Are you sure it’s dated that late? June 1944 was less than a year before V-E Day and 2 months before V-J Day. I hadn’t remembered that compromise feelers were so active that late. Ordinary Americans were certainly not thinking in those squishy terms.

But let’s assume the date is correct, since even 3 years earlier it would be an astonishing article: cycle of violence, assertion of moral equivalence from the Vatican, peace process, road metaphor—it’s all there!

How to explain the eerie resemblance? After trying and discarding a few explanations, I find only the following plausible: the inability to distinguish sharply enough between the adversaries. For far too long, the “good guys” still thought the world could tolerate Hitler alive and in power, even though news of the Holocaust had already spread throughout the world. This willingness is the starting point; everything else follows, including the continuing sacrifice of innocents. And is it mere coincidence that the innocents in both cases were Jews?

Frieda, this is a parody that I wrote, imagining how today’s left-liberal establishment would have managed and reported World War II. I guess I made it so realistic that it wasn’t instantly clear that it was a parody; I’m not sure if that makes the parody successful or unsuccessful. In any case, phrases like “peace process,” “cycle of violence,” and “culture of death” ought to have been dead giveaways!

Don’t feel bad Frieda. He got me too. My only coherent thought was to the effect, “My God, now I am 100 percent certain history is vitally important.”

God only knows how much history has been ignored or twisted by the liberal academic establishment that has existed since at least the 1950’s. Truth is stranger than fiction. Accordingly, Mr. Auster’s shall we say generously—experiment—still makes one wonder whether there is substantial truth in his implication that liberals have been bad for a long time. The late Professor Stephen Ambrose, from the University of New Orleans, admitted not long before his death that his liberal and only mentors inappropriately distorted his perspective.

Which makes one wonder why traditionalists send their children to liberal universities.

My gosh, I wasn’t trying to “get” anyone, and it was not an experiment. It’s a straightforward parody, and on a subject that has been frequently commented on lately in a jokey sort of way. Conservatives today will say things like, “If we had had the peace process when we fought Japan, the war would still be going on.”

Also, I had no intention of suggesting that modern-type liberalism was in operation during World War II. I was simply—by transplanting the peace process into that war—trying to show its complete absurdity and unreality, and how it would make the effective waging of war impossible. What happens to the Allied war effort in my parody, is exactly what is being done to Israel today. There’s a war for Israel’s national existence going on, but people are still saying “peace, peace,” when there is no peace.

Touché. The too-late date should have alerted me.

But here’s an interesting datum, a quote from Susan Zuccotti, UNDER HIS VERY WINDOWS (Yale, 2002), p. 63. In August 1943, she says, “As the world awaited an expected German invasion of Poland, Pius called on all national leaders to seek peaceful solutions to international problems. He was thus firmly on the record as calling for peace, but he had given no hint that any single leader or nation was responsible for war. It was a pattern that he would repeat throughout the war years, condemning atrocities committed against civilians without naming names—without mentioning the perpetrators of such deeds.”

I picked that passage and book at random; there are other documents in my library that I could have quoted.