Nicholson Baker, author of Human Smoke, in an interview with Amazon.com, takes aim at the familiar retort of the warmongers to any criticism of the Allies in World War II:

“I’ve had some very good reviews and some very bad ones. The bad ones seem to follow the teeter-totter school: that if a dictator and the nation he controls is evil, then the leader of the nation who opposes the evil dictator must be good. Life isn’t that way, of course. There is in fact no ‘moral equivalence’ created by examining coterminous violent and repulsive acts. The notion of moral equivalence is a mistake, because it undermines our notions of personal responsibility and law. Each act of killing is its own act, not something to be heaped like produce on a balancing scale. One person, as Roosevelt said, must not be punished for the deed of another–though he didn’t follow his own precept.”