World War II, we know on good authority, was unnecessary, the authority being none other than Winston Churchill. By unnecessary Churchill meant that if the Allies' appeasement of Hitler hadn't taken place earlier, the war wouldn't have to have been to fought later.

Now, in this country at least, a current of opinion is gaining strength that stands Churchill on his head. It wasn't appeasement that brought about the disaster of the conflict, but warmongering on the part of the Allied leaders, Churchill first and foremost among them.

The new revisionism makes no excuses for Hitler, but it sees the war through a lens of moral relativism: Yes, the Nazis were evil, but so were the Allies, whose leaders were mendacious, committed unspeakable atrocities and hoodwinked the public into believing that the war was a noble one, fought on behalf of decency and against an evil more colossal than any previous evil in human history.

For those of us, including myself, who have long believed that the Allied war effort was indeed noble, it might seem that such a point of view could only emanate from the dank quarters of some lunatic fringe, perhaps holed up in a Rocky Mountain redoubt and eating conspiracy theories for breakfast.

But on the contrary, the view seems to be the province of entirely respectable and thoughtful people of literary bent. The most visible proponent of the unnecessary war theory is the novelist Nicholson Baker, an accomplished, gentle and entirely civilized man, whose book "Human Smoke" has made him a darling of leftist critics of the American role in the world.