[Peace-discuss] Zinn on war and the human condition

[Morton K. Brussel]

Always worthwhile to hear Howard Zinn; he always tries to be  
uplifting  --mkb

Published in the January, 2006 issue of The Progressive
After the War
by Howard Zinn

The war against Iraq, the assault on its people, the occupation of  
its cities, will come to an end, sooner or later. The process has  
already begun. The first signs of mutiny are appearing in Congress.  
The first editorials calling for withdrawal from Iraq are beginning  
to appear in the press. The anti-war movement has been growing,  
slowly but persistently, all over the country.

Public opinion polls now show the country decisively against the war  
and the Bush Administration. The harsh realities have become visible.  
The troops will have to come home.

And while we work with increased determination to make this happen,  
should we not think beyond this war? Should we begin to think, even  
before this shameful war is over, about ending our addiction to  
massive violence and instead using the enormous wealth of our country  
for human needs? That is, should we begin to speak about ending war— 
not just this war or that war, but war itself? Perhaps the time has  
come to bring an end to war, and turn the human race onto a path of  
health and healing.

A group of internationally known figures, celebrated both for their  
talent and their dedication to human rights (Gino Strada, Paul  
Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Eduardo Galeano, and others),  
will soon launch a worldwide campaign to enlist tens of millions of  
people in a movement for the renunciation of war, hoping to reach the  
point where governments, facing popular resistance, will find it  
difficult or impossible to wage war.

There is a persistent argument against such a possibility, which I  
have heard from people on all parts of the political spectrum: We  
will never do away with war because it comes out of human nature. The  
most compelling counter to that claim is in history: We don’t find  
people spontaneously rushing to make war on others. What we find,  
rather, is that governments must make the most strenuous efforts to  
mobilize populations for war. They must entice soldiers with promises  
of money, education, must hold out to young people whose chances in  
life look very poor that here is an opportunity to attain respect and  
status. And if those enticements don’t work, governments must use  
coercion: They must conscript young people, force them into military  
service, threaten them with prison if they do not comply.

Furthermore, the government must persuade young people and their  
families that though the soldier may die, though he or she may lose  
arms or legs, or become blind, that it is all for a noble cause, for  
God, for country.

When you look at the endless series of wars of this century you do  
not find a public demanding war, but rather resisting it, until  
citizens are bombarded with exhortations that appeal, not to a killer  
instinct, but to a desire to do good, to spread democracy or liberty  
or overthrow a tyrant.

Woodrow Wilson found a citizenry so reluctant to enter the First  
World War that he had to pummel the nation with propaganda and  
imprison dissenters in order to get the country to join the butchery  
going on in Europe.

In the Second World War, there was indeed a strong moral imperative,  
which still resonates among most people in this country and which  
maintains the reputation of World War II as “the good war.” There was  
a need to defeat the monstrosity of fascism. It was that belief that  
drove me to enlist in the Air Force and fly bombing missions over  
Europe.

Only after the war did I begin to question the purity of the moral  
crusade. Dropping bombs from five miles high, I had seen no human  
beings, heard no screams, seen no children dismembered. But now I had  
to think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombings of Tokyo  
and Dresden, the deaths of 600,000 civilians in Japan, and a similar  
number in Germany.

I came to a conclusion about the psychology of myself and other  
warriors: Once we decided, at the start, that our side was the good  
side and the other side was evil, once we had made that simple and  
simplistic calculation, we did not have to think anymore. Then we  
could commit unspeakable crimes and it was all right.

I began to think about the motives of the Western powers and  
Stalinist Russia and wondered if they cared as much about fascism as  
about retaining their own empires, their own power, and if that was  
why they had military priorities higher than bombing the rail lines  
leading to Auschwitz. Six million Jews were killed in the death camps  
(allowed to be killed?). Only 60,000 were saved by the war—1 percent.

A gunner on another crew, a reader of history with whom I had become  
friends, said to me one day: “You know this is an imperialist war.  
The fascists are evil. But our side is not much better.” I could not  
accept his statement at the time, but it stuck with me.

War, I decided, creates, insidiously, a common morality for all  
sides. It poisons everyone who is engaged in it, however different  
they are in many ways, turns them into killers and torturers, as we  
are seeing now. It pretends to be concerned with toppling tyrants,  
and may in fact do so, but the people it kills are the victims of the  
tyrants. It appears to cleanse the world of evil, but that does not  
last, because its very nature spawns more evil. Wars, like violence  
in general, I concluded, is a drug. It gives a quick high, the thrill  
of victory, but that wears off and then comes despair.

I acknowledge the possibility of humanitarian intervention to prevent  
atrocities, as in Rwanda. But war, defined as the indiscriminate  
killing of large numbers of people, must be resisted.

Whatever can be said about World War II, understanding its  
complexity, the situations that followed—Korea, Vietnam—were so far  
from the kind of threat that Germany and Japan had posed to the world  
that those wars could be justified only by drawing on the glow of  
“the good war.” A hysteria about communism led to McCarthyism at home  
and military interventions in Asia and Latin America—overt and covert— 
justified by a “Soviet threat” that was exaggerated just enough to  
mobilize the people for war.

Vietnam, however, proved to be a sobering experience, in which the  
American public, over a period of several years, began to see through  
the lies that had been told to justify all that bloodshed. The United  
States was forced to withdraw from Vietnam, and the world didn’t come  
to an end. One half of one tiny country in Southeast Asia was now  
joined to its communist other half, and 58,000 American lives and  
millions of Vietnamese lives had been expended to prevent that. A  
majority of Americans had come to oppose that war, which had provoked  
the largest anti-war movement in the nation’s history.

The war in Vietnam ended with a public fed up with war. I believe  
that the American people, once the fog of propaganda had dissipated,  
had come back to a more natural state. Public opinion polls showed  
that people in the United States were opposed to send troops anywhere  
in the world, for any reason.

The Establishment was alarmed. The government set out deliberately to  
overcome what it called “the Vietnam syndrome.” Opposition to  
military interventions abroad was a sickness, to be cured. And so  
they would wean the American public away from its unhealthy attitude,  
by tighter control of information, by avoiding a draft, and by  
engaging in short, swift wars over weak opponents (Grenada, Panama,  
Iraq), which didn’t give the public time to develop an anti-war  
movement.

I would argue that the end of the Vietnam War enabled the people of  
the United States to shake the “war syndrome,” a disease not natural  
to the human body. But they could be infected once again, and  
September 11 gave the government that opportunity. Terrorism became  
the justification for war, but war is itself terrorism, breeding rage  
and hate, as we are seeing now.

The war in Iraq has revealed the hypocrisy of the “war on terrorism.”  
And the government of the United States, indeed governments  
everywhere, are becoming exposed as untrustworthy: that is, not to be  
entrusted with the safety of human beings, or the safety of the  
planet, or the guarding of its air, its water, its natural wealth, or  
the curing of poverty and disease, or coping with the alarming growth  
of natural disasters that plague so many of the six billion people on  
Earth.

I don’t believe that our government will be able to do once more what  
it did after Vietnam—prepare the population for still another plunge  
into violence and dishonor. It seems to me that when the war in Iraq  
ends, and the war syndrome heals, that there will be a great  
opportunity to make that healing permanent.

My hope is that the memory of death and disgrace will be so intense  
that the people of the United States will be able to listen to a  
message that the rest of the world, sobered by wars without end, can  
also understand: that war itself is the enemy of the human race.

Governments will resist this message. But their power is dependent on  
the obedience of the citizenry. When that is withdrawn, governments  
are helpless. We have seen this again and again in history.

The abolition of war has become not only desirable but absolutely  
necessary if the planet is to be saved. It is an idea whose time has  
come.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a  
People’s History of the United States.”

© Copyright 2006 The Progressive

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