[Peace-discuss] Howard Zinn muses on what must be done …
Morton K.Brussel
brussel4 at insightbb.com
Mon Feb 28 11:17:58 CST 2005
From The Progressive:
Changing Minds, One at a Time
by Howard Zinn
As I write this, the day after the inauguration, the banner headline in
The New York Times reads: "BUSH, AT 2ND INAUGURAL, SAYS SPREAD OF
LIBERTY IS THE 'CALLING OF OUR TIME.' "
Two days earlier, on an inside page of the Times, was a photo of a
little girl, crouching, covered with blood, weeping. The caption read:
"An Iraqi girl screamed yesterday after her parents were killed when
American soldiers fired on their car when it failed to stop, despite
warning shots, in Tal Afar, Iraq. The military is investigating the
incident."
Today, there is a large photo in the Times of young people cheering the
President as his entourage moves down Pennsylvania Avenue. They do not
look very different from the young people shown in another part of the
paper, along another part of Pennsylvania Avenue, protesting the
inauguration.
I doubt that those young people cheering Bush saw the photo of the
little girl. And even if they did, would it occur to them to juxtapose
that photo to the words of George Bush about spreading liberty around
the world?
That question leads me to a larger one, which I suspect most of us have
pondered: What does it take to bring a turnaround in social
consciousness--from being a racist to being in favor of racial
equality, from being in favor of Bush's tax program to being against
it, from being in favor of the war in Iraq to being against it? We
desperately want an answer, because we know that the future of the
human race depends on a radical change in social consciousness.
It seems to me that we need not engage in some fancy psychological
experiment to learn the answer, but rather to look at ourselves and to
talk to our friends. We then see, though it is unsettling, that we were
not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives
(or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled
us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in
our consciousness--embedded there by years of family prejudices,
orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television.
This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an
enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information
they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink
long-held ideas. It is so simple a thought that it is easily overlooked
as we search, desperate in the face of war and apparently immovable
power in ruthless hands, for some magical formula, some secret strategy
to bring peace and justice to the land and to the world.
"What can I do?" The question is thrust at me again and again as if I
possessed some mysterious solution unknown to others. The odd thing is
that the question may be posed by someone sitting in an audience of a
thousand people, whose very presence there is an instance of
information being imparted which, if passed on, could have dramatic
consequences. The answer then is as obvious and profound as the
Buddhist mantra that says: "Look for the truth exactly on the spot
where you stand."
Yes, thinking of the young people holding up the pro-Bush signs at the
inauguration, there are those who will not be budged by new
information. They will be shown the bloodied little girl whose parents
have been killed by an American weapon, and find all sorts of reasons
to dismiss it: "Accidents happen. . . . This was an aberration. . . .
It is an unfortunate price of liberating a nation," and so on.
There is a hard core of people in the United States who will not be
moved, whatever facts you present, from their conviction that this
nation means only to do good, and almost always does good, in the
world, that it is the beacon of liberty and freedom (words used
forty-two times in Bush's inauguration speech). But that core is a
minority, as is that core of people who carried signs of protest at the
inauguration.
In between those two minorities stand a huge number of Americans who
have been brought up to believe in the beneficence of our nation, who
find it hard to believe otherwise, but who can rethink their beliefs
when presented with information new to them.
Is that not the history of social movements?
There was a hard core of people in this country who believed in the
institution of slavery. Between the 1830s, when a tiny group of
Abolitionists began their agitation, and the 1850s, when disobedience
of the fugitive slave acts reached their height, the Northern public,
at first ready to do violence to the agitators, now embraced their
cause. What happened in those years? The reality of slavery, its
cruelty, as well as the heroism of its resisters, was made evident to
Americans through the speeches and writings of the Abolitionists, the
testimony of escaped slaves, the presence of magnificent black
witnesses like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.
Something similar happened during those years of the Southern black
movement, starting with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the sit-ins, the
Freedom Rides, the marches. White people--not only in the North, but
also in the South--were startled into an awareness of the long history
of humiliation of millions of people who had been invisible and who now
demanded their rights.
When the Vietnam War began, two-thirds of the American public supported
the war. A few years later, two-thirds opposed the war. While some
remained adamantly pro-war, one-third of the population had learned
things that overthrew previously held ideas about the essential
goodness of the American intervention in Vietnam. The human
consequences of the fierce bombing campaigns, the "search and destroy"
missions, became clear in the image of the naked young girl, her skin
shredded by napalm, running down a road; the women and children huddled
in the trenches in My Lai with soldiers pouring rifle fire onto them;
Marines setting fire to peasant huts while the occupants stood by,
weeping.
Those images made it impossible for most Americans to believe President
Johnson when he said we were fighting for the freedom of the Vietnamese
people, that it was all worthwhile because it was part of the worldwide
struggle against Communism.
In his inauguration speech, and indeed, through all four years of his
presidency, George Bush has insisted that our violence in Afghanistan
and Iraq has been in the interest of freedom and democracy, and
essential to the "war on terrorism." When the war on Iraq began almost
two years ago, about three-fourths of Americans supported the war.
Today, the public opinion polls show that at least half of the
citizenry believes it was wrong to go to war.
What has happened in these two years is clear: a steady erosion of
support for the war, as the public has become more and more aware that
the Iraqi people, who were supposed to greet the U.S. troops with
flowers, are overwhelmingly opposed to the occupation. Despite the
reluctance of the major media to show the frightful toll of the war on
Iraqi men, women, children, or to show U.S. soldiers with amputated
limbs, enough of those images have broken through, joined by the grimly
rising death toll, to have an effect.
But there is still a large pool of Americans, beyond the hard-core
minority who will not be dissuaded by any facts (and it would be a
waste of energy to make them the object of our attention), who are open
to change. For them, it would be important to measure Bush's grandiose
inaugural talk about the "spread of liberty" against the historical
record of American expansion.
It is a challenge not just for the teachers of the young to give them
information they will not get in the standard textbooks, but for
everyone else who has an opportunity to speak to friends and neighbors
and work associates, to write letters to newspapers, to call in on talk
shows.
The history is powerful: the story of the lies and massacres that
accompanied our national expansion, first across the continent
victimizing Native Americans, then overseas as we left death and
destruction in our wake in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and especially
the Philippines. The long occupations of Haiti and the Dominican
Republic, the repeated dispatch of Marines into Central America, the
deaths of millions of Koreans and Vietnamese, none of them resulting in
democracy and liberty for those people.
Add to all that the toll of the American young, especially the poor,
black and white, a toll measured not only by the corpses and the
amputated limbs, but the damaged minds and corrupted sensibilities that
result from war.
Those truths make their way, against all obstacles, and break down the
credibility of the warmakers, juxtaposing what reality teaches against
the rhetoric of inaugural addresses and White House briefings. The work
of a movement is to enhance that learning, make clear the disconnect
between the rhetoric of "liberty" and the photo of a bloodied little
girl, weeping.
And also to go beyond the depiction of past and present, and suggest an
alternative to the paths of greed and violence. All through history,
people working for change have been inspired by visions of a different
world. It is possible, here in the United States, to point to our
enormous wealth and suggest how, once not wasted on war or siphoned off
to the super-rich, that wealth can make possible a truly just society.
The juxtapositions wait to be made. The recent disaster in Asia,
alongside the millions dying of AIDS in Africa, next to the $500
billion military budget, cry out for justice. The words of people from
all over the world gathered year after year in Porto Alegre, Brazil,
and other places--"a new world is possible"--point to a time when
national boundaries are erased, when the natural riches of the world
are used for everyone.
The false promises of the rich and powerful about "spreading liberty"
can be fulfilled, not by them, but by the concerted effort of us all,
as the truth comes out, and our numbers grow.
Howard Zinn's latest work (with Anthony Arnove) is "Voices of a
People's History of the United States."
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