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After the War
By Howard Zinn
The Progressive
January 2006 Issue
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.
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Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of Voices
of a People's History of the United States.
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