PAGE 1
N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , JABRUARY 2006
AFTER THE WAR
BY HOWARD ZINN
“There is no good w a r and no b ad peace. ”
-BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
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 appear­
ing in Congress. The first editorials calling for withdrawal from
Iraq are beginning to appear in the press. The antiwar 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 end­
ing 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
Strade, 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 renuncia­
tion 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 don’t 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 wars of the past 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 propa­
ganda 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 2
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 dismem­
bered. 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 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 bomb­
ing 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%.
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 everybody who is engaged in it, however
different they are, turns them into killers and torturers, as we are
1287 COMMERCIAL ST
ASTORIA 325-5221
t
STEPHANIE CARTER
seeing now. It pretends to be concerned with toppling tyrants,
and may in fact do so, but the people it kills are 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 intervent­
ion 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 2, understanding
its complexity, the situations that followed — Korea, Vietnam —
were so far from the 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 Viet­
nam, 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
PEACE IN THE
REAL WORLD
It is incongruous to speak of peace without its evil twin
war — not unlike concentrating on yang without including yin.
Peace and war are joined at the hip, human inventions
that have no parallel in nature, which is of course violent as
well as simultaneously nonviolent from weather to predator/prey
relationships. Somehow we inventors of war think we can have
life without it — which we call peace, defined as a period without
war, or more apropos, a lull between wars (a time to bury the war
dead, heal wounds, produce more modern weapons, sow newer
crops of human fodder to resume the genocides of their fathers).
People who are unconditionally for peace are known as
pacifists. Pacifists wish to live not only their own lives in peace
but wish for it to become the normal condition of humanity.They
are sneered at in times of war fervor and told to live in the real
world. Yet the real world, the human world, is of our making and
threatens more than ever to be our undoing.
Pacifists have been imprisoned, exiled or executed for
centuries when they raise the issue of abolishing war. Pacifists
exude an odor of weakness and appeasement to their detractors
and are accused being agents or dupes of an enemy
Pacifists are themselves in conflict. The central most
agonizing question is whether some principles are worth the risk
of annihilation. Human life and possibly all organic existence is
conceivably so rare in the universe that its loss as a result of
conflict over abstract principles peculiar to a point in time would
be more intolerable than the loss of those principles, which,
being human in origin, would as surely be evaporated in the
holocaust. “What difference does it make to the dead," Gandhi
said, “whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name
of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy."
Pacifists usually look down the long road instead of
being gripped by the frenzies of the moment, and they have
grim visions of humanity’s future if it continues to make w a r.
upon itself. Pacifists seem to hope we might at least elevate
to a higher plain of thought and compassion before we blow
ourselves out of the cosmos
-M ICHAEL McCUSKER
had been expended to prevent that. A majority of Americans had
come to oppose that war,which had provoked the largest antiwar
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 antiwar 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 the oppor­
tunity. 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 untrust­
worthy: 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 with­
drawn, 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 a renowned American historian and
educator, and is the author of People's History o f the United
States (and co-author with Anthony Amove of the recent Voices
o f a People 's History of the United States). This article originally
appeared in The Progressive magazine.
The Lower Columbia Clinic
595 18th St. ) /
Astoria, OR
T> 503 325-9131
i Thomas S. Duncan, m . o
Susan L. Skinner, «
5 C.N.M., C.F.N.P., I.R.C.L.C.
Michael J. Meno, in, pac
I *---
z
.M ed ical care for the entire family
M in o r surgery
lactation counseling