Anonymous Comrade writes:
"Historian and author Howard Zinn talks with AGR"
By Nicholas Holt, AGR
Howard Zinn is one of the most well known American
historians. In the introduction to a later edition of his
revolutionary work, A People's History of the United States,
Zinn wrote that his focus as a historian "is not on the
achievements of the heroes of traditional history, but on
all those people who were the victims of those achievements,
who suffered silently, or fought back magnificently."
Soon after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, Zinn concluded an essay entitled
"Retaliation" with these remarks: "We should take our
example not from our military and political leaders shouting
'retaliate' and 'war' but from the doctors and nurses and
medical students and firemen and policemen who have been
saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts
are not violence, but healing, not vengence, but
compassion."
Zinn took time from his busy schedule to speak with us from
his home in Massachusetts.
AGR: Since September 11th, you've been in great demand as a
speaker. How does the mainstream media depiction of the
anti-war-events you've attended and of the anti-war movement
in general compare with your own observations?
Howard Zinn: The major media have paid very little attention
to the anti war movement. There's an occasional article here
and there, but there's a lot more anti-war activity than you
would gather from reading the mainstream press.
I know there have been at least 150 gatherings at campuses
around the country. I mean, that was of two weeks ago and by
now, I am sure there are many more.
I, and others I know, who have been involved, have been
ferociously busy, and in fact, not able to meet all the
requests to come and speak to student groups and community
groups. And when we do speak, the crowds are very large.
I have spoken to audiences ranging from 500 to 1000 people
since September 11th. Iâve spoken at Johns Hopkins, Iâve
spoken in Iowa, I've spoken in Greensboro, North Carolina,
I've spoken at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
I've spoken to high school assemblies. In fact, I'm about to
go up tomorrow to speak in Oregon, at Oregon State
University and then at Santa Cruz.
There've been rallies here in Boston, with thousands of
people. Ralph Nader spoke the other day to several thousand
people gathered. The emails I get from all parts of the
country indicate that there is a very large amount of
activity.
Some very famous writers have written articles and essays
against the bombing, but have not appeared in the mainstream
press. Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible, was
an Oprah Winfrey selection. But, when Barbara Kingsolver
wrote something just recently against the bombing, she
couldn't get it in the mainstream press. It appeared in In
These Times which is, you know, a very good weekly
publication, but doesn't have a large circulation.
Similarly, with Arundhati Roy. Arundhati Roy's novel, The
God of Small Things, has sold five or six million copies
worldwide. A very famous novelist, but when she sent her
essay on the war against terrorism to The New Yorker, The
New York Times, other major newspapers, they rejected it.
So what we're seeing is an attempt to shut out the voices of
the anti-war movement. The anti-war movement has to spend
money to put in full-page ads in The New York Times, Boston
Globe, and other newspapers, The Los Angeles Times, whereas
the people who speak for the war are granted free space.
Of course the television programs, the major networks, are
full of the pictures and voices of military people, military
experts, and high administration officials, and low
administration officials. It's very rare to find a dissident
on a major television network.
AGR: Even on the left, The Nation columnist Christopher
Hitchens has accused what he calls the
"Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter" of "rationalizing" the
September 11th attacks by reviewing the historical context
in which these events occured. For example: US support of
oppressive Israeli actions, the Gulf War, Iraqi sanctions,
Clinton's attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan. And of course
this sentiment is echoed very much in the mainstream press.
How do you respond to this?
Zinn: It's very sad to see somebody like Christopher
Hitchens making the same spurious point that is made in the
mainstream press and that is, (when) you point to something
fundamental about terrorism, soon as you get past the
superficial, and point to something which is serious, basic,
and talk about US foreign policy and the anger it has
generated in the world, especially in the Middle East...soon
as you begin to talk about that, people say you're
justifying the attack on the Twin Towers, which is absurd,
of course.
Nobody I know, on the left, or anywhere, has justified, can
justify what happened on September 11th. To try to explain,
analyze, the motives of the terrorists, to try to get at the
bottom of what leads to terrorism is certainly not to
justify the acts of the terrorists. Anybody who cannot make
that distinction, seems to me, deserves to flunk a basic
course in logic.
I don't know what got into Hitchens. I know what gets into
the mainstream, when they talk about that. They simply don't
want to discuss American foreign policy. Hitchens has wanted
to discuss American foreign policy. He's criticized American
foreign policy, but, he seems to have been thrown into
emotional turmoil by the events of September 11th.
All of us have felt very deep emotions as a result of
September 11th, but it certainly shouldn't distort our
thinking and prevent us from sitting down calmly and trying
to think through what was behind that attack and what is
behind terrorism in general and what to do about it.
AGR: Who were the key figures in the war resistance movement
in America's past?
Zinn: I suppose maybe we should start with the turn of the
century and the American War in the Philippines, which is
very much overlooked in our history books. So much attention
is paid to the Spanish American War -- that was the war in
Cuba in 1898 -- but very little attention is paid to the
fact that in the early 20th century the United States sent
an expeditionary force...to conquer the Philippines, who
wanted to be independent. The war lasted for years, a war
full of atrocities. In many [it was] ways a preview of the
war in Vietnam in the horrible things we were doing to the
Philippino people.
And there were voices raised against this. There was an
Anti-Imperialist League. William James, the philosopher, and
brother of the novelist Henry James, was one of the leaders
of the Anti-Imperialist League. Mark Twain spoke out and
denounced Theodore Roosevelt because Roosevelt was a war
lover. Roosevelt was president, was sending telegrams of
congratulations to generals who had committed atrocities in
the Philippines. So, early on in the century we had people
who spoke out against the war in the Philippines.
Of course, in World War I there was a very great anti-war
movement, so great that the government had to pass
legislation enabling them to put in prison people who spoke
out against the war. They prosecuted 2000 people for
criticizing the war. Congress passed the Espionage Act and
Sedition Act. The people they put in jail had nothing to do
with espionage, they were just saying that the United States
should not go to war. About a thousand people went into
prison during World War I.
Eugene Debs spoke out against the war and went to prison.
Various people were against the war, socialists, anarchists.
Emma Goldman, the feminist anarchist, and Alexander Berkman,
both of them very, very involved anarchists at the time,
both of them went to prison, 1917 and 18, for opposing the
war.
The opposition to World War I was very great because the
Socialist Party, at that time...was a very powerful force in
the United States. Its newspapers were read by several
million people, it had chapters and groups in almost every
state, it elected mayors and members of state legislatures,
members of Congress. Anarchists and the socialist parties
spoke out against the war.
So the government really had to crack down because there was
so much opposition. The government had to go to great
efforts to launch propaganda efforts to persuade the
American people it was right for the United States to go to
War...after World War I, enormous disillusionment set in. At
the end of World War I, when people looked around and saw
the 10 million that had died on the battlefields of Europe,
nobody could figure out why. There was a tremendous reaction
against the war.
That was put aside during World War II, because...the fact
that fascist countries were aggressively moving...gave the
war a sort of moral element that made war palatable once
again. And still, even in World War II, there were people
that thought that fascism was wrong, but [that] war was
wrong, people like A.J. Muste, one of the great leaders of
the peace movement in the United States. There were voices
raised from thousands of people, of American men who refused
to fight in World War II (and) were sent to prison. David
Dellinger was one of them. I recently attended a celebration
with his wife that took place in Vermont, because he has
steadfastly opposed war from World War II to Vietnam down to
this day. He was one of the Chicago 7 who were prosecuted
during the Vietnam War because of the demonstrations in
Chicago at the time of the 1968 Democratic national
convention.
During the Vietnam war, of course, we had the greatest
anti-war movement weâve ever had in the United States, the
first one that was successful, the first one that actually
helped get the nation, get the government to withdraw.
AGR: Many commentators have likened the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon to the attacks on Pearl Harbor
that drew the US into World War II. Would you say that's an
accurate comparison?
Zinn: Well, no. It's a very different situation. First of
all, the attack on Pearl Harbor came from an identifiable
nation, which you can then react to. A nation attacks Pearl
Harbor, there it is, you know who they are, it's a coherent
entity.
The attack on the World Trade Center did not come from a
nation. It came from a group of terrorists who have been
incensed against the United States and they come from no one
specific country. In fact, although we are bombing
Afghanistan, most of the people identified as the hijackers
on September 11th came from Saudi Arabia. In fact, the
administration spokespeople have said again and again that
the terrorists have bases in twenty or thirty or forty
countries. They change the figure from week to week, but
what's clear is that there's no one country which you can
identify as a source of terrorism. So it's a very, very
different situation from Pearl Harbor.
I might say one other thing, that is, that World War II,
Pearl Harbor and Churchill, Munich, Chamberlain,
appeasement, all of those symbols of World War II are always
pulled out whenever the United States is going into a war.
They're pulled out because World War II has a kind of moral
core to it, a moral glow around it, connected with the fact
that we were fighting against fascism. This has been called
the "Good War", very unlike most of the bad wars that we
fight.
Because of the general aura of goodness that surrounds World
War II, it is constantly invoked as a metaphor. And every
ugly war we have fought since World War II has been
constantly compared to World War II and the attempt is made
to get some of the glory and righteousness that was
associated with World War II and attach it to Korea,
Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, the bombing of
Yugoslavia, and now the war against Afghanistan.
And it just doesn't fit. You cannot find the same kind of
moral justification that one could find in World War II for
the wars that we have fought since. Certainly not for this
war in Afghanistan."
