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From: John Calvert <jc@calvertdesign.com>
[HD-G]
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 loo”\Ãw€ë k 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 Seco”\Ãw€ë nd 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 ”\Ãw€ë 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 show”\Ãw€ë ed
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”\Ãw€ë 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 desirabl”\Ãw€ë e 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.
<http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/010206M.shtml>http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/010206M.shtml
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