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RENOUNCE WAR
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After the
War
By
Howard Zinn
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.
Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a
People’s History of the United States.”
Re-published from January 2006 Progressive Magazine
Their are only a few News
Reporters who in today's world have the courage to bring the
true realities of
WAR to the minds of
the citizens of this world. Robert Fisk is one such reporter and
you would do well to educate yourself by gaining insight through
his experience in the WAR theaters over the past 35 Years. Click
this
LINK
to gain this knowledge from his experience.
For all those who would
inform themselves of the sin and iniquity of WAR click
the links in this article from
www.Robert-Fisk.com
Protect your children
from these graphic images but be aware the people of
every nation who willfully embrace WAR and fail to
educate themselves as to the moral and ethical values of
those who support WAR will see themselves and their
children one day suffer these things themselves. The
United States and all those who support corporate and
military economies will become victims of WAR.
We will let you be the
Judge. An honest and Just Judge. Not one that is
prejudiced and influenced by corporate Media (that is
heavily controlled by governments and commerce) but one
that still retains his/her common sense and has some
human compassion still left in him/her. Not one that
sees other human beings through the colour of their
skin, but through the colour of their blood. Not one
that considers human life and their suffering as a
justifiable price to pay for our cheap oil and luxuries,
but one that does not consider the blood of the innocent
to be cheaper than their oil resources.
If anyone is still in
any doubt that atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq, which
were committed under the pretext of "fighting
terrorism", were to do with oil and to control oil
resources, they are either deliberately being blind to
real facts or they have become victims of mind-control
(brainwashing) through blatant lies from our leaders,
who in every way now resemble and follow in the
footsteps of the Nazis. Compare their philosophy and
that of the Nazis below:
The Nazi Fuhrer Adolf
Hitler, in his 1925 book Mein Kampf, said:
“The broad mass of the
nation ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie
than to a small one.”
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels said:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,
people will eventually come to believe it.”
Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering,
before committing suicide at the Nuremberg Trials, said:
“Voice or no
voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding
of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell
them they are being attacked and denounce the
peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
And indeed it has
worked very well in our countries too! article from
www.Robert-Fisk.com
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Cluster Bombs - The people who make them
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