Historian and author Howard Zinn talks with AGR

By Nicholas Holt

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. I’ve spoken at Johns Hopkins, I’ve 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 we’ve 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.