A pacifist legacy

The Kathmandu Post On Saturday
Feb 27 - Howard Zinn, a radical historian best known for his book A People’s History of the United States, in which he celebrated the contribution of feminists, workers and coloured people, died on Jan. 28. He was 87. An incorrigible peace-monger and often referred to as a “people’s historian”, he inspired a generation of activists and authors to oppose wars and other military interventions. In his July 2009 column for the Progressive, he wrote, “…We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.”

His opposition to wars was shaped by his personal experience as a bombardier during the Second World War. When the war ended, he put his medals in an envelope, and wrote ‘never again’ on it. Referring to the Second World War, he said in a recent interview with The New York Times: “I would not deny that war had a certain moral core, but that made it easier for Americans to treat all subsequent wars with a kind of glow. Every enemy becomes Hitler.”

After the war, he worked odd jobs, and entered New York University on GI Bill and received his bachelor’s from there. GI Bill was a government scheme that provided education and training to returning World War II veterans. Later he received his Master’s degree from Columbia University.

He was a polarising figure in a country where chauvinism, the idea of American exceptionalism, and songs of benign hegemony continues to be sung to this day. He chose to shine light on the atrocities of the past, and tried to unravel the tidying up of history books. Even in the left-liberal circle, despite admiring his candidness, some took a skeptical view of his version of history.

I had corresponded with him over email in September 2004 while reviewing one of his books for the Nation Weekly, a short-lived newsweekly. In a typical journalistic illusion of being a resourceful individual, I shot an email to him after I found his address through Google; I was rather surprised by how accessible he turned out to be. I had not expected to hear back from him; I just wanted to feel better that I at least tried. He was against elitism and practised what he preached.

I asked him what was the message he was trying to get across in his book On War (it is published in South Asia as Rule by Force)? In response, Zinn said that his “book is intended to show by historical example, personal experience and logical argument that war is not morally acceptable or practically effective as a solution for whatever problems we face in the world.”

The title of his lucid, engaging autobiography—You Can’t Stay Neutral on a Moving Train—sums up the position he took. Zinn’s views are always powerfully expressed and often sharply at odds with conventional wisdom. He once said that his own experience crystallised his opposition to all wars. “After my own experience in that war, I moved away from my own rather orthodox view that there are just and unjust wars, to a universal rejection of war as a solution to any human problem.”

Equally unorthodox is his rejection of the common view of the historian as an impartial observer. He once remarked, “Objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable.” His writings are powerful partly because they are partisan. He contends that American history is an account of how an air of nobility was accorded to “ugly realities” by sympathetic chroniclers. He gives many examples of how even profound believers in democratic ideals have trampled on others’ rights in the name of “nationalism and expansionism” since the period immediately after the American independence.

Noam Chomsky said of his old friend Zinn: “Both by his actions, and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the Civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.”

Writing on U.S. foreign policy, Zinn said: “In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.” He further claimed that a nation’s relative liberalism at home often serves to distract domestic attention away from the ruthlessness abroad.

His criticism of the American government may strike many as hyperbolic. In his essay On Libya, he argued that if the Libyan leader Khadafi was one face of terrorism, the other was President Ronald Reagan during his presidency. “Does a Western democracy have a better right to kill innocent people than a Middle Eastern dictatorship?” In one of his essays Of Fish and Fishermen, Zinn offers a powerful metaphor about the need to reverse the perspective to see the horror of war: He refers to an eerie movie clip in which the fisherman gets hooked instead of the fish and makes a desperate bid for escape. For the first time the fisherman gets to see himself from the standpoint of the fish. The image of the fisherman is used to explain why there was a Japanese pacifist movement following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He was involved in the civil rights movement, but Vietnam soon became the focus of his opposition. In his essay, A Speech for LBJ (President Lyndon Johnson) he suggested that the then-president tell the nation: “No one in the world needs to be told how powerful we are. We can stay in Vietnam as long as we like. We can reduce the whole country to ashes. We are powerful enough to do this. But we are not cruel enough to do this. I as your president am not willing to engage in a war without end that would destroy the youth of this nation and the people of Vietnam.”

Zinn would find the equivalence between Vietnam and Iraq obvious. “All wars,” he said, “present agonizing moral questions,” and every war has two faces. If one face of the war in Iraq is promoting democracy and emancipating Iraqis from the ruthless chains of Saddam’s tyranny, the other face is unending violence and mounting human casualties.

Writing for the Nation, the American newspaper, right before he died, he said he was struggling to find a “highlight” of Obama’s presidency. Speaking at a Boston University lecture series named after him, where he was a professor emeritus of political science, he criticised Obama for not delivering on his rhetoric. “I believe he is dominated by the same forces that have determined American foreign policy since World War II—the military-industrial complex,” Zinn said. “He showed his subservience to the militarists as soon as he appointed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and Robert Gates as secretary of defense. By surrounding himself with hawks, he has made it inevitable that he would pursue an aggressive military posture,” he told his audience.

Zinn’s insistence that there is no such thing as a “just or righteous war” is a challenge to the world to confront issues of justice, not without a struggle, but without war. And perhaps that anti-violence, anti-war conscience is his legacy.