DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The outer limits of
empire
Interview with
Howard Zinn, conducted by Tom Engelhardt
He's tall and thin, with a shock of
white hair. A bombardier in the great war against
fascism and an antiwar veteran of America's wars
ever since, he's best known as the author of the
pathbreaking Voices of a People's History of
the United States, and as an expert on the
unexpected voices of resistance that have so
regularly made themselves heard throughout the
US's history. At 83 (though he looks a decade
younger), he is also a veteran of a rugged century
and yet there's nothing backward looking about
him. His voice is quiet and he clearly takes
himself with a grain of salt, chuckling wryly on
occasion at his own comments. From time to time,
when a thought pleases him and his well-used face
lights up or breaks out in a bona fide grin, he
looks positively boyish.
We sit down on
the back porch of a small coffee shop, alone, on a
vacation morning. He has a croissant and coffee in
front of him. I suggest that perhaps we should
start after breakfast, but he
assures me that there's no
particular contradiction between eating and
talking and so, as a novice interviewer, I
awkwardly turn on my two tape recorders - one of
which, on pause, will still miss several minutes
of our conversation (our equivalent, we joke, of
Richard Nixon's infamous 18-minute gap). In
preparation, he pushes aside his half-eaten
breakfast, never to touch it again, and we begin.
Tomdispatch: You and Anthony
Arnove just came out with a new book, Voices of
a People's History of the United States,
featuring American voices of resistance from our
earliest moments to late last night. Now, we have
a striking new voice of resistance, Cindy Sheehan.
I was wondering what you made of her?
Howard Zinn: Often a protest
movement that's already underway - and the present
antiwar movement was underway even before the Iraq
war began - gets a special impetus, a special
spark from one person's act of defiance. I think
of Rosa Parks and that one act of hers and what it
meant. [1]
TD: Can you think
of other Cindy Sheehan-like figures in the past
who made movements coalesce?
Zinn: In the antiwar
movement of the Vietnam years, there wasn't one
person, but when I think back to the abolitionist
movement, Frederick Douglass was a special figure
in that way. When he came north, out of slavery,
and spoke for the first time to a group of
antislavery people, the beginnings of a movement
existed. [William Lloyd] Garrison had already
started [his antislavery newspaper] the Liberator,
but Frederick Douglass was able to represent
slavery itself in a way that Garrison and the
other abolitionists could not. His dramatic
appearance, his eloquence, provided a special
spark for the abolitionist movement.
TD: I guess Cindy Sheehan
also represents something that can't be
represented by anyone else, almost, in fact, can't
be represented - the American dead in the war and,
of course, her own dead son.
Zinn:
It's interesting. There have been mothers
other than Cindy Sheehan who have spoken out, but
she decided on an act that had a special
resonance, which was simply to find where
[President George W] Bush was going [he chuckles
to himself at the thought] and have a
confrontation between the two poles of this war,
between its maker and the opposition. She just
parked herself near Bush and became the center of
national attention, of gravity, around which
people gathered, hundreds and hundreds of people.
TD: The Bush administration
has had such a long-term strategy of never
venturing anywhere that the president might be
challenged, but now, unless he's literally on a
military base, I suspect he's no longer safe from
that, and even then ...
Zinn: Did you read about the
mayor of Salt Lake City speaking out before 2,000
people to protest a presidential speech there?
This is just what began to happen in the Vietnam
War. After a while, [President Lyndon] Johnson and
[vice president Hubert] Humphrey couldn't go
anywhere except military bases. And the thing
about Cindy Sheehan is that she's not a moderate
voice either. I mean, she's saying we must
withdraw from Iraq so boldly and clearly that even
an antiwar person like [New York Times columnist]
Frank Rich refers to her position as "apocalyptic"
and kind of outside the pale. And that's terrible,
because on the issue of withdrawal she represents,
I think, the unspoken desires of a huge number of
people and is willing to say what the politicians
and the journalists have not yet dared to say.
There are very few newspapers in the country -
maybe the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and one other
- that have simply called for withdrawal without
talking about timetables and conditions.
The logic of withdrawal in two wars
TD: As the person who, in
1967, wrote Vietnam: The Logic of
Withdrawal, how do you compare the logic of
withdrawal discussions in this moment with that
one?
Zinn: There was a point
early in the Vietnam War when no major figure and
no critic of the war was simply calling for
immediate withdrawal. Everybody was hedging in
some way. We must negotiate. We must compromise.
We must stop the bombing north of this or that
parallel. I think we're at a comparable point now,
two years after the beginning of the Iraq War.
When my book came out in the Spring of '67, it was
just two years after the escalation in early '65
when Johnson sent in the first major infusions of
American troops. What's comparable, I think, are
the arguments then and now. Even the language is
similar. We mustn't cut and run. We mustn't give
them a victory. We mustn't lose prestige in the
world.
TD: ... credibility
was the word then.
Zinn:
Yes, exactly, credibility. There will be chaos and
civil war if we leave ...
TD: ...and a bloodbath.
Zinn: Yes, and a bloodbath -
because the one way you can justify an ongoing
catastrophe is to posit a greater catastrophe if
you don't continue with the present one. We've
seen that psychology operating again and again. We
saw it, for instance, with Hiroshima. I mean, we
have to kill hundreds of thousands of people to
avert a greater catastrophe, the death of a
million people in the invasion of Japan.
It's interesting that when we finally did
leave Vietnam, none of those dire warnings really
came true. It's not that things were good after we
left. The Chinese were expelled, and there were
the boat people and the reeducation camps, but
none of that compared to the ongoing slaughter
taking place when the American troops were there.
So while no one can predict what will happen - I
think this is important to say - when the United
States withdraws its troops from Iraq, the point
is that we're choosing between the certainty of an
ongoing disaster, the chaos and violence that are
taking place in Iraq today, and an eventuality we
can't predict, which may be bad. But what may be
bad is uncertain; what's bad with our occupation
right now is certain. It seems to me that,
choosing between the two, you have to take a
chance on what might happen if you end the
occupation. At the same time, of course, you do
whatever you can to mitigate the worst
possibilities of your leaving.
Resistance in the military
TD: I want to return for a
moment to Cindy Sheehan. By the last years of the
Vietnam War, the American military was almost
incapable of fighting and, though there were
military families against the war, the main
resistance to the war was by then coming from
draft-age soldiers themselves. Now we have an
all-volunteer army; we know that morale is sinking
and that there are specific cases of resistance -
refusals to return to Iraq, for instance - within
the military, but most of the resistance this time
seems to be coming from the families of the
soldiers. I wonder whether there's any historical
precedent for that?
Zinn: I
don't know of any previous war where something
like this happened ... in the United States
anyway. The closest you might get would be in the
Confederacy in the Civil War, when the wives of
soldiers rioted because their husbands were dying
and the plantation owners were profiting from the
sale of cotton, refusing to grow grains for
civilians to eat. David Williams in Valdosta,
Georgia, is coming out this fall with A
People's History of the Civil War in which he
describes that phenomenon.
In the case of
the Soviet Union, though, there may be a closer
parallel. Russian mothers protested the continuing
war in Afghanistan, their Vietnam. I don't know
how strong a part that played in the Soviet
decision to withdraw, but certainly there was
something dramatic about that.
We had gold
star mothers against the war in the Vietnam era,
but nothing like this and I think you've pointed
to the reason. The GIs in Iraq are not in the same
position the draftees were in - although I have to
temper that by noting that a lot of the resistance
in the Vietnam War came from people who had
enlisted in the army. And, in a certain sense,
there are also draftees in this war, people who
didn't sign up to fight, or National Guards and
Reserves who didn't expect to go to war. You might
say that they had been drafted.
Still,
because it's a largely all-volunteer army, the
protesting has been left to the parents in an
unprecedented way. Their children just aren't in a
position to protest as easily, and yet I think
there's going to be more and more GI protest as
the war goes on. That's inevitable. I imagine -
there's no way of proving this - that there's
already a lot more subterranean protest and
disaffection in the military than has been
reported, maybe much more than can be reported
because it's probably not visible.
When I
try to think what would really compel the Bush
administration to get out of Iraq, the one thing
is a rebellion in the military. David Cortright
[author of Soldiers In Revolt: GI Resistance
During The Vietnam War] believes that what
happened to the military in Vietnam was the
crucial factor in finally bringing the United
States out of Vietnam.
TD:
And what about military resistance at the
top rather than the bottom? As far back as Korea,
there was a feeling among officers of being in the
wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time and
that was replicated in Vietnam. It's clear that
the top people in the field in Iraq have known for
a long time that they're involved in a
catastrophe. They were the ones recently who began
talking about draw-downs and withdrawals without
permission from the Bush administration.
Zinn: It's a very important
development, because when cracks occur in what had
previously seemed to be the solidity of the top,
it becomes that much more difficult to carry on.
One example I think of - it's not a war situation
- is McCarthyism. When [red-baiting Senator
Joseph] McCarthy began to go after important
figures in the Eisenhower administration, when he
went after General [George] Marshall and his
forays came closer and closer to the top, more and
more people moved away from him, and that was
critical to his demise. Disaffection in the top
ranks of the military has been evident for some
time now. [Retired Centcom commander] General
[Anthony] Zinni, for instance, has been speaking
out from the beginning. For a while I was worried
about the similarity between our names [he
laughs], but I feel better about it now that he's
come out speaking the way he has.
TD: And retired generals
like him are always speaking for others inside the
military.
Zinn: That's
right. They're in a position to say what others
can't say. I mean there's been military resistance
in many of our wars, but until Vietnam it never
reached the point where it actually changed
policy. There were mutinies against Washington in
the revolutionary army. In the Mexican War, even
huge numbers of desertions didn't stop the war. I
can't think of any military resistance in World
War I. Of course, the United States was only in
for a brief time, a year and a half really.
Certainly, World War II was a different situation.
That's what makes Vietnam such a historical
phenomenon. It was the first time you had a
movement in the military that was an important
factor in changing government policy. And it's
interesting that we've had short wars ever since,
except for this one, and those wars were
deliberately designed to be short so that there
wouldn't be time for an antiwar movement to
develop. In this case, they miscalculated.
Now, I don't think it's a question of if,
just when. When and how. I don't think there's any
question that the United States is going to have
to get out of Iraq. The only questions are: how
long will it take? How many more people will die?
And how will it be done?
The outer
limits of empire TD: Let me
turn to another issue you certainly wrote about in
the 60s, war crimes. But "war crimes" was the last
charge to arrive in the mainstream in those years
and the first to depart. We've certainly
experienced many crimes in the last few years,
from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo to Afghanistan. I
wonder why, as a concept, it sticks so poorly with
Americans?
Zinn: It does
seem like a hard concept - war crimes, war
criminals - to catch on here. There's a
willingness to say the leadership is wrong, but
it's a great jump from there to saying that the
leadership is vicious. Unfortunately, in American
culture, there's still a kind of monarchical idea
that the president, the people up there, are very
special people and while they may make mistakes,
they couldn't be criminals. Even after the public
had turned against the Vietnam War, there was no
widespread talk about Johnson, [secretary of
defense Robert] McNamara, and the rest of them
being war criminals. And I think it has to do with
an American culture of deference to the president
and his men - beyond which people refuse to think.
TD: How does an American
culture of exceptionalism play into this?
Zinn: I would guess that a
very large number of Americans against the war in
Vietnam still believed in the essential goodness
of this country. They thought of Vietnam as an
aberration. Only a minority in the antiwar
movement saw it as part of a continuous policy of
imperialism and expansion. I think that's true
today as well. It's very hard for Americans to let
go of the idea that we're an especially good
nation. It's comforting to know that, even though
we do wrong things from time to time, these are
just individual aberrations. I think it takes a
great deal of political consciousness to extend
the criticism of a particular policy or a
particular war to a general negative appraisal of
the country and its history. It strikes too close
to something Americans seem to need to hold onto.
Of course, there's an element that's right
in this as well - in that there are principles for
which the United States presumably stands that are
good. It's just that people confuse the principles
with the policies - and so long as they can keep
those principles in their heads (justice for all,
equality, and so on), they are very reluctant to
accept the fact that they have been crassly,
consistently violated. This is the only way I can
account for the stopping short when it comes to
looking at the president and the people around him
as war criminals.
TD:
Stepping back from the catastrophe in Iraq, what
do you make of the Bush administration's version
of the American imperial project?
Zinn: I like to think that
the American empire has reached its outer limits
with the Middle East. I don't believe it has a
future in Latin America. I think it's worn out
whatever power it had there and we're seeing the
rise of governments that will not play ball with
the United States. This may be one of the reasons
why the war in Iraq is so important to this
administration. Beyond Iraq there's no place to
go. So, let's put it this way, I see withdrawal
from Iraq whenever it takes place - and think of
this as partly wish and partly belief [he chuckles
at himself] - as the first step in the
retrenchment of the American empire. After all we
aren't the first country in history to be forced
to do this.
I'd like to say that this will
be because of American domestic opposition, but I
suspect mostly it will be because the rest of the
world won't accept further American forays into
places where we don't belong. In the future, I
believe 9/11 may be seen as representing the
beginning of the dissolution of the American
empire; that is, the very event that immediately
crystallized popular support for war, in the long
run - and I don't know how long that will be - may
be seen as the beginning of the weakening and
crumbling of the American empire.
TD: There would be an irony
in that.
Zinn: Yes,
certainly.
War's end
TD: I wanted to turn to the
issue of war. You've written about the possible
end of war not being a purely utopian project. Do
you really believe war could end or is it in our
genes?
Zinn: Although lots
of things are unclear to me, one thing is very
clear. It's not in our genes. Whenever I read
accounts, even by people who have been in war,
that suggest there's something in the masculine
psyche that requires this kind of violence and
militarism I don't believe it. I say this on the
basis of historical experience; that is, if you
compare the instances in which people, mostly men,
have committed violent acts and gone to war to
those in which people have not gone to war, have
rejected war, it seems people don't naturally want
war.
They may want a lot of things
associated with war - the comradeship, the thrill
that comes from holding a weapon. I think this is
what confuses people. Thrills, comradeship, all of
that can come in many different ways; it comes
from war, though, only when people are manipulated
into it. To me the strongest argument against an
inherent drive to war is the extent to which
governments have to resort to get people to go to
war, the huge amounts of propaganda and deception
of which we had an example very recently. And
don't forget coercion. So I discard that idea of a
natural inclination to war.
TD: You went to war yourself
...
Zinn: I was 20 years
old. I was a bombardier in the 8th Air Force on a
B-17 crew that flew some of the last missions of
the war out of England. I went in as a young,
radical, antifascist, believing in this war and
believing in the idea of a just war against
fascism. At war's end I was beginning to have
doubts about whether the mayhem we had engaged in
was justified: the bombing of cities, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, the bombings I had engaged in. And
then I was beginning to suspect the motives of the
Allied leaders. Did they really care that much
about fascism? Did they care about the Jews? Was
it a war for empire? In the Air Force I
encountered a young Trotskyite on another air crew
who said to me, "You know, this is an imperialist
war." I was sort of shocked. I said, "Well, you're
flying missions! Why are you here?" He replied,
"I'm here to talk to people like you." [He
laughs.] I mean, he didn't convert me, but he
shook me up a little.
After the war, as
the years went by, I couldn't help contemplating
the promises that had been made about what the war
would accomplish. You know, General Marshall sent
me - and 16 million others - a letter
congratulating us for winning the war and telling
us how the world would now be a different place.
Fifty million people were dead and the world was
not really that different. I mean, Hitler and
Mussolini were gone, as was the Japanese military
machine, but fascism and militarism, and racism
were still all over the world, and wars were still
continuing. So I came to the conclusion that war,
whatever quick fix it might give you - Oh, we've
defeated this phenomenon, fascism; we've gotten
rid of Hitler (like we've gotten rid of Saddam
Hussein, you see) - whatever spurt of enthusiasm,
the after-effects were like those of a drug; first
a high and then you settle back into something
horrible. So I began to think that any wars, even
wars against evil, simply don't accomplish much of
anything. In the long run, they simply don't solve
the problem. In the interim, an enormous number of
people die.
I also came to the conclusion
that, given the technology of modern warfare, war
is inevitably a war against children, against
civilians. When you look at the ratio of civilian
to military dead, it changes from 50-50 in World
War II to 80-20 in Vietnam, maybe as high as 90-10
today. Do you know this Italian war surgeon, Gino
Strada? He wrote Green Parrots: A War Surgeon's
Diary. He was doing war surgery in
Afghanistan, Iraq and other places. Ninety percent
of the people he operated on were civilians. When
you face that fact, war is now always a war
against civilians, and so against children. No
political goal can justify it, and so the great
challenge before the human race in our time is to
solve the problems of tyranny and aggression, and
do it without war. [He laughs quietly.] A very
complex and difficult job, but something that has
to be faced - and that's what accounts for my
becoming involved in antiwar movements ever since
the end of World War II.
Note [1] Most historians
date the beginning of the modern civil rights
movement in the US to December 1, 1955, the day
Rosa Parks, an unknown seamstress in Montgomery,
Alabama, refused to give up her bus seat to a
white passenger. Parks was arrested and fined for
violating a city ordinance, but her act of
defiance began a movement that ended legal
segregation in America.
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
