by Howard Zinn
were brought up in the most rigorous code of obedience … in the name of
obedience they were party to, and assisted in, the most wicked large scale
actions in the history of the world.12
What about the evidence from anthropology—that is, from the behavior of "primitive"
people, who are supposed to be closest to the "natural" state and, therefore, give strong clues about "human nature"? There have been many studies of the personality traits of such people: African Bushmen, North American Indians, Malay tribes, the Stone Age Tasaday
from the Philippines, etc.
The findings can be summed up easily: There is no single pattern of warlike or peaceable
behavior; the variations are very great. In North America, the Plains Indians were warlike,
the Cherokee of Georgia were peaceful.
Anthropologist Colin Tumbul conducted two different studies in which he lived for a while
with native tribes. In The Forest People, he describes the Pygmies of the Ituri rain forest in central Africa, wonderful y gentle and peaceful people whose idea of punishing a wrongdoer
was to send him out into the forest to sulk. When he observed the Mbuti tribe of Zaire, he
found them cooperative and pacific. However, when Turnbul spent time with the Ik people
of East Africa, whom he describes in The Mountain People, he found them ferocious and
selfish.13
The differences in behavior Turnbul found were explainable, not by genetics, not by the
"nature" of these people, but by their environment, or their living conditions. The relatively easy life of the forest people fostered goodwil and generosity. The Ik, on the other hand,
had been driven from their natural hunting grounds by the creation of a national game
reserve into an isolated life of starvation in barren mountains. Their desperate attempt to
survive brought out the aggressive destructiveness that Turnbul saw.
There have been many attempts to use the evidence of ethnology (the study of the behavior
of animals) to "prove" innate aggressiveness in human beings. We find Robert Ardrey using animal protection of their territory to argue for a "territorial imperative," which drives human beings to war against one another, or Desmond Morris, who uses the evidence of
primates (The Naked Ape) to see human beings as deeply influenced by their evolutionary
origins as tribal hunters.
31
But the study of animal behavior turns up al kinds of contradictory evidence. Baboons observed in a London zoo were found to be violent, but when studied on the plains of South
Africa their behavior was peaceful. The difference was easily explainable by the fact that in
the zoo baboons were strangers to one another, brought together by man. Even when
baboons were aggressive, this consisted mostly of yel ing and squabbling, not doing serious
damage to one another.
We might note the work of Konrad Lorenz, an important zoologist and a specialist in the
study of birds who could not resist the temptation to turn to human behavior in his book On
Aggression. Lorenz is often cited to support the idea that aggressive instincts in human
beings derive from evolutionary origins in animal behavior. But Lorenz was not that certain.
Indeed, he said at one point that none of our so-cal ed instincts are as dangerous as our
"emotional al egiance to cultural values."14
It is a big jump, in any case, from bees or ducks or even baboons to human beings. Such a
jump does not take account of the critical y different factor of the human brain, which
enables learning and culture and which creates a whole range of possibilities—good and
bad. Those wide possibilities are not available to creatures with limited intel igence whose
behavior is held close to their genetic instincts (although even with them different
environments bring different characteristics).
The psychologist Erik Erikson, moving away from Freud's emphasis on biological instinct and
on impressions gained in infancy, has pointed to the fact that, unlike most animals, human
beings have a long childhood, a period for learning and cultural influence. This creates the
possibility for a much wider range of behaviors.15 Erikson says that our cultures have
created "pseudospecies," that is, false categories of race and nation that obliterate our sense of ourselves as one species and thus encourage the hostility that turns violent.
Animals other than human beings do not make war. They do not engage in organized
violence on behalf of some abstraction. That is a special gift of creatures with advanced
brains and cultures. The animal commits violence for a specific, visible reason, the needs for
food and for self-defense.
Genetics, psychology, anthropology, and zoology—in none of these fields is there evidence
of a human instinct for the kind of aggressive violence that characterizes war. But what
about history, which Freud pointed to?
Who can deny the frequency of war in human history? But its persistence does not prove
that its origin is in human nature. Are there not persistent facts about human society that
can explain the constant eruption of war without recourse to those mysterious instincts that
science, however hard it tries, cannot find in our genes? Is not one of those facts the
existence of ruling elites in every culture, who become enamored of their own power and
seek to extend it? Is not another of those facts the greed, not of the general population, but
of powerful minorities in society who seek more raw materials or more markets or more
land or more favorable places for investment? Is there not a persistent ideology of
nationalism, especial y in the modern world, a set of beliefs taught to each generation in
which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning
cause for which one becomes wil ing to kil the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands?
Surely we do not need human nature to explain war; there are other explanations. But
human nature is simple and easy. It requires very little thought. To analyze the social,
economic, and cultural factors that throughout human history have led to so many wars—
that is hard work. One can hardly blame people for avoiding it.
32
But we should take another look at the proposition that the persistence of war in history proves that war comes from human nature. The claim requires that wars be not only
frequent, but perpetual, that they not be limited to some nations but be true of al . Because
if wars are only intermittent—if there are periods of war and periods of peace and if there
are nations that go to war and other nations that don't—then it is unreasonable to attribute
war to something as universal as human nature.
Whenever someone says, "history proves …" and then cites a list of historical facts, we
should beware. We can always select facts from history (there are lots to choose from) to
prove almost anything about human behavior. Just as one can select from a person's life
just those instances of mean and aggressive behavior to prove the person natural y mean
and aggressive, one can also select from that same person's life only those instances of kind
and affectionate behavior to prove him or her natural y nice.
Perhaps we should turn from these scholarly studies of history, genetics, anthropology,
psychology, and zoology to the plain reality of war itself. We surely have a lot of experience
with that in our time.
I rem
ember reading John Hersey's novel, The War Lover. It interested me greatly, partly
because I am an admirer of Hersey's writing, but even more because his subject was the
crew of a Flying Fortress, the B-17 heavy bomber in World War II. I had been a bombardier
on such a crew in just that war. The novel's main character is a pilot who loves war. He also
loves women. He is a braggart and a bul y in regard to both. It turns out that his boasted
sex exploits are a fraud and, in fact, he is impotent; it appears that his urge to bomb and
kil is connected to that impotence.
When I finished reading the novel, I thought, Wel , that may explain this piss-poor (a
phrase left over from that war) fel ow Hersey has picked as his subject and his lust for
violence and death. But it doesn't explain war.
The men I knew in the air force—the pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and gunners on the
crews flying over Europe, dropping bombs, and kil ing lots of people—were not lusting to
kil , were not enthusiasts for violence, and were not war lovers. They—we—were engaged in
large-scale kil ing, mostly of noncombatants, the women, children, and elderly people who
happened to inhabit the neighborhoods of the cities that we bombed (official y, these were
al "military targets"). But this did not come out of our natures, which were no different than when we were peaceful y playing, studying, and living the lives of American boys back in
Brooklyn, New York, or Aurora, Missouri.
The bloody deeds we did came out of a set of experiences not hard to figure out: We had
been brought up to believe that our political leaders had good motives and could be trusted
to do right in the world; we had learned that the world had good guys and bad guys, good
countries and bad countries, and ours was good. We had been trained to fly planes, fire
guns, operate bombsights, and to take pride in doing the job wel . And we had been trained
to fol ow orders, which there was no reason to question, because everyone on our side was
good, and on the other side, bad. Besides, we didn't have to watch a little girl's legs get
blown off by our bombs; we were 30,000 feet high and no human being on the ground was
visible, no scream could be heard. Surely that is enough to explain how men can participate
in war. We don't have to grope in the darkness of human nature.
33
Indeed, when you look at modern war, do you find men rushing into it with a ferocious desire to kil ? Hardly. You find men (and some women) joining the armed forces in search of
training, careers, companionship, glamour, and psychological and economic security. You
find others being conscripted by law, under penalty of prison if they refuse. And al of them
suddenly transported into a war, where the habit of fol owing orders and the dinning into
their ears of the rightness of their cause can overcome the fear of death or the moral
scruples of murdering another human being.
Many observers of war, and former soldiers too, have spoken of the lures of war for men, its
attractions and enticements, as if something in men's nature makes war desirable for them.
J. Glenn Gray, who was in army intel igence and close to combat situations in the European
theater during World War II, has a chapter in his book The Warriors cal ed "The Enduring Appeals of Battle." He writes of the "powerful fascination" of war. He says, "The emotional environment of warfare has always been compel ing… . Many men both hate and love
combat."16 What are these "appeals" of war according to Gray? "The delight in seeing, the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction."
He recal s the biblical phrase "the lust of the eye" to describe the sheer overpowering
spectacle of war, the astounding scenes, the images, the vignettes—things never before
experienced by young men who lived ordinary lives on ordinary farms or ordinary streets.
That is certainly true. I had never seen the innards of a fifty-caliber machine gun; had never
flown in an airplane miles high, in the night and close to the stars, overwhelmed by the
beauty of that, and operated my bombsight and watched specks of fire flare like tiny
torches on the ground below; and had never seen at close range the black puffs that were
the explosions of antiaircraft shel s, threatening my life. But that is not a love of war; it is
an aesthetic need for visual and emotional excitement that comes, unrequested, with war
and that can also be produced by other experiences.
Gray is also certainly right about the extraordinary comradeship of men in combat. But they
don't seek combat because of that, any more than men in prison seek imprisonment
because in prison they often forge human ties with fel ow prisoners far stronger than any
they have on the outside.
As for the "delight in destruction," I am skeptical about that. Granted, there is something visual y exciting about explosions and something satisfying about hitting your target
efficiently, as you were trained to do. But the delight that comes in a job wel done would
accompany any kind of job, not just destroying things.
Al of the elements Gray and others have talked about as "the enduring appeals" of war are appeals not of violence or murder but of the concomitants of the war situation. It is sad that
life is so drab, so unsatisfying for so many that combat gives them their first ecstatic
pleasures, whether in "seeing" or companionship or work done wel . It chal enges us to find what the philosopher Wil iam James cal ed "the moral equivalent of war," ways to make life outside of war vivid, affectionate, even thril ing.
Gray himself, although he tries to understand and explain those "enduring appeals," is
offended by war. The Warriors recal s an entry in his own wartime journal, made December
8, 1944, which reflects not only his own feelings, but that of so many other veterans of war,
that war is an affront to our nature as human beings. He wrote,
34
Last night I lay awake and thought of al the inhumanity of it, the beastliness
of the war … . I remembered al the brutal things I had seen since I came
overseas, al the people rotting in jail, some of whom I had helped to put
there … . I thought of Plato's phrase about the wise man caught in an evil
time who refuses to participate in the crimes of his fel ow citizens, but hides
behind a wal until the storm is past. And this morning, when I rose, tired and
distraught from bed, I knew that in order to survive this time I must love
more. There is no other way.
When the U.S. government decided to enter World War I, it did not find an eager army of
males, just waiting for an opportunity to vent their "natural" anger against the enemy, to indulge their "natural" inclination to kil . Indeed, there was a large protest movement
against entrance into the war, leading Congress to pass punitive legislation for antiwar
statements (2,000 people were prosecuted for criticizing the war). The government, besides
conscripting men for service on threat of prison and jailing antiwar protesters, had to
organize a propaganda campaign, sending 75,000 speakers to give 750,000 speeches in
hundreds of towns and cities to persuade people of the rightness of the war.
Even with al that, there was resistance by young men to the draft. In New York City, ninety
of the first hundred draftees claimed exemption. In Minnesota, the Minneapolis Journal
reported, "Draft Opposition Fast Spreading in State." In Florida, two black farm wor
kers
went into the woods with a shotgun and mutilated themselves to avoid the draft; one blew
off four fingers of his hand, the other shot off his arm below the elbow. A senator from
Georgia reported "general and widespread opposition … to the enactment of the draft… .
Mass meetings held in every part of the State protested against it." Ultimately, over
330,000 men were classified as draft evaders.17
We have an enormous literature of war. Much of it was written by men who experienced
combat: Erich Remarque and Ernest Hemingway on World War I; Norman Mailer, James
Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Hel er, and Paul Fussel on World War II; Philip Caputo, Tim
O'Brien, John DelVecchio, Bil Ehrhart, and Ron Kovic on Vietnam. The men they write about
are not (with occasional exceptions) bloodthirsty kil ers, consumed by some ferocious
instinct to maim and destroy other human beings. They connect across a whole century with
the young scared kid in Red Badge of Courage; they experience fear more than hate,
fatigue more than rage, and boredom more than vengefulness. If any of them turn into
crazed kil ers for some moment or some hour, it is not hard to find the cause in the crazed
circumstances of war, coming on top of the ordinary upbringing of a young man in a
civilized country.
A GI named John Ketwig wrote a letter to his wife:
After al those years of preparation in the schools, you walked out the door,
and they told you it was your duty to kil the commies in South Vietnam. If
you wouldn't volunteer, they would draft you, force you to do things against
your wil . Put you in jail. Cut your hair, take away your mod clothes, train you
to kil . How could they do that? It was directly opposite to everything your
parents had been saying, the teachers had been saying, the clergymen had
been saying. You questioned it, and your parents said they didn't want you to
go, but better that than jail. The teacher said it was your duty. The clergy
said you wouldn't want your mother to live in a communist country, so you'd
best go fight them in Asia before they landed in California. You asked about
'Thou shalt not kil ', and they mumbled.18
It was no instinct to kil that led John Ketwig into military duty, but the pressure of people
