by Howard Zinn
around him, the indoctrination of his growing up. So it is not remarkable that he joined the
military. What is remarkable is that at a certain point he rebel ed against it.
35
While 2 mil ion men served in Vietnam at one time or another, another 0.5 mil ion evaded the draft in some way. And of those who served, there were perhaps 100,000 deserters.
About 34,000 GIs were court-martialed and imprisoned. If an instinct real y was at work, it
was not for war, but against it.
Once in the war, the tensions of combat on top of the training in obedience produced
atrocities. In the My Lai Massacre we have an extreme example of the power of a culture in
teaching obedience. In My Lai, a hamlet in South Vietnam, a company of U.S. soldiers
landed by helicopter early one morning in March 1968, with orders to kil everybody there.
In about one hour, although not a single shot was fired at them, they slaughtered about
400 Vietnamese, most of them old people, women, and children. Many of them were herded
into ditches and then mowed down with automatic rifles.
One of the American soldiers, Charles Hutto, said later, "The impression I got was that we
was to shoot everyone in the vil age … . An order came down to destroy al of the food, kil
al the animals and kil al the people … then the vil age was burned … . I didn't agree with
the kil ings but we were ordered to do it."19
It is not at al surprising that men go to war, when they have been cajoled, bribed,
propagandized, conscripted, threatened, and also not surprising that after rigorous training
they obey orders, even to kil unarmed women and children. What is surprising is that some
refuse.
At My Lai a number of soldiers would not kil when ordered to: Michael Bernhardt, Roy
Wood, Robert Maples, a GI named Grzesik. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson commanded a
helicopter that flew over the scene and, when he saw what was happening, he landed the
helicopter and rescued some of the women and children, ordering his crewmen to fire on
GIs if they fired on the Vietnamese. Charles Hutto, who participated in the My Lai Massacre,
said afterward,
I was 19 years old, and I'd always been told to do what the grown-ups told
me to do… . But now I'l tel my sons, if the government cal s, to go, to serve
their country, but to use their own judgment at times … to forget about
authority … to use their own conscience. I wish somebody had told me that
before I went to Vietnam. I didn't know. Now I don't think there should be
even a thing cal ed war … 'cause it messes up a person's mind.20
In British novelist George Orwel 's essay, "Shooting an Elephant," he recal s his experience in Burma, when he was a minor official of the British Empire. An elephant ran loose, and he
final y shot it to death, but notes he did this not out of any internal drive, not of malice, but
because people around him expected him to do that, as part of his job. It was not in his
"nature."
The American feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman, writing at the beginning of the
twentieth century before so much of the scientific discussion of the relationship between
violence and human nature, said,
Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!
Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flathead parson to the visionless
dabbler in science, presume to speak authoritatively of human nature. The
greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the
wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can any one speak of
it today, with every soul a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and
maimed?21
36
Her point about "the visionless dabbler in science" was affirmed half a century later by Nobel Prize-winning biologist Salvadore E. Luria, who points to the misuse of science in
attributing violent behavior to our genes. Moving away from genetic determinism and its
mood of inevitability (as too often interpreted, the inevitability of war and death), Luria says
that biologists have a nobler role for the future: to explore "the most intriguing feature—the creativity of the human spirit."22
That creativity is revealed in human history, but it is a history that Machiavel i and a
succession of scholarly pessimists ignore as they concentrate on the worst aspects of human
behavior. There is another history, of the rejection of violence, the refusal to kil , and the
yearning for community. It has shown itself throughout the past in acts of courage and
sacrifice that defied al the immediate pressures of the environment.
This was true even in the unspeakable conditions of the German death camps in World War
II, as Terence des Pres pointed out in his book The Survivor. He wrote, "The depth and durability of man's social nature may be gauged by the fact that conditions in the
concentration camps were designed to turn prisoners against each other, but that in a
multitude of ways, men and women persisted in social acts."23
It is true that there is an infinite human capacity for violence. There is also an infinite
potential for kindness. The unique ability of humans to imagine gives enormous power to
idealism, an imagining of a better state of things not yet in existence. That power has been
misused to send young men to war. But the power of idealism can also be used to attain
justice, to end the massive violence of war.
Anyone who has participated in a social movement has seen the power of idealism to move
people toward self-sacrifice and cooperation. I think of Sam Block, a young black
Mississippian, very thin and with very bad eyes, taking black people to register to vote in
the murderous atmosphere of Greenwood, Mississippi, in the early 1960s. Block was
accosted by a sheriff (another civil rights worker, listening, recorded their conversation):
sheriff: Nigger, where you from?
block: I'm a native of Mississippi.
sheriff: I know al the niggers here.
block: Do you know any colored people?
(The sheriff spat at him.)
sheriff: I'l give you til tomorrow to get out of here.
block: If you don't want to see me here, you better pack up and leave,
because I'l be here.24
History, so diligent at recording disasters, is largely silent on the enormous number of
courageous acts by individuals chal enging authority and defying death.
The question of history, its use and abuse, deserves a discussion of its own.
1 This statement is in my files as from John Stuart Mil . I have not been able to find the
exact source even after consulting a leading Mil scholar and searching the Intelex col ection
of Mil 's major works. I wil be pleased to hear from anyone who can locate the source.
2 For instance, a recent survey of students at Wesleyan University conducted by
psychologist David Adams found that nearly half of them believed war was built into human
nature. U.S. News & World Report, Apr. 11, 1988.
3 Machiavel i, The Prince, 56.
37
4 Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan. How many political scientists today accept this view of
human nature is hard to say. Certainly some do. For instance, Professor Stephen J.
Andriole, writing in the American Political Science Review (1975), criticizes author Robert Nye because "Nye rejects the hypothesis that aggressive behavior is in any way innate, or
instinctual, in the human species."
5 The exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud was printed in Why War? a pamphlet
published by the International Institute of Intel ectual Co-operation of the League of Nations
in 1933. Freud's response appears also in Sigmund Freud, Col ected Papers, Vol. 5 (Basic
Books, 1959).
6 E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology, The New Synthesis (Harvard University Press, 1975).
7 E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Harvard University Press, 1978).
8 The great Goya, who painted the horrors of the Napoleonic wars, came to a pessimistic
view. As one art critic said: "The liberal message was that human nature is natural y good,
but is deformed by corrupt laws and bad customs… . Goya's message, late in his life, is
different. The chains are attached to something deep inside human nature." Robert Hughes,
"The Liberal Goya," New York Review of Books, June 29, 1989.
9 New York Review of Books, Mar. 8, 1973.
10 Freud's essay Civilization and Its Discontents (Hogarth Press, 1930) refers to aggression as an "indestructible feature of human nature," and in it he talks of the "constitutional inclination of people to be aggressive to one another." But Freud is not consistent or clear.
In his lecture "Anxiety and Instinctual Life" (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
#32 [Norton, 1933]) he talks in one paragraph about "what history tel s us … that belief in
the 'goodness' of human nature is one of those evil il usions" and in the same paragraph
says "We have argued in favor of a special aggressive and destructive instinct in men not on
account of the teachings of history or of our experience in life but on the basis of general
considerations to which we were led by examining the phenomena of sadism and
masochism."
11 The story of the experiment is told in detail by Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority
(Harper & Row, 1974).
12 Quoted in Milgram, Obedience to Authority, 1.
13 Colin Turnbul , The Mountain People (Simon & Schuster, 1972).
14 Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (Harcourt Brace & World, 1966).
15 Erik Erikson, "Psychoanalysis and Ongoing History," American Journal of Psychiatry (Sept.
1965).
16 J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors (Harper & Row, 1970).
17 For a summary of antiwar feeling during World War I, see Howard Zinn, "War Is the
Health of the State," A People's History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1981). For the specifics of draft resistance and other forms of opposition to the war, see H. C. Peterson and
Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (University of Washington Press, 1957).
18 John Ketwig's letter became a book,… and a hard rain fel (Macmil an, 1985). Part of it is reprinted in Unwinding the Vietnam War (Real Comet Press, 1987).
38
19 Boston Globe, Mar. 20, 1983. The story of the massacre is vividly described in detail by Seymour Hersh, Mylai 4 (Random House, 1970). Hersh was the first American journalist to
write about it; he wrote for a smal antiwar news agency in Southeast Asia cal ed Dispatch
News Service.
20 Boston Globe, Mar. 20, 1983.
21 Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What It Real y Stands For," in Red Emma Speaks, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Schocken Books, 1983), 73.
22 New York Review of Books, Feb. 7, 1974.
23 Terence des Pres, The Survivor (Oxford University Press, 1976).
24 Howard Zinn, S.N.C.C: The New Abolitionists (Greenwood Press, 1985), 85-86.
39
Four
The Use and Abuse of History
Before I became a professional historian, I had grown up in the dirt and dankness of New
York tenements, had been knocked unconscious by a policeman while holding a banner in a
demonstration, had worked for three years in a shipyard, and had participated in the
violence of war. Those experiences, among others, made me lose al desire for "objectivity,"
whether in living my life, or writing history.
This statement is troubling to some people. It needs explanation.
I mean by it that by the time I began to study history formal y I knew I was not doing it
because it was simply "interesting" or because it meant a solid, respectable career. I had been touched in some way by the struggle of ordinary working people to survive, by the
glamour and ugliness of war, and by the reading I had done on my own trying to
understand fascism, communism, capitalism, and socialism. I could not possibly study
history as a neutral. For me, history could only be a way of understanding and helping to
change (yes, an extravagant ambition!) what was wrong in the world.
That did not mean looking only for historical facts to reinforce the beliefs I already held. It
did not mean ignoring data that would change or complicate my understanding of society. It
meant asking questions that were important for social change, questions relating to
equality, liberty, peace, and justice, but being open to whatever answers were suggested by
looking at history.
I decided early that I would be biased in the sense of holding fast to certain fundamental
values: the equal right of al human beings—whatever race, nationality, sex, religion—to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Jefferson's ideals. It seemed to me that devoting
a life to the study of history was worthwhile only if it aimed at those ideals.
But I wanted to be flexible in arriving at the means to achieve those ends. Scrupulous
honesty in reporting on the past would be needed, because any decision on means (tactics,
avenues, and instruments) had to be tentative and had to be open to change based on what
one could learn from history. The values, ends, and ideals I held need not be discarded,
whatever history disclosed. So there would be no incentive to distort the past, fearing that
an honest recounting would hurt the desired ends.
Does this mean that our values, our most cherished ideals, have no solid basis in fact, that desires for freedom and justice have the lightness of personal whims and subjective
desires? On the contrary, our powerful impulses for freedom and community come from
deep, dependable internal drives (these too are facts), often deflected or overcome by
terrible pressures in our culture, but never extinguished. Does this not account for the way
peoples long oppressed and apparently beaten into silence, suddenly rebel, demanding their
freedom?1
Professional philosophers refer to the "fact-value" problem. That is Do your basic values depend on certain facts, so that if you discover your facts are wrong, you are compel ed to
change your values? I am arguing here for holding on to certain basic values—and insisting
that whatever facts you discover in history may change your means without dislodging your
ends.2
I can il ustrate that with my own experience. At seventeen or eighteen, I was reading lots of
novels. Some were pure entertainment. Others were novels of social criticism, like Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
41
I don't know exactly when I decided that I believed in the socialism described by Sinclair in the last pages of The Jungle. Or that I wouldn't be afraid of the epithet "Communist,"
because, as someone said (I recal it approximately) in The Grapes of Wrath, "A Communist is anyone who asks for twenty cents an hour when the boss is paying fifteen."
When I encountered young Communists in my working-class neighborhood and they
bombarded me with literatur
e on the Soviet Union, I was persuaded (like many Americans
in the Depression years) that here was a model for a future society of equality and justice,
the rational planning of production and distribution, the creation of a "workers' state." But while flying bombing missions in World War II, I became friends with a young gunner on
another crew who, like me, was a constant reader. He gave me a book I had never heard
of, by a writer I had never heard of. It was The Yogi and the Commissar by Arthur Koestler.
That book, written by a former Communist who had fought against fascism in Spain, was a
powerful, eloquent denunciation of the Soviet Union, seeing what happened there as a
betrayal of Communist ideals. Its historical data seemed irrefutable. I trusted the author's
commitment and his intel igence. That was the beginning of my own move away from
acceptance of the Soviet Union as a socialist or Communist model.
When Khrushchev gave his astounding speech in 1956 acknowledging Stalin's crimes (which
involved, although Khrushchev did not stress this, the complicity of so many other members
of the Soviet hierarchy), he was affirming what Koestler and other critics of the Soviet
Union had been saying for a long time. When Soviet troops invaded Hungary and then
Czechoslovakia to crush rebel ions, it was clear to me that the Soviet Union was violating a
fundamental Marxist value—real y, a universal principle, beyond Marxism—of international
solidarity.
My faith in the ideal of an egalitarian society, a cooperative commonwealth, in a world
without national boundaries, remained secure. My idea that the Soviet Union represented
that new world was something I could discard. I had to be wil ing to cal the shots as I saw
them in reading the history of the Soviet Union, just as I wanted those who had a
romanticized view of the United States to be wil ing to cal the shots as they saw them in
the American past. I knew also that it was a temptation to hold onto old beliefs, to ignore
uncomfortable facts because one had become attached to ideals, and that I must guard
myself against that temptation and be watchful for it in reading other historians.
A historian's strong belief in certain values and goals can lead to dishonesty or to distortions of history. But that is avoidable if the historian understands the difference between solidity
