by Howard Zinn
A ground assault by the French fol owed up on the bombing. The Times reported,
French troops mopped up most of Royan, on the north side of the river's
mouth… . Royan, a town of 20,000, once was a vacation spot. About 350
civilians, dazed or bruised by two terrific air bombings in forty-eight hours,
crawled from the ruins and said the air attacks had been "such hel as we
never believed possible."70
General de Larminat, in charge of the French forces in that region and much criticized for
the attack, was silent for a long time, but several years after the war he said,
Al wars carry these painful errors… . This is the painful ransom, the inevitable
ransom of war… . We do not linger on the causes of these unfortunate events
because, in truth, there is only a single cause: War, and the only ones truly
responsible are those who wanted war."71
A similar statement was made by British Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby after the bombing
of Dresden:
It was one of those terrible things that sometimes happen in wartime,
brought about by an unfortunate combination of circumstances … . It is not so
much this or the other means of making war that is immoral or inhumane.
What is immoral is war itself. Once ful -scale war has broken out it can never
be humanized or civilized … . So long as we resort to war to settle differences
between nations, so long wil we have to endure the horrors, the barbarities
and excesses that war brings with it. That, to me, is the lesson of Dresden.72
77
Dissident Voices
What is remarkable is how close these statements, by two military men, come to the one
made by Albert Einstein, on the occasion of the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932.
Al of them were suggesting that once war is made, an atmosphere is created and a
momentum begins in which the worst horrors become inevitable. Thus a war that
apparently begins with a "good" cause—stopping aggression, helping victims, or punishing
brutality—ends with its own aggression, creates more victims than before, and brings out
more brutality than before, on both sides. The Holocaust, a plan made and executed in the
ferocious atmosphere of war, and the saturation bombings, also created in the frenzy of
war, are evidence of this.
The good cause in World War II was the defeat of fascism. And, in fact, it ended with that
defeat: the corpse of Mussolini hanging in the public square in Milan; Hitler burned to death
in his underground bunker; Tojo, captured and sentenced to death by an international
tribunal. But 40 mil ion people were dead, and the elements of fascism—militarism, racism,
imperialism, dictatorship, ferocious nationalism, and war—were stil at large in the postwar
world.
Two of those 40 mil ion were my closest air force friends, Joe Perry and Ed Plotkin. We had
suffered through basic training and rode horses and flew Piper Cubs in Burlington, Vermont,
and played basketbal at Santa Ana before going our own ways to different combat zones.
Both were kil ed in the final weeks of the war. For years afterward, they appeared in my
dreams. In my waking hours, the question grew: What did they real y die for?
We were victorious over fascism, but this left two superpowers dominating the world, vying
for control of other nations, carving out new spheres of influence, on a scale even larger
than that attempted by the Fascist powers. Both superpowers supported dictatorships al
over the world: the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in Latin America,
Korea, and the Philippines.
The war machines of the Axis powers were destroyed, but the Soviet Union and the United
States were building military machines greater than the world had ever seen, piling up
frightful numbers of nuclear weapons, soon equivalent to a mil ion Hiroshima-type bombs.
They were preparing for a war to keep the peace, they said (this had also been said before
World War I) but those preparations were such that if war took place (by accident? by
miscalculation?) it would make the Holocaust look puny.
Hitler's aggression was over but wars continued, which the superpowers either initiated or
fed with military aid or observed without attempting to halt them. Two mil ion people died in
Korea; 2 to 5 mil ion in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; 1 mil ion in Indonesia; perhaps 2
mil ion in the Nigerian civil war; 1 mil ion in the Iran-Iraq War; and many more in Latin
America, Africa, and the Middle East. It is estimated that, in the forty years after 1945,
there were 150 wars, with 20 mil ion casualties.73
The victorious and moral y righteous superpowers stood by in the postwar world while
mil ions—more than had died in Hitler's Holocaust—starved to death. They made gestures,
but al owed national ambitions and interpower rivalries to stand in the way of saving the
hungry. A United Nations official reported, with great bitterness, that
in pursuit of political objectives in the Nigerian Civil War, a number of great
and smal nations, including Britain and the United States, worked to prevent
supplies of food and medicine from reaching the starving children of rebel
Biafra.74
78
Swept up in the obvious rightness of a crusade to rid the world of fascism, most people supported or participated in that crusade, .to the point of risking their lives. But there were
skeptics, especial y among the nonwhite peoples of the world—blacks in the United States
and the colonized mil ions of the British Empire (Gandhi withheld his support).
The extraordinary black writer Zora Neale Hurston wrote her memoir, Dust Tracks on a
Road, at the start of World War II. Just before it was to come out the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor, and her publisher, Lippincott, removed a section of the book in which she
wrote bitterly about the "democracies" of the West and their hypocrisy. She said:
Al around me, bitter tears are being shed over the fate of Hol and, Belgium,
France and England. I must confess to being a little dry around the eyes. I
hear people shaking with shudders at the thought of Germany col ecting taxes
in Hol and. I have not heard a word against Hol and col ecting one twelfth of
poor people's wages in Asia. Hitler's crime is that he is actual y doing a thing
like that to his own kind… .
As I see it, the doctrines of democracy deal with the aspirations of men's
souls, but the application deals with things. One hand in somebody else's
pocket and one on your gun, and you are highly civilized … . Desire enough
for your own use only, and you are a heathen. Civilized people have things to
show to their neighbors.75
The editor at Lippincott wrote on her manuscript, "Suggest eliminating international
opinions as irrelevant to autobiography."76 Only when the book was reissued in 1984 did the
censored passages appear.77
Hurston, in a letter she wrote to a journalist friend in 1946, showed her indignation at the
hypocrisy that accompanied the war:
I am amazed at the complacency of Negro press and public. Truman is a
monster. I can think of him as nothing else but the Butcher of Asia. Of his
grin of triumph on giving the order to drop the Atom bombs on Japan. Of his
maintaining troops in China who are shooting the starving Ch
inese for
stealing a handful of food.78
Some white writers were resistant to the fanaticism of war. After it was over, Joseph Hel er
wrote his biting, bril iant satire Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five. In the 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwai, the Japanese military is obsessed with building a
bridge, and the British are obsessed with destroying it. At the end it is blown up and a
British lieutenant, barely surviving, looks around at the river strewn with corpses and
mutters: "Madness. Madness."
There were pacifists in the United States who went to prison rather than participate in World
War II. There were 350,000 draft evaders in the United States. Six thousand men went to
prison as conscientious objectors; one out of every six inmates in U.S. federal prisons was a
conscientious objector to the war.79
But the general mood in the United States was support. Liberals, conservatives, and
Communists agreed that it was a just war. Only a few voices were raised publicly in Europe
and the United States to question the motives of the participants, the means by which the
war was being conducted, and the ends that would be achieved. Very few tried to stand
back from the battle and take a long view. One was the French worker-philosopher Simone
Weil. Early in 1945 she wrote in a new magazine cal ed Politics,
79
Whether the mask is label ed Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the
Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus—the bureaucracy, the
police, the military… . No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal
wil always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample
underfoot, in its service, al human values in ourselves and in others.80
The editor of Politics was an extraordinary American intel ectual named Dwight MacDonald,
who with his wife, Nancy, produced the magazine as an outlet for unorthodox points of
view. After the bombing of Hiroshima, MacDonald refused to join in the general jubilation.
He wrote with a fury:
The CONCEPTS "WAR" AND "PROGRESS" ARE NOW OBSOLETE: … THE
FUTILITY OF MODERN WARFARE SHOULD NOW BE CLEAR. Must we not now
conclude, with Simone Weil, that the technical aspect of war today is the evil,
regardless of political factors? Can one imagine that the atomic bomb could
ever be used "in a good cause?”81
But what was the alternative to war, with Germany on the march in Europe, Japan on its
rampage through Asia, and Italy looking for empire? This is the toughest possible question.
Once the history of an epoch has run its course, it is very difficult to imagine an alternate
set of events, to imagine that some act or acts might set in motion a whole new train of
circumstances, leading in a different direction.82
Would it have been possible to trade time and territory for human life? Was there an
alternative preferable to using the most modern weapons of destruction for mass
annihilation? Can we try to imagine instead of a six-year war a ten-year or twenty-year
period of resistance; of guerril a warfare, strikes, and noncooperation; of underground
movements, sabotage, and paralysis of vital communication and transportation; and of
clandestine propaganda for the organization of a larger and larger opposition?
Even in the midst of war, some nations occupied by the Nazis were able to resist: the
Danes, the Norwegians, and the Bulgarians refused to give up their Jews.83 Gene Sharp, on
the basis of his study of resistance movements in World War II, writes:
During the second World War—in such occupied countries as the Netherlands,
Norway and Denmark—patriots resisted their Nazi overlords and internal
puppets by such weapons as underground newspapers, labor slowdowns,
general strikes, refusal of col aboration, special boycotts of German troops
and quislings, and noncooperation with fascist controls and efforts to
restructure their societies' institutions.84
Guerril a warfare is more selective, its violence more limited and more discriminate, than
conventional war. It is less centralized and more democratic by nature, requiring the
commitment, the initiative, and the cooperation of ordinary people who do not need to be
conscripted, but who are motivated by their desire for freedom and justice.
History is ful of instances of successful resistance (although we are not informed very much
about this) without violence and against tyranny, by people using strikes, boycotts,
propaganda, and a dozen different ingenious forms of struggle. Gene Sharp, in his book The
Politics of Non-Violent Action, 85 records hundreds of instances and dozens of methods of
action.
80
Since the end of World War II, we have seen dictatorships overthrown by mass movements that mobilized so much popular opposition that the tyrant final y had to flee: in Iran, in
Nicaragua, in the Philippines, and in Haiti. Granted, the Nazi machine was formidable,
efficient, and ruthless. But there are limits to conquest. A point is reached where the
conqueror has swal owed too much territory, has to control too many people. Great empires
have fal en when it was thought they would last forever.
We have seen, in the eighties, mass movements of protest arise in the tightly control ed
Communist countries of Eastern Europe, forcing dramatic changes in Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, and East Germany. The Spanish people, having
lost a mil ion lives in their civil war, waited out Franco. He died, as al men do, and the
dictatorship was over. For Portugal, the resistance in its outlying African Empire weakened
control; corruption grew and the long dictatorship of Salazar was overthrown—without a
bloodbath.
There is a fable written by German playwright Bertolt Brecht that goes roughly like this: A
man living alone answers a knock at the door. When he opens it, he sees in the doorway
the powerful body, the cruel face, of The Tyrant. The Tyrant asks, "Wil you submit?" The man does not reply. He steps aside. The Tyrant enters and establishes himself in the man's
house. The man serves him for years. Then The Tyrant becomes sick from food poisoning.
He dies. The man wraps the body, opens the door, gets rid of the body, comes back to his
house, closes the door behind him, and says, firmly, "No."
Violence is not the only form of power. Sometimes it is the least effective. Always it is the
most vicious, for the perpetrator as wel as for the victim. And it is corrupting.
Immediately after the war, Albert Camus, the great French writer who fought in the
underground against the Nazis, wrote in Combat, the daily newspaper of the French
Resistance. In his essay cal ed "Neither Victims Nor Executioners," he considered the tens of mil ions of dead caused by the war and asked that the world reconsider fanaticism and
violence:
Al I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on
murder and to make a choice… . Over the expanse of five continents
throughout the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued
between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the
former has a thousand times the chances of success than has the latter. But I
have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool,
he who gives up in the face of circ
umstances is a coward. And henceforth, the
only honorable course wil be to stake everything on a formidable gamble:
that words are more powerful than munitions.86
Whatever alternative scenarios we can imagine to replace World War II and its mountain of
corpses, it real y doesn't matter any more. That war is over. The practical effect of declaring
World War II just is not for that war, but for the wars that fol ow. And that effect has been a dangerous one, because the glow of rightness that accompanied that war has been
transferred, by false analogy and emotional carryover, to other wars. To put it another way,
perhaps the worst consequence of World War II is that it kept alive the idea that war could
be just.
Looking at World War II in perspective, looking at the world it created and the terror that
grips our century, should we not bury for al time the idea of just war?
Some of the participants in that "good war" had second thoughts. Former GI Tommy
Bridges, who after the war became a policeman in Michigan, expressed his feelings to Studs
Terkel:
81
It was a useless war, as every war is … . How gaddamn foolish it is, the war.
They's no war in the world that's worth fighting for, I don't care where it is.
They can't tel me any different. Money, money is the thing that causes it al .
I wouldn't be a bit surprised that the people that start wars and promote 'em
are the men that make the money, make the ammunition, make the clothing
and so forth. Just think of the poor kids that are starvin' to death in Asia and
so forth that could be fed with how much you make one big shel out of.87
Higher up in the military ranks was Admiral Gene LaRocque, who also spoke to Studs Terkel
about the war:
I had been in thirteen battle engagements, had sunk a submarine, and was
the first man ashore in the landing at Roi. In that four years, I thought. What
a hel of a waste of a man's life. I lost a lot of friends. I had the task of tel ing
my roommate's parents about our last days together. You lose limbs, sight,
part of your life—for what? Old men send young men to war. Flag, banners,
and patriotic savings… .
We've institutionalized militarism. This came out of World War Two … . It gave
us the National Security Council. It gave us the CIA, that is able to spy on you
