by Howard Zinn
and me this very moment. For the first time in the history of man, a country
has divided up the world into military districts… .
You could argue World War Two had to be fought. Hitler had to be stopped.
Unfortunately, we translate it unchanged to the situation today… .
I hate it when they say, "He gave his life for his country." Nobody gives their
life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them.
They don't die for the honor and glory of their country. We kil them.88
Granted that we have started in this century with the notion of just war, we don't have to
keep it. Perhaps the change in our thinking can be as dramatic, as clear, as that in the life
of a French general, whose obituary in 1986 was headed: "Gen. Jacques Paris de
Bol ardiere, War Hero Who Became a Pacifist; Dead at the age of 78."
He had served in the Free French Forces in Africa during World War II, later parachuted into
France and Hol and to organize the Resistance, and commanded an airborne unit in
Indochina from 1946 to 1953. But in 1957, according to the obituary, he "caused an uproar
in the French army when he asked to be relieved of his command in Algeria to protest the
torture of Algerian rebels." In 1961 he began to speak out against militarism and nuclear
weapons. He created an organization cal ed The Alternative Movement for Non-Violence and
in 1973 participated in a protest expedition to France's South Pacific nuclear testing site.
It remains to be seen how many people in our time wil make that journey from war to
nonviolent action against war. It is the great chal enge of our time: How to achieve justice,
with struggle, but without war.
1 NEC White Paper, broadcast Jan. 30, 1972.
2 Christian Gauss, of Princeton University, in an introduction to the Mentor edition of The
Prince, says, "Machiavel i was not interested in peace and did not believe it was necessary."
82
3 The idea persists that military service and war itself "build character." Poet Michael
Blumenthal (is he trying to destroy my notion about the pacifism of poets?) wrote in the
1980s about his success in evading the draft cal in the Vietnam War. He felt now that he
had missed something positive and strengthening in the experience of the army, the testing
ground of war. "And maybe, short of violating one's most deeply held moral principles,
serving in the armed forces or, for that matter, being in a war, isn't the greatest tragedy
that can occur in life" (Op-ed essay. New York Times). But if "one's most deeply held moral principles" include refusing to kil another human being, what is left of Blumenthal's point?
4 Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevil a, War: Ends and Means (Basic Books, 1089), quoted in
a review article by Gordon A. Craig, New York Review of Books, Aug. 17, 1989.
5 Michael Walzer's book, Just and Unjust Wars (Basic Books, 1977), engages thoughtful y in
this discussion, and there have been many articles on the subject in the pages of the
periodical Philosophy and Public Affairs.
6 Erasmus is quoted in Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (Rutgers University
Press, 1978). Erasmus's major work is In Praise of Fol y.
7 Ronald Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (World, 1971), 370. Clark, a "realist," deplored Einstein's action, saying it "offered a useful weapon to those only waiting to claim that
outside his own field Einstein was something between crank and buffoon." And what would
Clark say about the delegates who sat for over a year scrupulously going over ways to
"humanize" war, their work ignored almost immediately in a war that was a long succession of horribly inhuman acts?
8 New York Times, Feb. 10, 1090.
9 H. D. Kitto, The Greeks (Peter Smith, 1988).
10 Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War seemed to understand the injustices
committed by Athens against her neighbors and gave ful attention to the arguments
against Athens. See Christopher Bruel , "Thucydides' View of Athenian Imperialism,"
American Political Science Review (1974).
11 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.
12 Quoted in Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience.
13 Tom Paine, The Rights of Man (1791-1792).
14 Helen Kel er's speech was reprinted in a Socialist newspaper, the New York Cal , Jan. 6, 1916.
15 Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (Macmil an, 1962).
16 Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (Bantam Books, 1983), 230.
17 Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (Oxford University Press, 1986),
18 When the war ended, Trumbo agreed to a new edition of the book. In 1970, he wrote a
bitter "addendum": "Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of
40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning
rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody
else gobbles our share." Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (Lyle Stuart, 1970).
19 James E. Mil er was reviewing a book by an Italian historian, Gian Giacomo Migone, Gli
Stati Uniti e il fascismo (Feltrinel i, 1980), in American Historical Review (1981).
83
20 Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War (Longman, 1987)
21 Bruce Russett, in his book on the origins of U.S. entrance into World War II, No Clear and
Present Danger (Harper & Row, 1972), says: "Throughout the 1930s, the United States government had done little to resist the Japanese advance on the Asian continent." But:
"The Southwest Pacific area was of undeniable economic importance to the United States—
at the time most of America's tin and rubber came from there, as did substantial quantities
of other raw materials."
The cutoff of oil to Japan was crucial in their decision to make war on the United States and
try to conquer the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. The cutoff was actual y not planned to be total
when the United States froze Japanese assets, but Dean Acheson, who was the State
Department's representative to the Foreign Funds Control Committee and who was not ful y
aware of how desperate Japan was about oil nor of the violent reaction it might bring,
engineered the policy so as to cut off oil completely to Japan. See Jonathan G. Utley,
"Upstairs, Downstairs at Foggy Bottom: Oil Exports and Japan, 1940-41," Prologue (Spring 1976).
22 See Arnold Offner, American Appeasement: U.S. Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938
(Norton, 1976).
23 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Harper & Row, 1961). Indeed, at
certain critical moments, the Al ies suppressed information about the operations of
extermination camps, according to Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1980).
24 Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the
Holocaust, 1938-1945 (Rutgers University Press, 1970). Robert Daliek in a review article on this issue wrote, "The congressional restrictionists, the British, the Vatican, the Latin
Americans, the neutrals, the Arabs, the exiled governments, the conquered Europeans, the
Committee of the International Red Cross, and American Jewry itself directly and indirectly
threw up obstacles to effective rescue that would have inhibited even the most determined
administration effort." Robert Daliek, "Franklin Roosevelt as World Leader," American Historical Review (1971). But, of course, there was no determ
ined administration effort.
25 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European few.
26 The quotation is from a summary of the commission report by its chairman, former
Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, and a member of the commission, Rabbi Arthur
Hertzberg. For a comprehensive picture of the cal ousness, incompetence, and self-seeking
behavior, by both the U.S. government and Jewish organizations, that stood in the way of
saving Jews during the war, see David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (Pantheon,
1984).
27 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 723.
28 Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (Pantheon, 1989). The first of the
extermination camps began to operate in December 1941, six months into the invasion of
the Soviet Union.
29 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 258.
30 These and other references to the French control over Indochina appear in The Pentagon
Papers, Vol. I (Beacon Press, 1971).
31 A. J. P. Taylor, The Second World War: An Il ustrated History (Putnam, 1975).
84
32 For a detailed picture of the basic conservatism of the Churchil government, its single-
minded pursuit of military victory and its resistance to social change, see Angus Calder, The
People's War: Britain 1939-1945 (Pantheon, 1969).
33 Cordel Hul , Memoirs (Macmil an, 1948), 1177.
34 Life, Feb. 17, 1941.
35 U.S. economic expansion during the war is described in detail by Lloyd Gardner, Economic
Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), and Gabriel Kolko,
The Politics of War (Random House, 1968).
36 Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They
Shaped (Viking, 1975).
37 Quoted in Lloyd Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1964), 264.
38 There is a summary of wartime discrimination in the Report of the National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).
39 Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels against War (Columbia University Press, 1969), 46.
40 Ibid., 46.
41 Ibid., 47.
42 Robert L. Alien, The Port Chicago Mutiny (Warner Books, 1989).
43 Robert L. Alien, "The Port Chicago Disaster and Its Aftermath," Black Scholar (Spring 1982).
44 Representative John Rankin of Mississippi in the Congressional Record, Dec. 15, 1941,
quoted in Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy (Wil iam Morrow, 1976), 54.
45 Hirabayasbi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943).
46 Peter Irons, Justice at War (Oxford University Press, 1983), 286-292. The footnote
appeared in a draft of the Justice Department brief written by John L. Burling, assistant
director of the Alien Enemy Control Unit of the department. It said that the reports of the
army on espionage by Japanese on the West Coast were "in conflict with information in the
possession of the Department of Justice." In view of that conflict, it said, "we do not ask the Court to take judicial notice of the recital of those facts contained in the Report." McCloy
objected to the footnote, and then Burling told a col eague: "Presumably at Mr. McCloy's
request, the Solicitor General had the printing stopped at about noon." What happened then
was that Herbert Wechsler, a former Columbia law school professor and a wartime assistant
attorney-general, wrote a substitute footnote that cast no such doubt on the army report
and made no such suggestion to the Supreme Court.
47 Weglyn, Years of Infamy.
48 See John Dower, War without Mercy (Pantheon, 1986) for the way the press treated the
incarceration of the Japanese.
49 Studs Terkel, "The Good War" (Pantheon, 1984).
50 The story was told in a television documentary by Lavinia Warner, Jailed by the British,
reviewed in the Daily Mail, Feb. 17, 1983.
85
51 An account of their trial is the book by James P. Cannon, Socialism on Trial (Pathfinder Press, 1973).
52 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the McCone appointment to the CIA, Jan.
18, 1962, quoted in l.F. Stone's Weekly, Jan. 29, 1962.
53 Bruce Catton, The Warlords of Washington (Harcourt Brace, 1948).
54 Quoted in Bruce Russett, No Clear and Present Danger (Harper & Row, 1972), 73.
55 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (Overal Report, European War) (U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1945).
56 Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power (Yale University Press, 1987).
57 David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (Bal antine, 1965).
58 These recol ections are from a story in the New York Times, Jan. 30, 1985.
59 See David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden, Chapt. 2. One historian of the Holocaust, Lucy Davidowitz, rightful y enraged at what happened to the Jews, goes on to defend the
bombing of Dresden. She says it was a justified retaliation for the Germans sending V-2
rockets, terrible engines of indiscriminate destruction, over London. Telford Taylor,
reviewing her book, The War Against the Jews (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975), points out that the V-2 bombardment was already five months old, so that "the explanation is
implausible on its face." Taylor notes that "the announced justification for the raid was to stop German reinforcement of the Russian front, and that it was carried out despite plain
evidence from Ultra sources (counterintel igence) that no such reinforcement was in
process." New York Times, Mar. 10, 1985.
60 Barton J. Bernstein, "Churchil 's Secret Biological Weapons," Bul etin of Atomic Scientists (Jan./Feb., 1987).
61 New York Times, Nov. 23, 1974.
62 The item on the BBC reaction to Burton appeared in the New York Times, Nov. 30,1974.
63 New York Times, Mar. 10, 1085.
64 Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects
of the Atomic Bombings (Basic Books, 1981).
65 In his private diary, Truman wrote: "The target wil be a purely military one." It was an astounding self-deception. The quote is from Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic
Bomb, 691.
66 Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed (Knopf, 1975).
67 This recol ection appeared in August 1966 in The Journal of Social and Political Ideas in
Japan, and is quoted by Noam Chomsky in his essay, "The Revolutionary Pacifism of A. J.
Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War," Liberation (Sept.-Oct., 1967).
68 Wesley Craven and James Gate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 3 (University
of Chicago Press, 1948-58).
69 New York Times, Apr. 16, 1945.
70 This is from a little book produced by a printer in Royan, a former member of the
Resistance named Botton. Botton, Royan—Vil e Martyrs.
86
71 Quoted by Botton, Royan—Vil e Martyre. I returned to Royan in 1966 to do research on
the bombing and the resulting essay appears in Howard Zinn, The Politics of History
(Beacon, 1970).
72 Irving, The Destruction of Dresden.
73 Lawrence Freedman, Atlas of Global Strategy (Facts on File, 1985), 51.
74 Dan Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations (Knopf, 1987).
75 The original edition: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Lippincott, 1942). A new edition added the deleted portion as an appendix as wel as an introduction by Robert
Hemenway describing the censor
ship incident. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Harper &
Row, 1984).
76 Ibid., xxxi i.
77 Ibid., 322-348.
78 Ibid., xxxi.
79 Winner, Rebels against War, 34-61.
80 Simone Weil, "Reflections on War," Politics (Feb. 1945). Quoted in Winner, 95.
81 Politics, Aug. 1945. Quoted in Dwight MacDonald, Politics Past (Viking, 1957), 169.
82 In 1989 Oxford University Press published a book by Paul Fussel , Wartime: Under-
standing and Behavior in the Second World War. Fussel sees war as madness, much like
the lieutenant surveying the corpses at the end of the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. A British reviewer, Noel Annan (New York Review of Books, Sept. 28, 1989) is unhappy with
Fussel 's total rejection of war. "The great question you expect Fussel to ask he never does.
If war is so bestial, should America have gone to war after Pearl Harbor and should the
French and the British have decided to stop Hitler in 1939?" Perhaps Fussel doesn't ask that
question. I have asked it and try to answer it in my own way. But Annan does not want to
consider any but the stock answer: "Of course." He cannot give any other answer because
he is caught up in the orthodox glorification of combat for "just cause," saying, near the end of his review: "It is not sweet to die for one's country. It is bitter. But it can be noble." If Fussel doesn't answer Annan's question, neither does Annan answer a crucial question:
What makes you so sure that to die in war is to die "for one's country," rather than for
national aggrandizement, political power, economic greed, and fanaticism?
83 See Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, where he discusses the ways in which the Nazi satel ite countries in Eastern Europe reacted in different ways to the "Jewish
question." Bulgaria, for instance, resisted by procrastination and was always affected by
opportunism. Hilberg writes: "For twelve months the Bulgarian Jews remained subject to al
the discriminations and persecutions of the disrupted destruction process. Then, on August
30, 1944 … the morning newspapers in Sofia displayed in prominent headlines the Cabinet's
decision to revoke al of the anti-Jewish laws" (p. 484).
84 Gene Sharp, Making Europe Unconquerable (Bal inger, 1985), 3-4.
