The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy

National Catholic Reporter, March 27, 1998 by Gary MacEoin

War hysteria once again grips the United States. TV's know-all "talking heads" and their fellow pundits of the print media mindlessly repeat the administration's explanations why our national interests demand that we drag our reluctant allies into unleashing unimaginable destruction on Iraq -- or even go it alone. Howard Zinn's monumental collection of challenges to conventional thinking has much to contribute to this discussion.

In particular, a long essay in The Zinn Reader titled "Just and Unjust War" places the issue in a remarkable historical context. Few, I believe, could read it without raising questions that are absent from the current pseudo-debate. Zinn starts from his personal experience as a willing and eager 21-year-old bombardier assigned to attack military targets in Germany.

"If there were such a thing as a just war," he writes, "this was it. ... Fascism had to be resisted and defeated. I had no doubts. ... The moral issue could hardly be clearer. The enemy could not be more obviously evil."

What had been perfectly clear in training school became a little blurred in execution. When you bomb from a height of 30,000 feet, you are liable to miss by a quarter of a mile, with inevitably high "collateral damage." From what height will they bomb in Iraq?

By war's end, Zinn had already begun to question. A Ph.D. in history (Columbia) and a postdoctoral fellowship (Harvard) later, Zinn's doubt had become certainty. "However moral is the cause that initiates a war ... it is in the nature of war to corrupt that morality until the rule becomes `An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,' and soon it is not a matter of equivalence but indiscriminate revenge."

Seven years as a professor and civil-rights activist in a black college in Georgia completed Zinn's transformation into a professional challenger of conventional wisdom as writer, lecturer and human rights activist. Most important of some 20 books Zinn has written is the monumental A People's History of the United States, the story of the United States as seen from the underside.

Swimming against the current, of course, carries a price. Like Noam Chomsky and other counterculture thinkers, Zinn does not find his books listed in the catalogs of major publishers.

The Zinn Reader consists of 61 extracts from books, essays, articles, pamphlets, lectures and reviews written over 35 years. The result constitutes a powerful defense of the author's unorthodox evaluation of our society. It reflects an amazing knowledge of history combined with the analyses of a brilliant mind. Note worthy is Zinn's insistence that historians are not and should not be objective, with the corollary that the academic community wastes much of its, potential contribution by its pretense at objectivity.

"I was relieved when I decided that keeping one's judgment out of historical narrative was impossible, because I had already determined I would never do that. I had grown up amidst poverty, had been in a war, had witnessed the ugliness of race hatred, and I was not going to pretend to neutrality. As I told my students at the start of my courses, `You can't be neutral on a moving train.'"

The Reader is divided into six sections: race, class, war, law, history and means and ends. The last I found particularly relevant: how injustice can be remedied, how social change is brought about, what tactics are both effective and morally acceptable in that process and what reason we have to be hopeful. A wide-ranging discussion that includes a closely reasoned rejection of Freud's insistence that we humans are innately aggressive and Machiavelli's confident assertion that we tend to be bad leads to a nuanced conclusion about our nature.

He writes, "Surely history does not start anew with each decade. The roots of one era branch and flower in subsequent eras. Human beings, writings, invisible transmitters of all kinds, carry messages across the generations. I try to be pessimistic, to keep up with some of my friends. But I think back over the decades and look around. And then, it seems to me that the future is not certain, but it is possible."