September 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Warmaking and Resistance in
US History

Howard Zinn is professor emeritus at Boston University. He is the author of the classic A People's History of the United States, "a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories" (Library Journal). His most recent book is the play Emma (South End Press). Anthony Arnove is the editor of Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Cambridge: South End Press; London: Pluto Press, second edition forthcoming fall 2002). He is a member of the International Socialist Organization and the National Writers Union. The following is excerpted from Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War, edited by Anthony Arnove (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002).

Anthony Arnove: Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish revolutionary, wrote in 1911 that "militarism in both its forms--as war and as armed peace--is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism." Is there a connection between war and the way the economy is managed under capitalism?

Howard Zinn: Certainly there is a connection between capitalism and war. That doesn't mean that it is an exclusive connection. We have had wars before capitalism, and we've had wars engaged in by governments that are precapitalist. We've had wars engaged in by the Soviet Union, which was not really a socialist state, and not quite the traditional capitalist state; sometimes it has been described as "state capitalism."

Howard Zinn, Boston, Sept. 23, 2001 © Josh Reynolds

While you don't have to have a capitalist society to have war, certainly capitalism feeds upon war, and war feeds upon capitalism. As soon as you have societies driven by profit, you are in a situation of nations vying for exploitation of other peoples and other materials. Then nations competing for that profit are going to engage in war with one another. You see how many wars are fought over colonies, raw materials, and cheap labor. That's what imperialism is.

So, by being based on profit, capitalism certainly makes wars between nations, wars over economic resources, much more likely, indeed, inevitable.

Then you have another fact about capitalism: Under capitalism, corporations that produce weapons make huge profits from these weapons of war and therefore are happy both to prepare for war and to engage in war. You prepare for war, you have all these government contracts, and make all this money, and you engage in war and you use up all these products and you have to replace them.

So yes, the connection between capitalism and war is a close one, and I suspect that if we can build a world without capitalism, without the principle of profit being dominant, we may not eliminate all conflict or violence or war, but we would have gone a long way toward that goal.

The United States has a long history of antiwar activism and pacifism.

It's a long history. It's not always a victorious history, in that antiwar movements have only very rarely succeeded in having an effect on the makers of war, but we certainly have had internal movements against war from the American Revolution to today. There were mutinies in the American army against the officers by soldiers disillusioned with the war and the class nature of the war--with their own misery and the luxurious treatment of the officers.

Then you have the Spanish-American war.

Yes, the public is whipped up into a frenzy against Spain. The lie is told that USS Maine, which was docked in Havana harbor, was blown up by the Spanish. No one asked what the Maine was doing in Cuba, but this becomes a cause for war. (By the way, years later, it was revealed that the Maine exploded because of a defect in its engine.) So, the war lasts a very short time, and there wasn't much time for an antiwar movement to develop.

But the Spanish-American War is quickly followed by the war in the Philippines, which lasts for years, and an antiwar movement develops. Mark Twain and some other very distinguished Americans form the Anti-Imperialist League. Some of the black soldiers sent to the Philippines desert and go over to the other side to fight with the Filipinos, with whom they feel they have a greater rapport than they had with their white officers.

Washington, DC,April 20, 2002. Photo: Scott Yoos

World War II still remains the "good war" in the American mind. Yet there are troubling memories: The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the revelation that we had caused perhaps a hundred thousand casualties in the bombing of Dresden, and the fact that we'd engaged in the ruthless bombing of civilians. It was the "good war," but it ended without the elimination of racism, or tyranny, or aggression in the world. Hitler and Japan and Mussolini were defeated, but now we had two superpowers--both of which were eventually armed with nuclear weapons--fighting for control of various parts of the world.

I said that it was rare for an antiwar movement to have any real effect on American policy, but Vietnam was the outstanding exception. In Vietnam, the war lasted long enough for the American people to see behind the deceptions of the government and begin to learn about the atrocities being committed against the Vietnamese people.

Many GIs turned against the war and formed organizations such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War. So, while in 1966 about two-thirds of the American people supported the war, by 1969 about two-thirds opposed the war. That's a very dramatic turnaround. For the first time, there was an antiwar movement powerful enough to have an impact on government policy. . .The escalation of the war in Vietnam meant the neglect of the condition of the people in the black ghettoes in the United States, a connection that was explicitly made by Martin Luther King Jr.

You've written that opposition to the Vietnam War started out among a small minority and then, through hard and patient work, became a national and effective movement. How does the antiwar movement today look in light of this historical example?

Clearly things have started faster here in actions against the war. Even before we were at war, before the bombing had started, people had organized teach-ins, rallies, demonstrations, and so on. In the case of Vietnam, it took longer for things to develop. I remember the spring of 1965, when the first big bombing of Vietnam began, we held an antiwar rally, the first antiwar rally on the Boston Common, and a hundred people showed up. This past September, even before the bombing of Afghanistan had begun, we had a rally in Copley Square in Boston and a thousand people showed up. Thousands more in San Francisco and New York City demonstrated against war. So, the momentum certainly started faster in this war than it did during Vietnam.

Bush speaks as if war is the main way in which people in this country have won their freedoms and expanded their rights.

War has always diminished our freedom. When our freedom has expanded, it has not come as a result of war or of anything the government has done but as a result of what citizens have done. The best test of that is the history of black people in the United States, the history of slavery and segregation. It wasn't the government that initiated the movement against slavery but white and black abolitionists. It wasn't the government that initiated the battle against racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, but the movement of people in the South. It wasn't the government that gave the people the freedom to work eight hours a day instead of twelve hours a day. It was working people themselves who organized into unions, went out on strike, and faced the police. The government was on the other side; the government was always in support of the employers and the corporations.

The freedom of working people, the freedom of black people has always depended on the struggles of people themselves against the government. So, if we look at it historically, we certainly cannot depend on governments to maintain our liberties. We have to depend on our own organized efforts.

Another lesson of this history is that you should never depend on your legal rights. Never think you can point to a legal statute or the Constitution and say, "Look, this is what it says and therefore this is what I'm going to have." Because whatever the Constitution says and whatever the statutes say, whoever holds the power in any given situation is going to determine whether the rights you have on paper are rights you have in fact. This is a very common situation in our society. People struggled to get their legal rights, they achieved their legal rights on paper. Then the reality of power and wealth comes into play, and those legal rights don't mean very much. You have to struggle to make them real.

You are fond of quoting a question from Ignazio Silone's novel Fontamara--a question that many people are asking now: "What are we to do?"

Yes, "Che fare?" was the question asked by the rebellious Italian peasants in Silone's novel. I think one thing we can do right now is to make connections to working people and support workers' rights wherever possible. At any given time around the country, people are engaged in labor struggles and strikes that go unreported in the press--strikes of nurses in hospitals, strikes of teachers. Too often, these are sort of set aside. People think, "These are problems for the nurses" or "These are problems for the teachers." But I think it's very important to develop the idea of solidarity, of a community solidarity, so I think that any kind of action for economic justice that can broaden the kind of interest and involve the whole community is crucial. And then we need to connect these issues, the attacks on working people here, the recession, the tax breaks for the corporations, the attacks on our civil liberties, and the wars being waged in our names and with our tax dollars.

We have a lot to do. We are all teachers, communicators. We all have contacts, we all have neighbors, we all work someplace, we can all write letters to the editor, we can organize rallies. We can engage in civil disobedience, in strikes and boycotts. We can all do what was done at other times in American history when it was necessary to build a national movement to say to the government, "No, you don't speak for us. You're not doing this for us. You aren't doing this in our name."

Copyright 2002 by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. Used with permission. Excerpted from Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War, edited by Anthony Arnove (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002). Available from www.sevenstories.com or 800-788-3123.

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