Howard Zinn

I AM NOT HOWARD ZINN, BUT MERELY A GREAT ADMIRER OF THE LIFE'S WORK OF THE GREATEST LIVING AMERICAN
For current information about new books I've published and my public speaking schedule, please visit howardzinn.org.
I am a historian, playwright, social activist and patriot. In my youth I was a shipyard worker and Air Force bombardier, before I went to college under the GI Bill and received my Ph.D. from Columbia University. I have taught at Spelman College and Boston University, and have been a visiting professor variously at the University of Paris and the University of Bologna. I received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. I currently reside in Auburndale, Massachusetts.
I was raised in a working-class family in Brooklyn, NY, and flew bombing missions for the United States in World War II, an experience I believe helped shape my opposition to war. In 1956, I became a professor of history at Spelman College in Atlanta, a school for black women, where I soon involved myself in the Civil rights movement. I participated as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and chronicling my experience in my book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists. I collaborated with historian Staughton Lynd and mentored a young student named Alice Walker who would later go on to author, The Color Purple. When I was fired in 1963 for insubordination related to my protest work, I moved to Boston University, where I became a leading critic of the Vietnam War.
My best known book, entitled "A People's History of the United States", presents American history through the eyes of those who are outside of the political and economic establishment, yet central to the political, economic and spiritual well-being and redemption of the country. The book sets out to provide an alternative to the heretofore ubiquitous, homogenous works of history which imply that history is dominated and decided solely by presidents, generals and wealthy businessmen. What has been excluded is, to name a few examples, the history of the Arawak Indians brutalized by Columbus and his men; the oppression of black slaves during the so-called War for Independence in America; the silence of pre-suffrage women; soldiers on Luzon in the Philipines in the early 20th century and many others whose voices and experiences have never been told.
The seminal experience of my life occurred during my service in the second world war. As an Air Force bombadier, my assignment was to run bombing missions for the United States government. These included runs over cities in France during the last days of the war. In April of 1945, despite the fact that most of us knew the war would be over in a matter of days or weeks, we were ordered to drop bombs on cities in France in which isolated German soldiers and French civilians were merely waiting out the last days of the conflict. At the time we were told we would be dropping "jellied gasoline" as it was called at the time. During the Vietnam conflict, this substance would be renamed, Napalm. This did not concern me at the time for, from thousands of feet in the air, it is impossible to see burned flesh, detached limbs and mangled bodies. Nor is it possible to to hear the screams of agony over lost limbs, and lost loved ones. During this time period, the city of Dresden, Germany was firebombed to a smoldering cinder for the official purpose of speeding the end of the war. Later, I began to wonder how this was relevant when Hitler was buried in a bunker, and the whole of the German High Command was surrounded by the Soviet Army. At the time, I did not consider the implications of my actions and the horrific results of the Allied bombing, but merely my patriotic duty to serving my country.
In the months and years following the war, I began to question the total goodness of the so-called "good war." Even if all sides can agree that the ostensible reasons for the war constitute a noble cause, does this justify the appalling casualties concomitant with the way in which war is waged in the 20th, and now, the 21st century. I scrutinized the decision by the Allied High Command to bomb primarily civilian targets when the war was clearly coming to end. The question crystalized, "Can a war be called good, in which women and children are blown up, burned, mutilated and murdered by the so-called liberating force?" Numerous examples of this horrific practice are apparent, but to name just a few: Dresden, Tokyo and Royen, France, for the last of which I bear a great deal of responsibility.
Governments try to explain these deaths with euphemisms like 'accident' and 'collateral damage'... but as the bodies pile up into the thousands and thousands, can any credence be given to the protestations that the military's precision bombs merely strayed slightly off course? Would you trust the military to precision bomb your neighbor's house with your family at home? As the great journalist I.F. Stone famously observed: "Governments lie."
Now, the current situation in the Middle East begs the question, "How does the indiscriminant murder of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis honor the memory of the victims of 9/11?" Only, even a conservative estimate of the dead shows a dozen slaughtered for each individual killed on that awful day. The fact is, because of the way in which modern wars are waged, civilians - primarily children - suffer a casualty rate of over 10 per soldier killed or maimed.
Two motifs of my work - the second of which follows from the first - are the logic of war, and the wonderful nature of uncertainty. During wartime, we often hear from the leaders of our country that we must fight in order to prevent future deaths. One marvels at the tortuous false logic of such statements. Based on the principle of the fallacy of the predetermined outcome, do these leaders see that they are causing death and destruction in the present, in the guise of 'preventing' hypothetical casualties in the future? To use an analogy, the same thinking would lead one to destroy one's home in advance of the arrival of a hurricane, so that the storm won't cause the destruction. You see, the future is purely undetermined, and it can only be what we make of it. So if we choose peace and justice today, we are guarantee peace and justice tomorrow. Of course, the converse is also true.
So you see, to be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
War is intolerable and must be abolished now!