Excellent Howard Zinn interview: War is now always a war against civilians

[Karmadillo]

Covers a number of issues. Well worth a read.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=8700

Tomdispatch: You and Anthony Arnove just came out with a new book, Voices of a People's History of the United States, featuring American voices of resistance from our earliest moments to late last night. Now, we have a striking new voice of resistance, Cindy Sheehan. I was wondering what you made of her?

Howard Zinn: Often a protest movement that's already underway -- and the present antiwar movement was underway even before the Iraq War began -- gets a special impetus, a special spark, from one person's act of defiance. I think of Rosa Parks and that one act of hers and what it meant.

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TD: How does an American culture of exceptionalism play into this?

Zinn: I would guess that a very large number of Americans against the war in Vietnam still believed in the essential goodness of this country. They thought of Vietnam as an aberration. Only a minority in the antiwar movement saw it as part of a continuous policy of imperialism and expansion. I think that's true today as well. It's very hard for Americans to let go of the idea that we're an especially good nation. It's comforting to know that, even though we do wrong things from time to time, these are just individual aberrations. I think it takes a great deal of political consciousness to extend the criticism of a particular policy or a particular war to a general negative appraisal of the country and its history. It strikes too close to something Americans seem to need to hold onto.

Of course, there's an element that's right in this as well -- in that there are principles for which the United States presumably stands that are good. It's just that people confuse the principles with the policies -- and so long as they can keep those principles in their heads (justice for all, equality, and so on), they are very reluctant to accept the fact that they have been crassly, consistently violated. This is the only way I can account for the stopping short when it comes to looking at the President and the people around him as war criminals.

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[G_j]

1. excellent interview.. highly recommended

Zinn is one of our best

[izzie]

2. I am not sure I read this or not but I have read about the people.

Mass armies and battle fields seem to be gone. I think we saw this coming in WW2 when all air forces starting mass bombing people on both sides. Germany hardly needed to bomb London, or cities in Spain or our side had to bomb cities off the map long after Germany was on its last leg. It is like you have the bombs so you use them.