[WCUSP] The Uses of History and the War on Terrorism

[yvonne simmons]

> November 24, 2006
> Democracy Now!
> 
> The Uses of History and the War on Terrorism
> Howard Zinn
> 
> [An excerpt from Howard Zinn's lecture at Madison,
> Wisconsin where he
> received the Haven Center's Award for Lifetime
> Contribution to Critical
> Scholarship. His classic work "A People's History of
> the United States,"
> first published a quarter of a century ago, has sold
> over a million copies
> and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing -
> selling more copies each
> successive year.]
> 
> 
> . . . If we knew this history, we would understand
> how often fear has been
> used as a way of getting people to act against their
> own interests to work
> up hysteria and to get people to do terrible things
> to other people, because
> theyve been made afraid. Wasnt it fear and hysteria
> that motivated lynch
> mobs in the South? Wasnt there created fear of black
> people, hysteria about
> black people, that led white people to do some of
> the most atrocious things
> that have been done in our history? And isnt it
> today -- isnt it fear, fear
> of Muslims, not just terrorists, in general? Of
> course, fear of terrorists,
> especially fear of Muslims, you see? A very ugly
> kind of sentiment to
> inculcate on the American people, and creating a
> kind of hysteria, which
> then enables them to control the population and
> enable them to send us into
> war after war and to threaten, you know, still
> another war. . . .
> 
> Weve had a history of war after war after war after
> war. What have they
> solved? What have they done? Even World War II, the
> good war, the war in
> which I volunteered, the war in which I dropped
> bombs, the war after which,
> you know, I received a letter from General Marshall,
> general of generals, a
> letter addressed personally to me, and to 16 million
> others, in which he
> said, Weve won the war. It will be a new world.
> Well, of course, it wasnt a
> new world. It hasnt been a new world. War after war
> after war.
> 
> There are certain -- I came out of that war, the war
> in which I had
> volunteered, the war in which I was an enthusiastic
> bombardier, I came out
> of that war with certain ideas, which just developed
> gradually at the end of
> the war, ideas about war. One, that war corrupts
> everybody who engages in
> it. War poisons everybody who engages in it. You
> start off as the good guys,
> as we did in World War II. Theyre the bad guys.
> Theyre the fascists. What
> could be worse? So, theyre the bad guys, were the
> good guys. And as the war
> goes on, the good guys begin behaving like the bad
> guys. You can trace this
> back to the Peloponnesian War. You can trace it back
> to the good guy, the
> Athenians, and the bad guys, the Spartans. And after
> a while, the Athenians
> become ruthless and cruel, like the Spartans.
> 
> And we did that in World War II. We, after Hitler
> committed his atrocities,
> we committed our atrocities. You know, our killing
> of 600,000 civilians in
> Japan, our killing of probably an equal number of
> civilians in Germany.
> These, they werent Hitler, they werent Tojo. They
> werent -- no, they were
> just ordinary people, like we are ordinary people
> living in a country that
> is a marauding country, and they were living in
> countries that were
> marauding countries, and they were caught up in
> whatever it was and afraid
> to speak up. And I dont know, I came to the
> conclusion, yes, war poisons
> everybody.
> 
> And war -- this is an important thing to keep in
> mind -- that when you go to
> war against a tyrant -- and this was one of the
> claims: Oh, were going to
> get rid of Saddam Hussein, which was, of course,
> nonsense. They didnt -- did
> our government care that Saddam Hussein tyrannized
> his own people? We helped
> him tyrannize his people. We helped him gas the
> Kurds. We helped him
> accumulate weapons of mass destruction, really.
> 
> And the people you kill in a war are the victims of
> the tyrant. The people
> we killed in Germany were the victims of Hitler. The
> people we killed in
> Japan were the victims of the Japan Imperial Army,
> you know. And the people
> who die in wars are more and more and more people
> who are not in the
> military. You may know this about the different
> ratio of
> civilian-to-military deaths in war, how in World War
> I, ten military dead
> for one civilian dead; in World War II, it was
> 50-50, half military, half
> civilian; in Vietnam, it was 70% civilian and 30%
> military; and in the wars
> since then, its 80% and 85% civilian.
> 
> ARTICLE at
>
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/24/1442258
> 
> 
> ---
> In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
> material is distributed
> without profit to those who have expressed a prior
> interest in receiving the
> included information for research and educational
> purposes.
> 
> FATALLY FLAWED: THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT (slides
> and films presentation)
> http://www.twf.org/Gallery/911talk.html 
> 
> ADD your name to our mailing list at 
> http://www.twf.org/twflist/subscribe.html
> 


 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Want to start your own business?
Learn how on Yahoo! Small Business.
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/r-index