[Dialogue] Howard Zinn--The Progressive

[David & Lin Zahrt]

Published on Thursday, February 10, 2005 by The Progressive
Changing Minds, One at a Time
by Howard Zinn

As I write this, the day after the inauguration, the banner headline 
in The New York Times reads: "BUSH, AT 2ND INAUGURAL, SAYS SPREAD OF 
LIBERTY IS THE 'CALLING OF OUR TIME.' "
Two days earlier, on an inside page of the Times, was a photo of a 
little girl, crouching, covered with blood, weeping. The caption 
read: "An Iraqi girl screamed yesterday after her parents were killed 
when American soldiers fired on their car when it failed to stop, 
despite warning shots, in Tal Afar, Iraq. The military is 
investigating the incident."

Today, there is a large photo in the Times of young people cheering 
the President as his entourage moves down Pennsylvania Avenue. They 
do not look very different from the young people shown in another 
part of the paper, along another part of Pennsylvania Avenue, 
protesting the inauguration.

I doubt that those young people cheering Bush saw the photo of the 
little girl. And even if they did, would it occur to them to 
juxtapose that photo to the words of George Bush about spreading 
liberty around the world?

That question leads me to a larger one, which I suspect most of us 
have pondered: What does it take to bring a turnaround in social 
consciousness--from being a racist to being in favor of racial 
equality, from being in favor of Bush's tax program to being against 
it, from being in favor of the war in Iraq to being against it? We 
desperately want an answer, because we know that the future of the 
human race depends on a radical change in social consciousness.

It seems to me that we need not engage in some fancy psychological 
experiment to learn the answer, but rather to look at ourselves and 
to talk to our friends. We then see, though it is unsettling, that we 
were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our 
lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, 
startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were 
strongly fixed in our consciousness--embedded there by years of 
family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, 
and television.

This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an 
enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others 
information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them 
to rethink long-held ideas. It is so simple a thought that it is 
easily overlooked as we search, desperate in the face of war and 
apparently immovable power in ruthless hands, for some magical 
formula, some secret strategy to bring peace and justice to the land 
and to the world.

"What can I do?" The question is thrust at me again and again as if I 
possessed some mysterious solution unknown to others. The odd thing 
is that the question may be posed by someone sitting in an audience 
of a thousand people, whose very presence there is an instance of 
information being imparted which, if passed on, could have dramatic 
consequences. The answer then is as obvious and profound as the 
Buddhist mantra that says: "Look for the truth exactly on the spot 
where you stand."

Yes, thinking of the young people holding up the pro-Bush signs at 
the inauguration, there are those who will not be budged by new 
information. They will be shown the bloodied little girl whose 
parents have been killed by an American weapon, and find all sorts of 
reasons to dismiss it: "Accidents happen. . . . This was an 
aberration. . . . It is an unfortunate price of liberating a nation," 
and so on.

There is a hard core of people in the United States who will not be 
moved, whatever facts you present, from their conviction that this 
nation means only to do good, and almost always does good, in the 
world, that it is the beacon of liberty and freedom (words used 
forty-two times in Bush's inauguration speech). But that core is a 
minority, as is that core of people who carried signs of protest at 
the inauguration.

In between those two minorities stand a huge number of Americans who 
have been brought up to believe in the beneficence of our nation, who 
find it hard to believe otherwise, but who can rethink their beliefs 
when presented with information new to them.

Is that not the history of social movements?

There was a hard core of people in this country who believed in the 
institution of slavery. Between the 1830s, when a tiny group of 
Abolitionists began their agitation, and the 1850s, when disobedience 
of the fugitive slave acts reached their height, the Northern public, 
at first ready to do violence to the agitators, now embraced their 
cause. What happened in those years? The reality of slavery, its 
cruelty, as well as the heroism of its resisters, was made evident to 
Americans through the speeches and writings of the Abolitionists, the 
testimony of escaped slaves, the presence of magnificent black 
witnesses like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

Something similar happened during those years of the Southern black 
movement, starting with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the sit-ins, the 
Freedom Rides, the marches. White people--not only in the North, but 
also in the South--were startled into an awareness of the long 
history of humiliation of millions of people who had been invisible 
and who now demanded their rights.

When the Vietnam War began, two-thirds of the American public 
supported the war. A few years later, two-thirds opposed the war. 
While some remained adamantly pro-war, one-third of the population 
had learned things that overthrew previously held ideas about the 
essential goodness of the American intervention in Vietnam. The human 
consequences of the fierce bombing campaigns, the "search and 
destroy" missions, became clear in the image of the naked young girl, 
her skin shredded by napalm, running down a road; the women and 
children huddled in the trenches in My Lai with soldiers pouring 
rifle fire onto them; Marines setting fire to peasant huts while the 
occupants stood by, weeping.

Those images made it impossible for most Americans to believe 
President Johnson when he said we were fighting for the freedom of 
the Vietnamese people, that it was all worthwhile because it was part 
of the worldwide struggle against Communism.

In his inauguration speech, and indeed, through all four years of his 
presidency, George Bush has insisted that our violence in Afghanistan 
and Iraq has been in the interest of freedom and democracy, and 
essential to the "war on terrorism." When the war on Iraq began 
almost two years ago, about three-fourths of Americans supported the 
war. Today, the public opinion polls show that at least half of the 
citizenry believes it was wrong to go to war.

What has happened in these two years is clear: a steady erosion of 
support for the war, as the public has become more and more aware 
that the Iraqi people, who were supposed to greet the U.S. troops 
with flowers, are overwhelmingly opposed to the occupation. Despite 
the reluctance of the major media to show the frightful toll of the 
war on Iraqi men, women, children, or to show U.S. soldiers with 
amputated limbs, enough of those images have broken through, joined 
by the grimly rising death toll, to have an effect.

But there is still a large pool of Americans, beyond the hard-core 
minority who will not be dissuaded by any facts (and it would be a 
waste of energy to make them the object of our attention), who are 
open to change. For them, it would be important to measure Bush's 
grandiose inaugural talk about the "spread of liberty" against the 
historical record of American expansion.

It is a challenge not just for the teachers of the young to give them 
information they will not get in the standard textbooks, but for 
everyone else who has an opportunity to speak to friends and 
neighbors and work associates, to write letters to newspapers, to 
call in on talk shows.

The history is powerful: the story of the lies and massacres that 
accompanied our national expansion, first across the continent 
victimizing Native Americans, then overseas as we left death and 
destruction in our wake in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and especially 
the Philippines. The long occupations of Haiti and the Dominican 
Republic, the repeated dispatch of Marines into Central America, the 
deaths of millions of Koreans and Vietnamese, none of them resulting 
in democracy and liberty for those people.

Add to all that the toll of the American young, especially the poor, 
black and white, a toll measured not only by the corpses and the 
amputated limbs, but the damaged minds and corrupted sensibilities 
that result from war.

Those truths make their way, against all obstacles, and break down 
the credibility of the warmakers, juxtaposing what reality teaches 
against the rhetoric of inaugural addresses and White House 
briefings. The work of a movement is to enhance that learning, make 
clear the disconnect between the rhetoric of "liberty" and the photo 
of a bloodied little girl, weeping.

And also to go beyond the depiction of past and present, and suggest 
an alternative to the paths of greed and violence. All through 
history, people working for change have been inspired by visions of a 
different world. It is possible, here in the United States, to point 
to our enormous wealth and suggest how, once not wasted on war or 
siphoned off to the super-rich, that wealth can make possible a truly 
just society.

The juxtapositions wait to be made. The recent disaster in Asia, 
alongside the millions dying of AIDS in Africa, next to the $500 
billion military budget, cry out for justice. The words of people 
from all over the world gathered year after year in Porto Alegre, 
Brazil, and other places--"a new world is possible"--point to a time 
when national boundaries are erased, when the natural riches of the 
world are used for everyone.

The false promises of the rich and powerful about "spreading liberty" 
can be fulfilled, not by them, but by the concerted effort of us all, 
as the truth comes out, and our numbers grow.

Howard Zinn's latest work (with Anthony Arnove) is "Voices of a 
People's History of the United States."
© 2005 The Progressive




-- 
Dick Kroeger


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