Howard Zinn on War
Zinn's People's History was difficult for me to read. I like learning my challenges to history's conventional classroom wisdom in small enough bites I can handle them. It's not that I doubt the legitimacy of his perspectives, in fact they're pretty convincing. But altogether quite overwhelming. All that to say that I'm a fan, but a wussy version of one. His book should make me want to storm the local school board or seek avenues of protest day and night until my country can get a few things right. But here I sit.

Anyway, a veteran himself, Zinn was a panelist at the WWII memorial opening earlier this year and wrote of his remarks in The Progressive, reprinted at Alternet. The whole thing is good, but here's the goods, for my money (bold is my emphasis, for the best sentence I've read this week):

"Yes, World War II had a strong moral aspect to it – the defeat of fascism. But I deeply resent the way the so-called good war has been used to cast its glow over all the immoral wars we have fought in the past fifty years: in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan. I certainly don't want our government to use the triumphal excitement surrounding World War II to cover up the horrors now taking place in Iraq.
[SNIP]
I was encouraged by the thought that it is possible to challenge the standard glorification of the Second World War, and more important, to refuse to allow it to give war a good name. I did not want this celebration to make it easy for the American public to accept whatever monstrous adventure is cooked up by the establishment in Washington.

More and more, I am finding that I am not the only veteran of World War II who refuses to be corralled into justifying the wars of today, drawing on the emotional and moral capital of World War II. There are other veterans who do not want to overlook the moral complexity of World War II: the imperial intentions of the Allies even as they declared it a war against fascism, and for democracy; the deliberate bombing of civilian populations to destroy the morale of the enemy.

Trotter, could you (or do you) ever teach his book in History classes?