[Mb-hair] Re: Howard Zinn on WWII

[Joseph L. Tioga]

Barbara,

Thank you for sharing this.   I'll copy it and post it on another List to
which I belong -- NJVFP (New Jersey Veterans For Peace).  I know they'll
appreciate it.

Peace,

Tioga Joe

=======================================================

> Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 11:29:27 -0400
> From: barbarasiomos38 at webtv.net (Barbara Siomos)
> 
>     Dissent at the War Memorial 
>     By Howard Zinn 
>     The Progressive 
>     August 2004 Issue
>  
>     As I write this, the sounds of the World War II Memorial
> celebration in Washington, D.C., are still in my head. I was invited 
> by
> the Smithsonian Institution to be on one of the panels, and the 
> person
> who called to invite me said that the theme would be "War Stories." I
> told him that I would come, but not to tell "war stories," rather to
> talk about World War II and its meaning for us today. Fine, he said.
>  
>     I made my way into a scene that looked like a movie set for
> a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza - huge tents pitched here and there,
> hawkers with souvenirs, thousands of visitors, many of them clearly
> World War II veterans, some in old uniforms, sporting military caps,
> wearing their medals. In the tent designated for my panel, I joined 
> my
> fellow panelist, an African American woman who had served with the 
> WACS
> (Women's Army Corps) in World War II, and who would speak about her
> personal experiences in a racially segregated army.
>  
>     I was introduced as a veteran of the Army Air Corps, a
> bombardier who had flown combat missions over Europe in the last 
> months
> of the war. I wasn't sure how this audience would react to what I 
> had to
> say about the war, in that atmosphere of celebration, in the 
> honoring of
> the dead, in the glow of a great victory accompanied by countless 
> acts
> of military heroism. 
> 
>     This, roughly, is what I said: "I'm here to honor the two
> guys who were my closest buddies in the Air Corps - Joe Perry and Ed
> Plotkin, both of whom were killed in the last weeks of the war. And 
> to
> honor all the others who died in that war. But I'm not here to honor 
> war
> itself. I'm not here to honor the men in Washington who send the 
> young
> to war. I'm certainly not here to honor those in authority who are 
> now
> waging an immoral war in Iraq."
>  
>     I went on: "World War II is not simply and purely a 'good
> war.' It was accompanied by too many atrocities on our side - too 
> many
> bombings of civilian populations. There were too many betrayals of 
> the
> principles for which the war was supposed to have been fought.
>  
>     "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.
>  
>     "I don't want to honor military heroism - that conceals too
> much death and suffering. I want to honor those who all these years 
> have
> opposed the horror of war." 
> 
>     The audience applauded. But I wasn't sure what that meant. I
> knew I was going against the grain of orthodoxy, the romanticization 
> of
> the war in movies and television and now in the war memorial
> celebrations in the nation's capital.
>  
>     There was a question-and-answer period. The first person to
> walk up front was a veteran of World War II, wearing parts of his old
> uniform. He spoke into the microphone: "I was wounded in World War II
> and have a Purple Heart to show for it. If President Bush were here
> right now I would throw that medal in his face."
>  
>     There was a moment of what I think was shock at the force of
> his statement. Then applause. I wondered if I was seeing a phenomenon
> that recurs often in society - when one voice speaks out against the
> conventional wisdom, and is recognized as speaking truth, people are
> drawn out of their previous silence.
>  
>     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.
>  
>     Paul Fussell was an infantry lieutenant who was badly
> wounded while a platoon leader in France in World War II. 
>     "For the past fifty years the Allied war has been sanitized
> and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the 
> loony
> patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty," he wrote in Wartime.
>  
>     It was easier, after the end of World War II, to point to
> its stupidities and cruelties in fiction rather than in a direct
> onslaught on what was so universally acclaimed as "the good war." 
> Thus,
> Joseph Heller in Catch-22 captured the idiocy of military life, the
> crass profiteering, the pointless bombings. And Kurt Vonnegut, in
> Slaughterhouse-Five, brought to a large readership the awful story of
> the bombing of Dresden.
>  
>     My own delayed criticism of the war - I had volunteered and
> was an enthusiastic bombardier - began with reflecting about my
> participation in the bombing of Royan. This was a small town on the
> Atlantic coast of France, where several thousand German soldiers had
> been overrun and were waiting for the war to end. Twelve hundred 
> heavy
> bombers flew over the vicinity of Royan and dropped napalm, killing
> German soldiers and French civilians, destroying what was once a
> beautiful little resort town.
>  
>     Recently, a man wrote to me who had heard me speak on the
> radio about that bombing mission and said he was also on that 
> mission.
> After the war, he became a fireman, then a carpenter, and is now a
> strong opponent of war. He told me of a friend of his who was also on
> that mission, and who has been arrested many times in anti-war 
> actions.
> I was encouraged to hear that. 
> 
>     World War II veterans get in touch with me from time to
> time. One is Edward Wood Jr. of Denver, who upon hearing I was going 
> to
> be at the Washington Memorial, wrote to me: He said, "If I were 
> there, I
> would say: As a combat veteran of World War II, severely wounded in
> France in 1944, never the man I might have been because of that 
> wound, I
> so wish that this memorial to World War II might have been made of 
> more
> than stone or marble. I mourn my generation's failures since its 
> victory
> in World War II . . . our legacy of incessant warfare in smaller 
> nations
> far from our borders."
>  
>     Another airman, Ken Norwood, was shot down on his tenth
> mission over Europe, and spent a year as a prisoner of war in 
> Germany.
> He has written a memoir (unpublished, so far) which he says is
> "intentionally an anti-war war story." Packed first into a box car, 
> and
> then forced to march for two weeks through Bavaria in the spring of
> 1945, Norwood saw the mangled corpses of the victims of Allied bombs,
> the working class neighborhoods destroyed. All his experiences, he 
> says,
> "add to the harsh testimony about the futility and obscenity of war."
>  
>     The glorification of the "good war" persists on our
> television and movie screens, in the press, in the pretentious 
> speeches
> by politicians. The more ugly the stories that come out of Iraq - the
> bombing of civilians, the mutilation of children, the invasion of 
> homes,
> and now the torture of prisoners - the more urgent it is for our
> government to try to crowd out all those images with the triumphant
> stories of D-Day and World War II.
>  
>     Those who fought in that war are perhaps better able than
> anyone to insist that whatever moral standing can be attached to that
> war must not be used to turn our eyes away from Bush's atrocities in
> Afghanistan and Iraq.
> 
> 
> 


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