[Mb-hair] Howard Zinn on WWII

[Walter Michael Harris]

Barbara - thanks for posting the Howard Zinn piece.  What a courageous 
voice.

WMH

***

Barbara Siomos wrote:

>    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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