The "Good" War?

[Cd.]

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail...ly/015033.html


By Howard Zinn

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
elebration 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.

[Odysseus]

Good read. I think we can start to raise more awareness by better educating students in schools. More emphasis on the terrible fighting that occured, the atrocities on BOTH sides, and by not just concentrating on the holocaust. Too many people gloss over the normal, everyday fighting and romantically look a the victory as a heroic one.

I agree with him - comparing WW2 to any modern conflict, or using it to push justification, is a facile analogy.