Terrorism and War
by Howard Zinn
Seven Stories Press

Howard Zinn is best known for his colossal work "A People's History of the United States of America," a book that applied a Marxist "bottom-up" methodology to the story of America, filling hundreds of pages with brutal but necessary demystification. One comes away from Zinn's discussions of the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, the struggle for civil rights and fair labor practices and the government's conduct of the Vietnam War with a sense of disgust at a past so rife with exploitation.

America's most prominent Marxist historian has entered the fray again, this time with a slim tome of interviews conducted with Anthony Arnove concerning the war on terrorism. The text ranges widely, and Zinn touches on the events of Sept. 11, the anti-war movement then and now and the immorality of "just war" theory while making numerous and informative excursions into US history. Ever wonder if the Maine was really sunk by the Spanish? You can find this convincing argument in "Terrorism and War" — an engine defect prompted its explosion and the subsequent American invasion of Cuba. Curious about the approximate number of Americans who went to jail for opposing World War II? Zinn pegs that number at about 6,000.

These episodes in the overlooked history of our government's aggressive behavior and the good conscience of the leftist electorate consistently move the conversation away from the current events that inspired its publication. Zinn's answer to the war on terrorism is a meditation on the savage nature of war itself, an averson to the horror of "collateral damage" — which he claims constitutes a kind of terrorism — and the elimination of the capitalist moral cesspool from which springs (surprise) modern-day American militarism. The digressions are often unwieldy, given that they fail to reinforce Zinn's own goal of promoting understanding as an alternative to violence. He writes of the September tragedy:

To try and explain and understand terrorism is not to justify terrorism. But if you don't try to explain anything, you will never learn anything. We have to dig down and see if we can figure out what is at the root of this horrible act because there's something at the root besides irrational murderous feeling.

Amen. But, if you're actually interested in understanding some of the root causes of what is called Islamic fundamentalism, if you would like to know how it has formed in reaction to Western colonialism and hegemony even as it assails the failure of secular Arab regimes, you won't get your answers in Zinn's book. Besides listing several of Osama Bin Laden's demands for the US military to exit Saudi Arabia and to stop supporting Israel over and against the Palestinians, Zinn is curiously mute not only about the "root causes" of terrorism but even its proximate causes, instead deferring to his friend Noam Chomsky and Ahmed Rashid, the author of the informative "Taliban."

So what do we get instead of a detailed examination of the role of US foreign policy in contributing to the arrival of the Sept. 11 attacks? The text consistently steers the conversation between an explanation of the resentment of America and Zinn's critique of the military-industrial complex. Most of this dirty laundry has been aired before, but it's still shocking. Zinn is especially gifted at cataloging the violence sponsored by the US government in places like Guatemala and Chile.

What do these events have to do with our current predicament, besides reminding us that our own history is blood-soaked and morally dubious? If anti-American warriors blossomed in the ranks of leftist Chilean refugees, then one might make the same connection between the Allende coup and Osama Bin Laden that one makes between the abandonment of the Muhajedin and the formation of Al Qaeda. Obviously, that's not Zinn's argument. The awful lists of atrocities committed by our own government are supposed to reinforce the idea that violence does not secure peace so much as it secures more violence, a variation on the insightful Marxist critique that capitalism creates conditions favorable for war and war creates conditions favorable for capitalism. Zinn himself opens the discussion with the following statement: "The continued expenditure of more than $300 billion for the military every year has absolutely no effect on terrorism." The claim seems particularly justified if it refers to the construction of a neo-Maginot line in the form of missile defense, but should the military not spend any money on combating those who facilitated and encouraged the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Even Ralph Nader has endorsed the politics of "hot pursuit."

Zinn — though by his own admission not a pacifist — will not go that far, given the intrinsic immorality of all but the most focused conflict. His thoughts on war are poignant; as a bombardier in World War II Zinn almost certainly dropped ordnance on civilian as well as military targets. This is not a legacy with which he can live easily. Hence "Terrorism and War" stresses the way in which civilians have become the center of armed conflict. Though Zinn attributes this feature of modern war to aerial bombing in linking it to the American campaign in Afghanistan, his example of the origin of this practice is convoluted. Citing Sven Lindqvist's "The History of Bombing," which assigns the innovation of civilian bombing to the British Bomber Command's decision to terrorize the German citizenry, Zinn does not emphasize the indiscriminate carnage wrought by Hitler's V-2 rockets against the British population, nor, more crucially, the victimization of the Jewish people not at the mercy of aerial bombardment but because their German neighbors failed to resist their deportation. The omission is a major one, since Zinn is so reticent about endorsing violence as a means to an end that in the wake of the Holocaust he can actually find occasion to celebrate the non-violent protests of German wives over the deportation of their Jewish husbands. In the face of the murderous effectiveness of the German extermination machine — a point which Zinn is careful to acknowledge — retrospectively praising such a doomed non-violent strategy strikes the reader as unfortunate, if not fatuous.

Fatuous, but not terribly surprising, since "Terrorism and War" displays a constant, naive optimism. If only we could change the way we think about the world — if only we could get rid of a capitalism that distorts true human value, we wouldn't have to worry about terrorism. Zinn is sadly vague on what this struggle would actually entail. Apparently, one of its manifestations would be an ideological transformation of our country into the mindset of a tiny, homogenous welfare state:

We have to go through a real revolution in our thinking and no longer think of the United States as needing to be a superpower. Sweden is not worried about terrorists. Denmark, Holland, New Zealand. There are a lot of places in the world not worried about terrorists. They don't have their troops everywhere; they don't have their naval vessels everywhere; they're not bothering other people, they're not intervening. They don't have a record of massive military destruction and intervention. Let's be a more modest nation.

Surely, a little cultural modesty in the form of fewer SUVs would be an indisputably good thing. Yet the impossibility of a sudden change to wholesale American humility, not to mention the unlikely chance of the demilitarization he proposes, threaten to render Zinn's moral piety irrelevant. That said, of the many lessons a history of America teaches us is that our nation, while always a brimming cauldron of immodesty, has almost always failed to put that arrogance to good use on the world stage — witness the details in Samantha Powers new book "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide."

This does not mean that the opportunity to improve on our abysmal record — and abysmal is the correct word here — has passed. Though there's no reason not to want to be a Swede or a Kiwi or a Dane or a Dutchman, Zinn's proposal to adopt these postures, as if they were coherent progressive monoliths in themselves, constitutes a cartoonish solution to one of the more difficult problems of our time. In the absence of a feasible worldwide proletarian revolution that will bring global harmony and the end of armed conflict (not to mention organized religion, the division of labor and the abolition of the class system), or at the very least a more robust United Nations, Zinn's proposal to relinquish the superpower mantle doesn't guarantee anything except some other greedy, arrogant imperialist nation donning the brass crown. One hopes other historical materialists have more realistic understandings of political possibility.

— Joshua Adams (joshua at uchicago dot edu)