excerpts from the book

Terrorism And War

by Howard Zinn

Seven Stories Press, 2002

p9
The continued expenditure of more than $300 billion for the military every year has absolutely no effect on the danger of terrorism. If we want real security, we will have to change our posture in the world - to stop being an intervening military power and to stop dominating the economies of other countries. According to a 1997 Defense Science Board report, "Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.

p10
You go to war because you want to do something fast. You use violence because you don't want to wait. You don't want to work conflicts out. You don't want to use your mind, your intelligence, your wit.

p11
In bombing Afghanistan, we are doing great harm. Some people have said that we're not killing that many people. The Pentagon says it doesn't know how many people we're killing. The truth is, they don't care. In fact, you can't believe the government.

p12
It's not right to respond to terrorism by terrorizing other people.

p14
I don't think it's hard to figure out why the United States is so concerned with the Middle East. You can answer that question with one word: oil. At the time of World War II, the U.S. government made the decision that it was going to be the major power controlling the oil resources of the Middle East.

p15
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (before the Gulf War

The United States has not sent troops to the Saudi desert to preserve democratic principles. The Saudi monarchy is a feudal regime that does not even allow women to drive cars. Surely it is not American policy to make the world safe for feudalism. This is about money, about protecting governments loyal to America and punishing those that are not and about who will set the price of oil.... Oil is the single most important commodity in the industrial world, and its assured supply at reasonable prices is considered essential for economic growth-not just in the United States but also in Western Europe, Japan and the world at large.

p16
To try to explain and understand terrorism is not to justify terrorism. But if you don't try to explain anything, you will never learn anything.

p17
There is a reservoir of possible terrorists among all those people in the world who have suffered as a result of U.S. foreign policy.

p17
We have our troops everywhere in the world. We have major military bases all over the world. We have naval vessels in every sea in the world.

p18
Imagine what that $350 billion that we spend every year on being a military superpower could do to help people, to combat AIDS, to feed people, to immunize people. We could use the great wealth that would be freed up by no longer being a military power to pay for free health care for all, affordable housing for all, and helping people in other parts of the world.

p18
A recent report by the World Health Organization calculated that for $101 billion a year in basic medical research and treatment, 8 million lives could be saved annually in the poorer countries of the world. Spending money on basic health would help in making us more secure. Bombing is not making us more secure.

p19
The infant mortality rate in the United States is one of the worst among advanced industrial countries.

p24
War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is to how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.

p28
There is a precise division between who we bomb and who we don't bomb. The division has nothing to do with which countries may be harboring terrorists. The division has only to do with which countries we don't control yet. The countries that we control, like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, can harbor as many terrorists as they want. We will look elsewhere.

The advantage of [the] strategy of expanding the war and winning the "war on terrorism" is that it gives the government a perpetual war and a perpetual atmosphere of repression. And it generates perpetual profits for corporations. But it's going to make the world a far more unstable and dangerous place.

p29
People need to ask, "Do we want our children and our grandchildren to be living in a state of perpetual warfare, with more and more of the world becoming hostile to us, and with the United States responsible for more and more human casualties in the world?"

p37
The Bush administration is using the war as a cover for worsening the income gap in this country, while paying no attention to the problems of most of the American people, while enriching corporations. I think concentrating on the class issue, concentrating on the benefits being given to corporations, is critical.

p38
The left is in a position of continually opposing war after war after war, without getting at the root of the problem-which is the economic system under which we live, which needs war and makes war inevitable.

p39

Pastor Niemoller's famous statement about the Nazis because it's so applicable to the present situation:
First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist-so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat-so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but T was not a Jew-so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me.

p40
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor after visiting "ground zero" in New York

"We're likely to experience more restrictions on our personal freedom than has ever been the case in our country."

p40
According to Nancy Chang, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Bush administration's actions since September 11 "portend a wholesale suspension of civil liberties that will reach far beyond those who are involved in terrorist activities."

She says that a possible outcome of the USA PATRIOT Act is "the criminalization of legitimate political dissent" and warns that it "grants the executive branch unprecedented, and largely unchecked, surveillance powers, including the enhanced ability to track email and Internet usage, conduct sneak-and-peak searches, obtain sensitive personal records, [and] monitor financial transactions."

p43
The Financial Times recently noted that the U.S. government spends only 0.1 percent of its national income on foreign aid. And not all of that foreign aid is humanitarian.

p44
From a long term point of view the security of the people of the United States depends on the health and well-being of the rest of the world.

p46
Attorney General John Ashcroft has said about people who oppose his repressive policies - Senate Judiciary Committee on December 6, 2001

"[T]o those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends."

[That's almost straight out of the constitutional definition of treason, which is punishable by death.]

p48
The Internal Security Act of 1950 authorized the actual setting up of concentration camps that would be used to incarcerate people who were threats to national security. Recall that Martin Luther King Jr. was seen as a threat to national security by the FBI and put on their "Reserve Index" of people who were "likely to furnish financial and other material aid to subversive associations and ideology."

p48
Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country, for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria.

p50
The United States has been involved in wars and military actions for a very long time. You can't tell the Native Americans we were a peaceful nation as we moved across the continent and engaged in hundreds of wars against the Indians. The United States engaged in at least twenty military interventions in the Caribbean in the first twenty years of the last century. And then from World War II through today, we've had an endless succession of wars and military interventions.

Just five years after the end of the most disastrous war in world history, after World War II, we are at war in Korea. And then almost immediately we are helping the French in Indochina, supplying 80 percent of their military equipment, and soon we are involved in Southeast Asia. We are bombing not only Vietnam but Cambodia and Laos.

In the 1950s, we are also involved in covert operations, overthrowing the governments of Iran and Guatemala. And almost as soon as we get involved in Vietnam, we are sending military troops into the Dominican Republic. In that period, we are also giving enormous amounts of aid to the government of Indonesia, helping the dictator Suharto carry on an internal war against the opposition, in the course of which several hundred thousand people are killed. Then the U.S. government, starting in 1975, provides critical support to Indonesia's brutal campaign to subdue the people of East Timor, in which hundreds of thousands of people are killed.

In the 1980s, when Reagan comes into office, we begin a covert war throughout Central America, in E1 Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and especially in Nicaragua, creating the counterrevolutionary force, the Contras, whom Reagan called "freedom fighters."

In 1978, even before the Russians were in Afghanistan, we are covertly sending arms to the rebel forces in Afghanistan, the mujahedeen. Some of these people turned out later to be the Taliban, the people who suddenly are our enemy. The national security adviser to Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, boasted that he knew U.S. aid would "induce a Soviet military intervention" in Afghanistan. In fact, this happened, provoking a war that lasted ten years. The war was devastating to the people of Afghanistan and left the country in ruins. The moment it was over, the United States immediately moved out. The people that we supported, the fundamentalists, took power in Afghanistan and established their regime.

Almost as soon as George Bush Sr. came into office, in 1989, he launched a war against Panama, which left perhaps several thousand dead. Two years later, we were at war in the Gulf, using the invasion of Kuwait as an excuse to intensify our military presence in that area and to station troops in Saudi Arabia, which then became one of the major offenses for Osama bin Laden and other Saudi Arabian nationalists. Then in the Clinton administration we were bombing Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Iraq again.

p52
... since World War II, there has not been a more warlike nation in the world than the United States.

p53
If you forget history you will believe anything.

p53
If people knew some history, if teachers gave them history, if the media gave people history, if anyone with power over communications networks gave them some history, they might recognize in this rush to war the same subservience as we have seen in the past. When Bush went to Congress after September 11, everyone there acted as if there were no need to think and to ask questions about what we should do. They voted unanimously in the Senate and almost unanimously in the House of Representatives. There was only one dissenting vote. When I heard that, I thought that dissenting vote must have been Bernie Sanders, the Independent from Vermont, but it wasn't. It was Barbara Lee from California.

So, history can be useful. It can tell you something about government, about lies and deception. If people knew that history, they wouldn't just sit and listen to Bush and be impressed that he knows how to read.

If we don't know that history, we won't understand how much animosity we have engendered elsewhere in the world-not just in the Middle East but all over the world. (In its foreign policy, the United States has consigned several million people to their deaths and supported terrorist | governments in various parts of the world, especially in `< Latin America and the Middle East.

If we don't have any history, we'll live our lives believing what we're taught in school, that America is a beacon I for democracy and freedom in the world. We'll think that we've been the Boy Scouts of the world, helping countries across the street.

p55
The government says it is determined to close terrorist camps, yet here in the United States the School of the Americas has trained people who have engaged in terrorism, trained people who then became organizers of death squads in Central America.

p55
The Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega went to the School of the Americas and then became an employee of the CIA; but then suddenly he becomes an enemy and a terrorist, so we go to war to capture him. But we probably won't go to war to get Kissinger anytime soon. The United States has consistently opposed the, creation of an international war crimes tribunal because it could be used against people in the U.S. government and military. They are very explicit about it. In effect, the government is saying, "Yes, we have people who could be accused of having committed war crimes." The United States wants to find other people who have committed war crimes, but an American by definition cannot commit a war crime.

p56
[Henry] Kissinger wrote ... that the proposal to create an international court is a bad idea. Well, naturally it's a bad idea, because he would be one of the first people who would be up there on the witness stand trying to explain his support for death squads and repressive governments in Latin America, war crimes in Southeast Asia, and the apartheid South African government.

It would be good to have an international war crimes trial that would be truly evenhanded in bringing up for prosecution people in all countries of the world who have engaged in and supported, or conspired to support, terrorism. But the U.S. government is clearly not interested in that.

p57
Phrases such as the one Bush used after September 11 - "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists"- are rather terrifying. It means that if you're not supporting the government, you're an enemy of the government. All of this produces a kind of hysteria, which leads to what I think can only be described as a lynch spirit...

This idea that "you mustn't criticize your government and you must fall in line behind the president" is really a great danger to the very democracy that Bush claims we are defending by going to war.

p58
Dan Rather, the CBS news anchor, on the Late Show with David Letterman said

"George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions, and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where." This is the language you might hear in a totalitarian state, not in a democracy.

p59
Democracy isn't [about] falling in line behind the president. Democracy is for people to think independently, be skeptical of government, look around and try to find out what's going on. And if they find out that government is deceiving them, to speak out as loudly as they can. That's democracy.

p60
The attack on the World Trade Center was an immoral act of terrorism, the killing of civilians in Afghanistan and the driving of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in Afghanistan is an immoral act.

p61
While the press focuses on the anger of people who don't want to hear antiwar speeches, there is all this antiwar sentiment that is not reported.

p62
When people set an agenda and say, "We can only talk about this and we can't talk about that," they are very seriously limiting our freedom of speech. They are also creating a dangerous situation in which democracy no longer exists and there is no longer a free marketplace of opinion.

p62
The one thing that enables the authorities to deceive the public is to keep the public in a state of amnesia, to keep the public from thinking back to the history of war, the history of violence, the history of government deception, the history of media complicity and deception.

If more people knew something about the history of government deception, of the lies that were told getting us into the Mexican War, the lies that were told getting us into the Spanish-American War, the lies that were told getting us into the war in the Philippines, the lies that were told getting us into World War I, the lies that were told again and again in Vietnam, the lies on the eve of the Gulf War, they would have questions about what they are hearing from the government and the media to justify this war.

p65
Journalist John Reed, who wrote about the Russian Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World and who organized against World War I, wrote an essay in 1917 that seems like it could have been written today, if you just replace the phrase "European melee" with the word "Afghanistan." He wrote, "War means an ugly mob madness, crucifying the truth tellers, choking the artists, sidetracking reforms, revolutions and the working of social forces. Already in America those citizens who oppose the entrance of their country into the European melee are called 'traitors,' and those who protest against the curtailing of the meager rights of free speech are spoken of as 'dangerous lunatics."'

We have a long tradition in this country of stifling dissent exactly at those moments when dissent is badly needed. Exactly when you need free speech-when the lives of the young people in the armed forces, the lives of people overseas who may be the victims of our armed actions, are at stake-that's when they say you should shut up. Exactly when you need debate and free expression most. So you have free speech for trivial issues, and not for life-and-death issues, and that's called democracy. No, we can't accept that.

p67
When the United States went into war [WWI], Congress passed the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act. The Espionage Act had very little to do with espionage., Instead it made it a crime, punishable by up to twenty years in prison, to say or print anything that would "willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States."

The Sedition Act, which was an amendment to the Espionage Act, made it even a little more drastic. In fact, two thousand people were prosecuted under those acts and about a thousand went to prison. One of the people sent to jail for opposing World War I was the great socialist activist and speaker Eugene Debs. The magazine The Masses was put out of business, and an immense propaganda effort was undertaken to encourage Americans to look for subversives and traitors in their midst.

The First Amendment of the Constitution says that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Did this stop the Supreme Court from jailing Debs and antiwar leaders? No, they decided that maybe there are times when you can't allow freedom of speech because there is a "clear and present danger." What was the clear and present danger that the Supreme Court was facing when they made that decision? People distributing leaflets on the streets of New York opposing the draft.

p76
Bush does not want the American people to know how their government works. Kids go to junior high school and they get textbooks with diagrams illustrating the structure of the U.S. government, with its "checks and balances." But that's not the real story, and if Bush has his way, we're not going to learn how governments really function.

p78
In his book Century of War, Gabriel Kolko writes, "Warfare after 1937 has increasingly eliminated the distinction between combatants and others...traumatizing more and more civilians and entire nations. "

p78
According to an article in the Boston Review, "up to 35 million people-90 percent civilians-have been killed in 170 wars since the end of World War II.

p78
During the Vietnam War, far more civilians died than military personnel. The same was true in the Korean War. Most Americans have no idea what we did in Korea, but Korea was really a preview of Vietnam, particularly in the use of napalm and the bombing of villages, which contributed to more than 2 million people dying, most of them civilians.

War is now largely a war against people who are not combatants.

p81
General Curtis LeMay about the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War
"We're going to bomb them back into the stone Ages."

p82
The claim that smart bombs and technology now enable pinpoint bombing is very much a fraud. They discovered after the Gulf War that 93 percent of the bombs turned out not to be so-called smart bombs and the "smart" bombs often missed their targets. Overall, 70 percent of our bombs missed their targets.

p84
The concealment of what we're doing to the population in Afghanistan is essential. Most people ... make a kind of common sense calculation, a moral calculation. And if they knew that we were killing large numbers of people, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, they would not take such a benign view of the Afghan war. | They would not simply go along with their government. So, it becomes very important for the government to conceal the human effects of our bombing. And if you conceal that from the American population, then it's possible to understand why people would think we are not doing much harm.

p85
Victoria Clarke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said, "We take extraordinary care on the targeting process. Our targets are military. Our targets are al - Qaeda. That's what we are going after. There is unintended damage. There is collateral damage. Thus far, it has been extremely limited from what we have seen.

p86
General Colin Powell Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff during the Gulf War, when asked about the number of Iraqis killed
"It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in."

p88
If civilians in fact become victims again and again, and it's predictable that they will, can that be called an accident? If the deaths of civilians are inevitable in bombing, it is not an accident. The people prosecuting this war are committing murder. They are engaging in terrorism.

p90
There is always a right side and a wrong side in war, and it is your side that is the right side. And once you have decided that you are on the right side, then anything goes. It does not matter what happens to anybody else.

p91
[Harry] Truman announced the bombing [of Hiroshima]
"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

p91
Lieutenant Colonel Dave Lapan at the Pentagon, who was asked about civilians killed in Afghanistan.

"Were civilians killed? Possibly. If they were killed, it was because they were in the vicinity of a military target."

p94
Eugene Debs wrote in a letter to the New York Sun in 1915

"If...the United States were to prove in good faith that it is opposed to the barbarism and butchery of war by issuing a proclamation of peace, and itself setting the example of disarmament to the nations of the world, its preparedness would be, not only in accordance with its vaunted ideals, but a thousand-fold greater guarantee to the respect of its neighbors and to its own security and peace than if it were loaded down with all the implements of death and destruction on earth.'

p96
The history of arms technology is that whenever you have a development in defensive technology, you soon have another development in offensive technology to overcome that.

p96
Missile defense is fundamentally a program to make profits for the corporations that are going to get the billions of dollars in contracts to build the system. This is an enormous theft from the American people. Remember the quote from Eisenhower. He said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

p97
Corporations that produce weapons make huge profits from these weapons of war and therefore are happy both to prepare for war and to engage in war. You prepare for war, you have all these government contracts, and make all this money, and then you engage in war and you use up all these products and you have to replace them.

p101
Mark Twain wrote an essay called "The War Prayer":

"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst."

p102
About six thousand Americans went to jail for refusing to fight in World War II.

p103

In Vietnam, the war lasted long enough for the American people to see behind the deceptions of the government and begin to learn about the atrocities being committed against the Vietnamese people.

p103
In 1966 about two-thirds of the American people supported the war, by 1969 about two-thirds opposed the war.

p103
With the Vietnam War we saw the first antiwar movement that became broad enough and strong enough to have an effect on governmental policy. And apparently the government learned something from that war. It learned that if it's going to conduct a war, it must finish it quickly, before an antiwar movement develops.

p113
There are thousands of things that are going on all the time that aren't reported in the mainstream press and aren't reported in the major media. There's evidence of an enormous amount of energy in towns and cities all over the country-energy of people who are doing things that are noble and helpful to other people. There are thousands of organizations in this country working on issues like racial equality, women's rights, environmental protection, antimilitarism. But the work they do doesn't appear on television.

p115
Whatever the Constitution says and whatever the statutes say, whoever holds the power in any given situation is going to determine whether the rights you have on paper are rights you have in fact. This is a very common situation in our society. People struggled to get their legal rights, they achieved their legal rights on paper. Then the reality of power and wealth comes into play, and those legal rights don't mean very much. You have to struggle to make them real.

p123

EXCERPTS OF THE GENEVA PROTOCOLS

"Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1)," June 8, 1977. From Chapter II, "Civilians and Civilian Population," Article 51, "Protection of the Civilian Population":

1. The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising from military operations. To give effect to this protection, the following rules, which are additional to other applicable rules of international law, shall be observed in all circumstances.

2. The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.

3. Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this Section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.

4. Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:

(a) Those which are not directed at a specific military objective;

(b) Those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or

(c) Those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.

5. Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as indiscriminate:

(a) An attack by bombardment by any methods or means which treats as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in a city, town, village or other area containing a similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects; and

(b) An attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

Howard Zinn page

Index of Website

Home Page