Howard Zinn - You Cant Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

You Cant
Be Neutral
on a
Moving Train

Howard
Zinn

You Cant
Be Neutral
on a
Moving Train

A Personal History of Our Times

To Roslyn,
for everything

BEACON PRESS

25 Beacon Street

Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

1994, 2002 by Howard Zinn

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

The lines from Incident are reprinted from Color , by Countee Cullen, copyright 1925 by Harper & Brothers, renewed 1953 by Ida M. Cullen, by permission of GRM Associates, Inc., agents for the Estate of Ida M. Cullen; the lines from i sing of Olaf glad and big and my father moved through dooms of love are reprinted from Complete Poems: 19041962 , by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation, copyright 1931, 1940, 1959, 1968, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust; the lines from Once in Once , copyright 1968 by Alice Walker, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace and Company.

15 14 13 12 11 10 13 12 11 10 9 8

Text design by Daniel Ochsner

Composition by Wilsted & Taylor

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zinn, Howard.

You cant be neutral on a moving train : a personal history of our times / Howard Zinn.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-8070-7127-4 (paper)

1. Zinn, Howard, [data]. 2. HistoriansUnited StatesBiography. 3. United StatesHistory1945 Philosophy. I. Title.

E175.5Z25A3 1994

973'.07202dc20 94-8000

C O N T E N T S

: The Question Period in Kalamazoo

The South and the Movement

War

Scenes and Changes

I t has been eight years since this memoir was first published, and as I write now, the nation is in a state of great tension. On September 11, 2001, teams of hijackers flew two passenger planes, loaded with jet fuel, into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, and the ensuing catastrophe killed close to three thousand people who were burned or crushed to death as the buildings burst into flames and collapsed.

Like so many others who saw those events on television, I was horrified. And when President George W. Bush immediately announced to the nation that we were now at war, I was horrified again because solving problems with bombs has never worked. It seemed clear to me that this was exactly the wrong response to the act of terrorism that had just occurred. And when, soon after, the United States began bombing Afghanistan, I considered that, if terrorism can be defined as the willingness to kill innocent people for some presumed good cause, this was another form of terrorismone I had seen up close many years ago after meeting the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who also suffered needlessly for an alleged good cause.

In this book I tell of my experience as a bombardier in the Second World War. I describe how I came to the conclusion, after dropping bombs on European cities, and celebrating the victory over fascism, that war, even a good war, while it may bring immediate relief, cannot solve fundamental problems. Indeed, the glow of that good war has been used to cast a favorable light over every bad war for the next fifty years, wars in which our government lied to us, and millions of innocent people died.

Just five years after the end of the Second World War, we were at war with Korea, bombing villages, using napalm, destroying much of the country. That war was barely over when the United States intervened in Vietnam, with a half million troops and the most deadly bombing campaign in world history. I write here about my involvement in the movement against that war. Since then, our government has found reasons to bomb Panama, and Iraq, and Yugoslavia. We have become addicted to war.

Today the movie screens are filled with images of military heroism, and my generation is hailed as the greatest generation. In such films as Band of Brothers, Windtalkers, Saving Private Ryan, Memphis Belle , and others, World War II is being brought back to make us feel good about war.

My refusal to justify war has a simple logic. War in our time inevitably means the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of innocent people (no matter what claims are made by confident government officials about smart bombs and we only aim at military targets). Thus, the means of waging war are evil and certain. The ends of war, however proclaimed as noble (putting aside the historical evidence that aims are not really democracy and liberty, but political ambition, corporate profit, a lust for oil), are always uncertain.

Two months after the United States began to bomb Afghanistan, I read a dispatch by a reporter for the Boston Globe , writing from a hospital in Jalalabad. In one bed lay Noor Mohammad, 10, who was a bundle of bandages. He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner. The hospitals morgue received 17 bodies last weekend, and officials here estimate at least 89 civilians were killed in several villages.

The moral question was clear. One boy now without hands and eyes. There was no possible connection between him and the events of September 11 in New York. There was no possibility that the crippling of his face and body, or that any of the bombs dropped for months on Afghanistan, would reduce or eliminate terrorism. Indeed, more likely, the acts of violence on both sides would reinforce one another, and would create an endless cycle of death and suffering.

That scene in the hospital would need to be multiplied by a thousand times (because at least a thousand, and perhaps five thousand civilians died under our bombs, with many others maimed, wounded) to make a proper moral reckoning of whether the war on Afghanistan can be justified by anyone claiming to care about human rights.

I write this book about growing up class-conscious. As I look around at the world in 2002, I am even more aware today that behind the deceptive words designed to entice people into supporting violencewords like democracy, freedom, self-defense, national security there is the reality of enormous wealth in the hands of a few, while billions of people in the world are hungry, sick, homeless. President Eisenhower, himself a warrior, in one of his better moments, called the billions spent on preparations for war a theft from those who are without food, without shelter.

There is a sense of desperation and helplessness in the land. There is the feel of a country occupied by a foreign power, not foreign in the sense of coming from abroad, but rather foreign to the principles we want our country to stand for. The war on terror is being used to create an atmosphere of hysteria, in which the claim of national security becomes an excuse to throw aside the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, to give new powers to the FBI. The question not asked is whether the war itself creates great dangers for the security of the American people, and also for the security of innocent people abroad, who become pawns in the game to expand American power worldwide.

I write in this book about law and justice, about prisons and courtsand we have more prisons than ever before, and the courts still pretend to equal justice. It is the poor, the nonwhite, the nonconformists, the powerless who go to prison while corporate thieves and government architects of war remain at large.