Howard Zinn: A Just Cause (does not equal) A Just War
(Very interesting talk by Zinn in 2009. Keep in Mind this is a Philosophical discussion, not an argument, to keep our minds open and consider options when we discuss war and it's real value). I am posting a longer excerpt as since it is a transcript of his speech it is fair use, but still the Progressive has the entire speech which is well worth reading)
A Just Cause ? A Just War
Howard Zinn
The Progressive
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Editor's Note: Today we remember our legendary columnist Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States and champion of pacifism, civil rights, and the voices of the marginalized. On this fifth anniversary of his death in January 27, 2010, we present a classic essay on nonviolence adapted from his speech on May 2, 2009, at The Progressive’s 100th anniversary conference.
I want to talk about three holy wars. They aren’t religious wars, but they’re the three wars in American history that are sacrosanct, that you can’t say anything bad about: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II.
Let’s look carefully at these three idealized, three romanticized wars.
It’s important to at least be willing to raise the possibility that you could criticize something that everybody has accepted as uncriticizable.
We’re supposed to be thinking people. We’re supposed to be able to question everything.
There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”
You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.
You might say it was a good cause to get Spain out of Cuba in 1898. Spain was oppressing Cuba. But did that necessarily mean we needed to go to war against Spain? We have to see what it produced. We got Spain out of oppressing Cuba and got ourselves into oppressing Cuba.
You might say that stopping North Korea from invading South Korea was a good idea. The North Koreans shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t right. Does that mean we should have gone to war to stop it? Especially when you consider that two or three million Koreans died in that war? And what did the war accomplish? It started off with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. And it ended up, after two to three million dead, with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea.
The American Revolution—independence from England—was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?
I’d be very careful about rushing from one thing to another, from just cause to just war.
How many people died in the Revolutionary War?
Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let’s take the lower figure—25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs.
You might consider that worth it, or you might not.
Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?
Full text at the Progressive
http://www.progressive.org/zinnjuly09.html
