The Bomb: Howard Zinn's last call to rebel against war

[marmar]

via MichaelMoore.com:




August 4th, 2010 9:12 PM
The Bomb: Howard Zinn's last call to rebel against war

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By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog


In his lifetime, Howard Zinn wrote and edited nearly two dozen books, and altered radically the way Americans view their own history with his best selling A Peoples’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. He was compassionate, dynamic, and an unrelenting seeker after justice, and when he died in January 2010, he was mourned by friends and family, students and activists, fellow historians and makers of history like himself.

Zinn seemed to do it all: think, act, organize, and agitate for more than half a century. A G.I., he was also a professor and an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as a critic of the Vietnam War.

In The Bomb, a new book forthcoming from City Lights, he tells the little-known story of his own experience as a bomber in the U. S. Air Force and his role in dropping bombs on Germany during World War II. Zinn also explains that he initially applauded the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“So I wouldn’t be going to the Pacific, and might soon be coming home for good,” he thought when he saw a headline that read “Atom Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima.” Part history, part memoir, part sermon, The Bomb is meant to wake up citizens, to rouse them to reject “the abstractions of duty and obedience” and to refuse to heed the call of war.

It’s as though Zinn speaks from the dead one last time -- to plead for individual responsibility. Perhaps in writing the book, which he finished just before his own death, he also laid to rest ghosts in his own life. The publication of the book coincides with the 65th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/bomb-howard-zinns-last-call-rebel-against-war