Interview with Howard Zinn

By  Tom Engelhardt MWC's Editor At large

He's tall and thin, with a shock of white hair. A bombardier in the great war against fascism and an antiwar veteran of America's wars ever since, he's best known as the author of the pathbreaking A People's History of the United States, and as an expert on the unexpected voices of resistance that have so regularly made themselves heard throughout our history. At 83 (though he looks a decade younger), he is also a veteran of a rugged century and yet there's nothing backward looking about him. His voice is quiet and he clearly takes himself with a grain of salt, chuckling wryly on occasion at his own comments. From time to time, when a thought pleases him and his well-used face lights up or breaks out in a bona fide grin, he looks positively boyish.

We sit down on the back porch of the small coffee shop, alone, on a vacation morning. He has a croissant and coffee in front of him. I suggest that perhaps we should start after breakfast, but he assures me that there's no particular contradiction between eating and talking and so, as a novice interviewer, I awkwardly turn on my two tape recorders – one of which, on pause, will still miss several minutes of our conversation (our equivalent, we joke, of Nixon's infamous 18-minute gap). In preparation, he pushes aside his half-eaten breakfast, never to touch it again, and we begin.{mosgoogle right}

Tomdispatch: You and Anthony Arnove just came out with a new book, Voices of a People's History of the United States, featuring American voices of resistance from our earliest moments to late last night. Now, we have a striking new voice of resistance, Cindy Sheehan. I was wondering what you made of her?

Howard Zinn: Often a protest movement that's already underway -- and the present antiwar movement was underway even before the Iraq War began -- gets a special impetus, a special spark, from one person's act of defiance. I think of Rosa Parks and that one act of hers and what it meant.

TD: Can you think of other Cindy Sheehan-like figures in the past who made movements coalesce?

Zinn: In the antiwar movement of the Vietnam years, there wasn't one person, but when I think back to the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass was a special figure in that way. When he came north, out of slavery, and spoke for the first time to a group of antislavery people, the beginnings of a movement existed. [William Lloyd] Garrison had already started [his antislavery newspaper] the Liberator, but Frederick Douglass was able to represent slavery itself in a way that Garrison and the other abolitionists could not. His dramatic appearance, his eloquence, provided a special spark for the abolitionist movement.

TD: I guess Cindy Sheehan also represents something that can't be represented by anyone else, almost, in fact, can't be represented -- the American dead in the war and, of course, her own dead son.

Zinn: It's interesting. There have been mothers other than Cindy Sheehan who have spoken out, but she decided on an act that had a special resonance, which was simply to find where Bush was going [he chuckles to himself at the thought] and have a confrontation between the two poles of this war, between its maker and the opposition. She just parked herself near Bush and become the center of national attention, of gravity, around which people gathered, hundreds and hundreds of people.

TD: The Bush administration has had such a long-term strategy of never venturing anywhere that the President might be challenged, but now, unless he's literally on a military base, I suspect he's no longer safe from that, and even then…

Zinn: Did you read about the Mayor of Salt Lake City speaking out before 2,000 people to protest a presidential speech there? This is just what began to happen in the Vietnam War. After a while, [President Lyndon] Johnson and [Vice President Hubert] Humphrey couldn't go anywhere except military bases. And the thing about Cindy Sheehan is that she's not a moderate voice either. I mean, she's saying we must withdraw from Iraq so boldly and clearly that even an antiwar person like [New York Times columnist] Frank Rich refers to her position as "apocalyptic" and kind of outside the pale. And that's terrible, because on the issue of withdrawal she represents, I think, the unspoken desires of a huge number of people and is willing to say what the politicians and the journalists have not yet dared to say. There are very few newspapers in the country -- maybe the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and one other -- that have simply called for withdrawal without talking about timetables and conditions.

The Logic of Withdrawal in Two Wars

TD: As the person who, in 1967, wrote Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, how do you compare the logic of withdrawal discussions in this moment with that one?

Zinn: There was a point early in the Vietnam War when no major figure and no critic of the war was simply calling for immediate withdrawal. Everybody was hedging in some way. We must negotiate. We must compromise. We must stop the bombing north of this or that parallel. I think we're at a comparable point now, two years after the beginning of the Iraq War. When my book came out in the Spring of ‘67, it was just two years after the escalation in early '65 when Johnson sent in the first major infusions of American troops. What's comparable, I think, are the arguments then and now. Even the language is similar. We mustn't cut and run. We mustn't give them a victory. We mustn't lose prestige in the world.

TD: ...credibility was the word then.

Zinn: Yes, exactly, credibility. There will be chaos and civil war if we leave...

TD: ...and a bloodbath.

Zinn: Yes, and a bloodbath -- because the one way you can justify an ongoing catastrophe is to posit a greater catastrophe if you don't continue with the present one. We've seen that psychology operating again and again. We saw it, for instance, with Hiroshima. I mean, we have to kill hundreds of thousands of people to avert a greater catastrophe, the death of a million people in the invasion of Japan.

It's interesting that when we finally did leave Vietnam, none of those dire warnings really came true. It's not that things were good after we left. The Chinese were expelled, and there were the boat people and the reeducation camps, but none of that compared to the ongoing slaughter taking place when the American troops were there. So while no one can predict what will happen -- I think this is important to say -- when the United States withdraws its troops from Iraq, the point is that we're choosing between the certainty of an ongoing disaster, the chaos and violence that are taking place in Iraq today, and an eventuality we can't predict which may be bad. But what may be bad is uncertain; what's bad with our occupation right now is certain. It seems to me that, choosing between the two, you have to take a chance on what might happen if you end the occupation. At the same time, of course, you do whatever you can to mitigate the worst possibilities of your leaving.

Resistance in the Military

TD: I want to return for a moment to Cindy Sheehan. By the last years of the Vietnam War, the American military was almost incapable of fighting and, though there were military families against the war, the main resistance to the war was by then coming from draft-age soldiers themselves. Now we have an all-volunteer army; we know that morale is sinking and that there are specific cases of resistance -- refusals to return to Iraq, for instance -- within the military, but most of the resistance this time seems to be coming from the families of the soldiers. I wonder whether there's any historical precedent for that?