The Opposition and The Death Count
Howard Zinn is an historian and author of A People's History of the United States.
As I write this, it looks like war.
Despite shaky and ambivalent public commitment to war, this administration will not likely be stopped. Indeed, George Bush and his cohorts want -- and probably need -- to go to war before public support declines even further.
They assume that once soldiers are in combat, the American people will unite behind the war. Television screens will show "smart bombs" exploding, and the secretary of defense will say that civilian casualties are at a minimum.
This is the way it has always been: unity behind the president in time of war. But will it be this way again? Will the anti-war movement surrender to the martial atmosphere?
I believe they won't. Support for the war is shallow, but opposition to the war is deep. It is not going to be easily dislodged or frightened into silence. Hundreds of thousands marched in villages and cities from Georgia to Montana, from Washington to San Francisco, and they will not meekly withdraw. Indeed, the anti-war feelings will intensify.
The movement will say: "Yes, we support our GIs. We want them to live, and be brought home."
The media will be blocked from access to the dead and wounded of Iraq, but the movement will find a way to report on the suffering of real human beings, real children, real mothers and fathers. And when it does, the American people will respond.
This is not a fantasy, not a vain hope. It happened in the Vietnam years.
For a long time, the suffering of the Vietnam peasants was concealed by statistics, by the bloodless term "body count," -- with no bodies, no faces, no pain, fear, and anguish shown.
When those stories and photos began to come out, the American people were moved; the My Lai massacre, the atrocities, the innocents facing rounds of bullets from automatic rifles. The war "against Communism" began to be viewed as a war against poor peasants in a tiny country half the world away.
And at some point in this coming war -- we don't know when -- the administration's lies will emerge: "The death of this family was an accident.... We apologize for the death of this child. This was an intelligence mistake," or "a radar misfunction" -- the lies will unravel.
How soon will this happen?
That depends not only on the millions now, whether actively or silently, in the anti-war movement, but also on the emergence of whistleblowers inside the establishment.
It depends on journalists who tire of the government's manipulation, and dissident soldiers sick of a war that is not a war but a massacre: How else to describe the mayhem wreaked by the most powerful military machine on earth raining thousands of bombs on a fifth-rate military power already reduced to poverty by two wars and 10 years of economic sanctions?
There is a basic weakness in governments, however massive their armies, however wealthy they are, however they control the information given to the public, because their power depends on the obedience of citizens, of soldiers, of civil servants, of journalists and writers and teachers and artists. When these people begin to suspect they have been deceived, and withdraw their support, the government loses its legitimacy and its power.
The anti-war movement has the responsibility to encourage defections from the war machine. We must persist, with voices reaching out over the walls of government control, speaking to the consciences of people.
The generals who led the Gulf War of 1991 speak out against this impending war as foolish, unnecessary, dangerous. The CIA contradicts the president by saying Saddam Hussein is not likely to use his weapons unless he is attacked.
All across the country, not just the great metropolitan centers, like Chicago, but places like Bozeman, Mont., Des Moines, Iowa, San Luis Obispo, Calif., Nederland, Colo., Tacoma, Wash., York, Penn., Santa Fe, N.M., Gary, Ind., Carrboro, N.C. -- 57 cities and counties in all -- have passed resolutions against the war, responding to their citizens.
The legitimacy of this government has already begun to be undermined. There was a worm eating at the innards of its complacency all along -- the knowledge of the American public, shallowly buried and easy to disinter -- that this government came to power by a political coup, not by popular will.
The movement should not let this be forgotten.
In the cartoon "The Boondocks," which reaches 20 million readers every day, the cartoonist Aaron McGruder has his character, a black youngster named Huey Freeman, say the following:
In this time of war against Osama bin Laden and the oppressive Taliban regime, we are thankful that our leader isn't the spoiled son of a powerful politician from a wealthy oil family who is supported by religious fundamentalists, operates through clandestine organizations, has no respect for the democratic electoral process, bombs innocents and uses war to deny people their civil liberties. Amen.
The voices will multiply. The actions -- from silent vigils to acts of civil disobedience -- will multiply.
If Bush starts a war, he will be responsible for the lives lost, the children crippled, the terrorizing of millions of ordinary people, the American GIs not returning to their families. And all of us will be responsible for bringing that to a halt.
Men who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back.
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