Their Atrocities and Ours

Their Atrocities and Ours by Howard Zinn

Their Atrocities and Ours* is a short polemical essay by historians Howard Zinn and Marilyn B. Young examining the moral and political double standards applied to violence committed by the United States versus violence committed by its adversaries. Writing from a radical historical perspective, the authors argue that American political discourse and mainstream media consistently frame atrocities committed by official enemies—whether the Japanese in World War II, the Soviets, the Vietnamese, or later Iraq and other targets of U.S. military action—as uniquely barbaric, premeditated, and expressive of an evil national character, while comparable or greater harms caused by U.S. military policy are explained away as accidental, regrettable but necessary, isolated aberrations, or the unfortunate cost of pursuing legitimate strategic goals. Zinn and Young draw on case studies from twentieth-century U.S. military history—including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Japanese and German cities, the Vietnam War (with particular attention to free-fire zones, carpet bombing, and massacres such as My Lai), and the Gulf War—to show a recurring pattern: civilian deaths caused by American forces are described in the passive voice or attributed to unavoidable circumstances of war, while equivalent or lesser acts by opponents are labeled war crimes, terrorism, or evidence of totalitarian cruelty. They contend that this asymmetry is not incidental but structurally embedded in how war is reported, how history is taught, and how political and military leaders justify policy to the public. The essay traces this rhetorical pattern historically, noting that it has operated across very different ideological eras and administrations, suggesting the phenomenon is less about any single leader's or party's dishonesty than about deeper nationalist assumptions shared broadly across the American political spectrum. The authors argue that a nation's self-image as inherently benevolent, or acting only in self-defense or in defense of freedom, makes it psychologically and politically difficult to hold one's own state to the same standard used to judge adversaries. A central concern of the work is the human cost of this double standard: because domestic audiences are less likely to see their own government's violence as atrocity, there is correspondingly less political pressure to prevent, limit, or account for civilian casualties inflicted by their own military. Zinn and Young suggest that this selective moral vision helps sustain public support for wars and interventions that would otherwise provoke outrage if the same actions were carried out by an enemy state. They also examine how language itself participates in this process—terms like "collateral damage," "surgical strikes," or "pacification" function to euphemize and depersonalize the human consequences of U.S. military action, whereas equivalent enemy actions are described in more visceral, morally charged terms. Ultimately, the piece functions as both a historical survey and a call to moral consistency: the authors urge readers to apply a single, universal ethical standard to the assessment of wartime violence, regardless of which government or military force commits it. Rather than arguing that American conduct in war is uniquely worse than that of other nations, Zinn and Young's central claim is one of moral symmetry—that atrocity is atrocity irrespective of the flag under which it is committed, and that genuine historical honesty and effective prevention of future violence require dismantling the exceptionalist framework that exempts one's own nation from the judgments routinely applied to others. The essay is characteristic of Zinn's broader body of work, including *A People's History of the United States*, in its effort to recover suppressed or minimized aspects of U.S. history and to challenge triumphalist national narratives.

By Howard Zinn · First published 1999 · Genre: Political Nonfiction, Anti-War Literature, Political Essay · 2,214 words

First lines

We have become accustomed to the misuse of language by political and military leaders to deceive the public. I suppose it is a tribute to the humanity of ordinary people that horrible acts must be camouflaged in a thicket of deceptive words in order to justify them. This op-ed piece appeared in the Boston Globe and several other newspapers around the country at the time of the bombing of Yugoslavia. Technically, it was NATO-the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-that was carrying on the bombing, but in reality (another obfuscation) it was the United States.

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Tags

American foreign policy · war crimes · military interventionism · political hypocrisy · double standards in justice · historical accountability · U.S. imperialism · government criticism · human rights violations · propaganda analysis · international relations · anti-militarism

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