Three Holy Wars

Three Holy Wars by Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn delivered "Three Holy Wars" as a speech at Boston University on November 11, 2009, arguing that the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II are treated as untouchable, uncriticizable conflicts in American memory, and that this reputation for "goodness" is used to justify later wars like Vietnam and Iraq. He proposes examining each through a moral balance sheet rather than accepting the simple verdict that each accomplished something good and was therefore worth it. On the Revolutionary War, Zinn notes twenty-five thousand deaths, which, scaled to the colonial population, would equal about two and a half million deaths today. He argues the war did not benefit everyone: roughly a third of colonists opposed it, recruitment was difficult, the poor were coerced or bribed into service with land promises, and officers were treated far better than ordinary soldiers, provoking mass mutinies in the Pennsylvania line and a smaller one in the New Jersey line, whose leaders Washington had executed. After the war, veterans faced heavy taxation and foreclosures, provoking Shays' Rebellion in western Massachusetts, which Zinn links directly to the founding fathers' motivation for a strong central government at the Constitutional Convention, citing a letter from General Henry Knox to Washington about controlling people who felt entitled to a share of the nation's wealth. Zinn states the Constitution was a class document protecting bondholders, slaveowners, and land expansionists. Black slaves gained nothing from independence, and Indians lost ground because the British Proclamation of 1763 fell away once the British were gone, opening western expansion and dispossession. He raises Canada's peaceful independence as a comparative alternative. On the Civil War, Zinn weighs the end of slavery against roughly 600,000 deaths, a toll he says would equal five or six million in proportion to today's population. Freed slaves, promised forty acres and a mule, received nothing and became serfs, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers still controlled by former masters. Lincoln's initial war aim was keeping southern territory within the grasp of the central government, not freeing slaves; the Emancipation Proclamation freed only the slaves in Confederate states that the national government could not reach, leaving slavery intact in slave states fighting on the side of the Union. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments followed pressure from the antislavery movement, but the equality and voting protections were honored only while federal troops remained in the South enforcing them, then set aside, ushering in a hundred years of segregation and lynching during which every president violated his oath by failing to enforce the amendments. Zinn contrasts the war's toll with slavery's peaceful end elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere and cites John Brown's 1859 execution for attempting slave rebellions, followed a year later by a war that killed 600,000, as a tragic irony. On World War II, Zinn recounts his own service as a bombardier, including a raid on a French town three weeks before the war's end to test napalm despite no military necessity. He describes learning only after the war about the human cost of the bombing campaigns: 600,000 German civilians killed, the firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 in one night, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, understood through John Hersey's book on survivors. He cites the Strategic Bombing Survey's postwar finding that Japan was ready to end the war without an invasion, and a British scientist's remark that Hiroshima was "the first step of the Cold War." Zinn argues war corrupts "the good guys" into resembling the enemy, that defeating Hitler and Mussolini did not end fascism, racism, or militarism, and that the postwar world produced nuclear-armed superpowers and continuous war rather than the "new world" promised in General Marshall's discharge letter to servicemen. Zinn concludes that no war qualifies as good given the scale of killing, especially of children, and that opposition to tyranny should take forms other than war. He closes by urging listeners to join a peace movement, noting that the power of those in authority depends on the obedience of those below, and that strikes, boycotts, and soldiers' refusal to fight — as occurred during Vietnam — can end wars when enough people withdraw cooperation.

By Howard Zinn · Genre: Political Essay, Historical Analysis, Philosophy/Ethics · 7,838 words

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Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, November 11, 2009.

This was Zinn's last major speech. He saw it as the quintessential expression of his view that there is no such thing as a just war and of his desire to see an end to all war.

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history · military-conflict · religious-ideology · American-foreign-policy · political-analysis · imperialism · geopolitics · critical-perspective · revisionist-history · social-commentary · government-critique · international-relations

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