Uncommon Sense

From the Writings of Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn, Dean Birkenkamp, Wanda Rhudy, Dean Birkenkamp, Wanda Rhudy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317249955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why Howard Zinn has become one of the most important and influential American historians is perhaps nowhere more evident than in this new book. Few social critics have been as inspiring as the ever-hopeful Zinn and, unlike many historians, Zinn turns historical details toward deeper observations on the universal truths and struggles of humankind. His remarkable wisdom and insight can be found in his earliest writings through his latest essays, speeches, and plays. Uncommon Sense brings together his most poignant and profound quotations from decades of writing and speaking. The book reveals the philosophical side of Howard Zinn and a consistency of vision over 50 years on topics ranging from government to race, history, law, civil disobedience, and activism. Offering quotations of universal and timeless quality, the book shows why history will regard this historian as a political and moral philosopher in the company of Paine, Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr.

War and Peace

DOI: 10.4324/9781315631417-3

At its worst, war has been mass slaughter without even the saving grace of a definable social goal.

The Healthful Use of Power & The Zinn Reader

Once an initial judgment has been made that a war is just, there is a tendency to stop thinking, to assume then that everything done on behalf of victory is morally acceptable The beneficent nature of a government is assumed to give rightness to the wars it wages.

Declarations of Independence

There’s no ideological reason, no territorial reason that can justify the cruelty of war. The means of war have reached the point where they overwhelm any possible decent ends.

The Future of History

It remains to be seen how many people in our time will make that journey from war to nonviolent action against war. It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war.

Declarations of Independence

It is a problem of the corruption of human intelligence, enabling our leaders to create plausible reasons for monstrous acts, to exhort citizens to accept those reasons, and to train soldiers to follow orders. So long as that continues, we will need to refute those reasons and resist those exhortations.

The Bombs of August

Should not the real motivations of governments be scrutinized? They always claim to be fighting for democracy, for liberty, against aggression, to end all wars—but is that not a handy way to mobilize a population to support war, indeed, absolutely necessary because people do not instinctively want to fight?

You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train

There is endless room for more wars, with an endless supply of reasons ready to justify them.

The Bombs of August

The people who fight the wars are not the people that benefit from the wars.

Artists in Times of War

It is a long story, the betrayal of the very ones sent to kill and die in wars. When soldiers realize this, they rebel. In the Civil War there was deep resentment that the rich could buy their way out of service, and that financiers like J. P. Morgan were profiting as the bodies piled up on the battlefields. The black soldiers who joined the Union army and were decisive in the victory came home to poverty and racism.

Soldiers returning from World War I, many of them crippled and shell-shocked, were hit hard, barely a dozen years after the end of the war, by the Depression. Unemployed, their families hungry, they descended on Washington—20,000 of them, from every part of the country. They set up tents across the Potomac from the Capitol and demanded that Congress pay the bonuses it had promised.

Instead, the army was called out, and the veterans were fired on, tear gassed, and dispersed.

The Ultimate Betrayal

Innocent and well-meaning people—of whom I considered myself one—are capable of the most brutal acts and the most self-righteous excuses, whether they be Germans, Japanese, Russians, or Americans. Later I was trained as a historian and learned that our country is capable of moral absurdities.

Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal

“Any means to an end” is a totalitarian philosophy, one that is shared by all nations that make war.

The Bombs of August

It becomes difficult to sustain the claim that a war is just when both sides commit atrocities, unless one wants to argue that their atrocities are worse than ours.

Declarations of Independence

The moral failures of other nations [have] to be seen not in isolation, but against our own failures.

Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal

It seems that however moral is the cause that initiates a war (in the minds of the public, in the mouths of the politicians), it is in the nature of war to corrupt that morality until the rule becomes “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” and soon it is not a matter of equivalence, but indiscriminate revenge.

Declarations of Independence

It is the old human story, the little boy nurtured by his family on the Biblical exhortation Thou Shalt Not Kill, watching his father return, gun still smoking from a mission of murder.

Of Fish and Fishermen & The...