Historian Howard Zinn, author of the new People’s History of American Empire, discusses the long history of American imperialism from the genocide of the American Indians to the wars against Mexico, Spain, the Good War, and the ‘war on terrorism,’ and the long and proud history of the American antiwar movement too.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org.
And our first guest today is Howard Zinn.
He's the highly acclaimed American historian, political scientist, social critic, activist, and playwright.
He's best known for his bestseller titled A People's History of the United States, which I think pretty much everybody in Austin, Texas has read.
And he is professor emeritus in the political science department at Boston University.
He's got a new book out, A People's History of American Empire.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Oh, thank you.
It's very nice to talk to you.
And I have to say, I read A People's History of the United States years and years ago.
And the way I remember it, I really, really liked the first half and not so much the second.
I can't remember why, though.
But here's the thing.
You come from a left-wing perspective, myself from a very libertarian one.
And yet I completely agree with you on your most recent article for Tom Englehart, where you talk about as a young man learning American history and trying to figure out when America became an empire.
How long had America been an empire?
And your conclusion basically seems to be was right around 1791, maybe even earlier.
Yeah, it's interesting, especially since, you know, in our traditional education, and I remember this very well, in our histories of the United States, there might be a chapter which would be called the Age of Imperialism.
And it turned out, if you looked in this chapter, they were talking about the period between 1898 and like 1903.
That is the recovery.
The Philippine War.
The war in Cuba, the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine War.
And that was it.
That was the Age of Imperialism.
But of course, as you point out, it goes way back.
Well, you know, it goes back to our expansion into Indian territory.
What was that, if not imperialism?
Taking control of other people's land, driving the Indians westward and westward and westward.
And of course, then comes in 1846, and you're sitting right there in that territory, which we took from Mexico in the Mexican War.
And at first as the Lone Star State, but very cleverly engineered into the Lone Star State, so that then we could win a war with Mexico and take virtually half of Mexico.
So yeah, imperialism has been a long period of expansion, not just a couple of years, and from right after the revolution and up to the present war in Iraq.
And something that goes along with this, too, is bigotry and white supremacy.
And really, even more generally than that, just we, they.
You know, us good, them bad.
We're on the side of Jesus, the shining city on the hill.
They're Indian savages, and God wants us to kill them all and take their land.
Yeah, as the Bob Dylan sings, with God on our side, you know.
And yeah, it's, and what you say is true, that racism and this hostility towards different people helps fuel this imperialism, gives it a special nasty edge.
And so the Mexicans, when we go into the Mexican War in 1846, the Mexicans are inferior people, and we are going to bring civilization to them.
The Filipinos are, you know, a dark-skinned, inferior people, and we're going to bring Christianity to them.
Well, and you know what's funny there?
McKinley said, yeah, we're going to go Christianize the Filipinos, but they've been under the domination of Spain for, I forget how many hundreds of years before that, and they were already like 70% Catholic at the time.
Yeah, well, you know, McKinley didn't know very much.
You know, we have presidents who don't know very much.
I remember learning, I went to a private high school where I learned from an anarcho-leftist the history of the American Indian Wars, and I learned the phrase, knits make lice, kill them all men, knits make lice.
That means kill the women and the children too, because they'll just grow up to be an Indian we have to fight later on.
Yeah, you know, it's very sad that we grow up in this country, and we get the impression from our history books, and also from the media, and certainly from our politicians, that we are the greatest, we are the best, we are the good guys of the world, you know, but the fact is we haven't been good to other people in the world, because we haven't been good to our own people either.
We haven't been good to black people, we haven't been good to poor people, and we haven't been good to immigrants, but we certainly have been very vicious and violent to other people in the world.
And, you know, it's not unpatriotic to say this.
You know, some people think that if you criticize our foreign policy, if you criticize the government, if you take a critical look at our history, that you're being unpatriotic, but no, you're just being honest, and being patriotic doesn't mean a kind of blind support of the government, it means the support of the principles for which the government is supposed to stand.
Sure, and if you're interested in the future of your country, everybody knows that all empires fall, that if our society is going to last, if our Bill of Rights is going to last, it's going to be because we're very modest and prudent and dedicated to keeping our republic, and not destroying ourselves like all other civilizations who've tried to take over the world have done.
You know, you're right, a lot of people forget this, that empires don't last, they fall, they collapse, and they deserve to collapse, because they're all built on the exploitation and the occupation of other people, and it's a whole different future for us if we stop being an imperial power, and start taking the enormous wealth that we have, which we've been wasting on war, on violence, take this enormous wealth that we have, and use it for people, use it for healthcare, use it for education, use it for children, use it for older people, use it to help people in Africa and in the Middle East, I mean, what we could do with this wealth if we weren't, I mean, we're spending $500 billion on the military in this year, I mean, this is incredible.
Yeah, and you know, even if they just didn't tax that money at all, and just left it in the pockets of the people, we can all put it to productive use ourselves.
Yeah, now you're talking like a libertarian.
All right, now, I like this, because I really see eye to eye with you a lot, I should have been interviewing you all these years.
Let me ask you this, you bring up in your article how you were a bombardier over Germany, I think it was, in World War II, and it was during one of these missions that you struck up a conversation with one of your mates on the airplane, who right in the middle of it was saying that this wasn't a good war, that this was an imperialist adventure as well.
That's right, there was a gunner on another crew, and we were talking, and we became friends because he liked to read books, and so did I. And one day he said to me, you realize that this is an imperialist war, that both sides are imperialist, they're not really fighting for freedom or democracy, and it's the British Empire, and the American Empire, and Stalin's Russia, and sure, the fascists are evil, but we're not good.
And I was startled by this, really startled by this, and I didn't believe him, and I argued with him, but after the war, when I looked around and contemplated what we had done, and saw Hiroshima, Nagasaki, how ruthless we had been, and the Nazis, of course, were more ruthless than anybody, but we were very ruthless.
Nagasaki, Hiroshima, bombing of Tokyo, killing 100,000 people in one night, 600,000 civilians in Europe died under our bombs.
When I began to think about all of that, I thought, no, war solves nothing, and we had better turn our ways in different directions, and so my experiences as a bombardier, it led me at first to be an enthusiastic participant in war.
It led me later to write up to the present day to oppose all wars, and of course, the present war in Iraq is just a continuation of the attempt to create a bigger and more violent American Empire.
You know, I'm sorry, this is sort of out of order, but I just remembered, part of the people's history of the United States, as you quote extensively from the right-hand man, the Smithers, so to speak, to Zachary Taylor during the Mexican War, is that right?
And his misgivings about what they were doing, do I have the names there?
Yeah, yeah, you know, there were people who opposed the Mexican War.
We forget that, there were people who opposed all wars.
You know, there were always dissidents.
Well, look, Thoreau went to prison in Massachusetts because he refused to pay taxes to support the war, and as you point out, there were soldiers in the Mexican War who saw what we were doing, and you know, a lot of people don't notice, there were thousands and thousands of soldiers who, after we invaded Mexico, deserted from our army and wouldn't fight anymore because they got tired of the bloodshed.
They were asking themselves, what in the world are we doing here?
What good are we doing?
We're just killing people and killing ourselves, and this is something that a lot of, not a lot of people know.
Some Irish immigrants would join the army out of kind of desperation, really, and then found themselves in the war in Mexico.
They deserted to the Mexican side, formed a battalion called St. Patrick's Battalion, and they actually fought with the Mexicans against the United States, and the Mexicans every year celebrate what they call the San Patricio Battalion, so we've always had dissidents.
Like today, we have Iraq veterans against the war.
Our own soldiers come back from Iraq.
They hold hearings, the winter soldier hearings recently around Washington, D.C., and telling about the terrible things they did and saw in Iraq, so that's encouraging that we have always had Americans who have protested war, who've resisted war, and who, in the case of Vietnam, brought that resistance to such a point that a government that has finally had to stop the war.
And now, I think that's really important, it goes back to what you were saying about this isn't unpatriotic.
The fact that the American government has waged war since it was created is not necessarily the fault of all the people who've lived here all along, and there's a long tradition of people opposing these policies all along in this country, but it's important that we look at the history because, as Harry Brown used to say, history doesn't begin on September 11th, or as others have pointed out, history doesn't begin in 1939, and we have to look at the larger context so we understand where we are.
A lot of people do believe that history begins on 9-11.
They came out of the clear blue sky and attacked us for no reason at all, and in your article, The End of Empire, that's under Tom Englehart's name at antiwar.com, you point out that actually what happened before 9-11 was a lot of imperialism, and it became an excuse for just more of the same.
Oh yeah, the Bush administration really seized upon 9-11, and they used it not to ask serious intelligent questions about why 9-11 happened, and is it possible that our policies in the Middle East have infuriated huge numbers of people, led to fanaticism, and led to this violence against us.
Instead of asking such intelligent and probing questions, the Bush administration immediately used the opportunity to send an army into Afghanistan to bomb those people.
I mean, 3,000 and more innocent people in Afghanistan died under our bombs.
That's more people than were killed in the Twin Towers, and it was an excuse to go into Afghanistan that became an excuse to go into Iraq, and I mean, that's what imperialism has always done.
It has looked for excuses.
You know, they've done this, they've done that, and therefore we must go to war.
But, you know, fortunately, I think more Americans have gotten wise to this, and now, you know, 80% of the American people don't believe in this war, and that's good.
Our problem is to translate that 80% opposition into national policy by getting rid of this administration.
Well, it's almost over.
All right, everybody, that's Howard Zinn.
He is Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Boston University.
He's the author of A People's History of the United States and the new one, A People's History of American Empire.
Again, you can find his most recent article with Tom Englehart at antiwar.com slash Englehart.
It's called The End of American Empire.
Thanks very much, sir.
Oh, thanks so much for inviting me.
Good luck.
