Howard Zinn: Holy Wars

Friends of Ashland Public Library 
Documentary Film & Discussion Series

This is Howard Zinn’s last recorded public talk at Boston University.   Seating himself at a table, the 87-year old Zinn asks the audience of students, facility, and guests if they mind if he sits down. “After all,” he reminds them, “you’re seating down.” Zinn’s humor and warm, relaxed mood delight the audience throughout his talk. Zinn’s subject is provocative. He questions three “holy wars” in U.S. history: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II. He questions them because the “notion that any war is a good war serves to justify all war.”

Zinn asks who benefited from America’s war for freedom and independence.  Did the common man win freedom and independence or was the war fought on behalf of the propertied class? Zinn points to Shay’s Rebellion in Western Massachusetts as evidence that poor farmers got only taxes and debt from the war. Their rebellion produced fear among the propertied class that the Revolution’s democratic impulse had gotten out of hand and hastened the Philadelphia Convention and the establishment of a strong central government to crush local rebellions.

Zinn questions whether the slaves were freed by the Civil War and was a war necessary to abolish slavery? He also questions World War II, always referred to as the “good” war where democracy defeated fascism. Zinn talks about his experience as an Air Force bombardier in the European theatre and his participation in the first napalm bombing by the U.S. “I didn’t think about or question then what I was doing,” Zinn says. “It was later when I was older that I began to question what I had done.”

Zinn’s talk is followed by questions and answers from an engaged B.U.
audience.

70 minutes

Followed by discussion.