Historian Howard Zinn is dead

Howard Zinn, radical activist, historian, and author of the People's History of the United States, died yesterday at the age of 87.

Amy Goodman has a tribute with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, and Anthony Arnove at Democracy Now. Daniel Ellsberg has a remembrance at CommonDreams.org.

Common Dreams has also republished this commentary that Zinn wrote in December 2001 for The Progressive, right at the beginning of the "War on Terror." This, of course, was the period of time shortly after the terrorist bombings in New York and Washington in September of that year. Many commentators, at that time, were referring to the US invasion of Afghanistan as a "just war." Zinn wrote:

I have puzzled over this. How can a war be truly just when it involves the daily killing of civilians, when it causes hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to leave their homes to escape the bombs, when it may not find those who planned the September 11 attacks, and when it will multiply the ranks of people who are angry enough at this country to become terrorists themselves?

This war amounts to a gross violation of human rights, and it will produce the exact opposite of what is wanted: It will not end terrorism; it will proliferate terrorism.

I believe that the progressive supporters of the war have confused a "just cause" with a "just war." There are unjust causes, such as the attempt of the United States to establish its power in Vietnam, or to dominate Panama or Grenada, or to subvert the government of Nicaragua. And a cause may be just--getting North Korea to withdraw from South Korea, getting Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, or ending terrorism--but it does not follow that going to war on behalf of that cause, with the inevitable mayhem that follows, is just.