artists in times of war by howard zinn

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  • Artists in limes of lTar

    An edited vercion of a talk given at Massachusetts ColJegeof Art, Boston, Mass., October 10,2001,

    When I think of the relationship between aftistsand society-and for me the question is alwayswhat it could be, rather than what it is-I thinkof the word transcendent. It is a word I never usein public, but it's the only word I can come upwith to describe what I think about the role o{artists. By transcendent, I mean that the artisttranscends the immediate. Transcends the hereand now. Transcends the madness of the world.Transcends terrorism and war.

    The artist thinks, acts, performs music, andwrites outside the framework that society hascreated. The artist may do no more than gi.ve us

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    Arthts in limes of l{aroften. People say, "You have to be professiond."Whenever I hear the worf I get a little scaredbecause that limits human beings to workingwithin the conJines set by thefu profession.

    I face this as a historian. During the VietnamWar, there were meetings of historians. Whilethe war was raging in Southeast Asia, the ques-tion was, "should historians take a stand on thewar?" There was a big debate about this. Some ofus introduced a resolution saying that "We histo-rians think the United States should get out ofVietnam." Other historians obiected. They said,"It's not that we don't think the United Statesshould get out, but we are just historians. It's notour business."

    But whose business is it? The historian says,"It's not my business." The-lawyer says, "It's notmy business." The businessman,says, "It's notmy business." And the artist says, "It's not mybusiness." Then whose business is it? Does thatmean you are going to leave the business of themost important issues in the world to the peoplewho run the country? How stupid can we be?

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    Hottard Zinn

    beauty, laughter, passion, surprise, and drama. Idon't mean to minimize these activities by say-ing the artist can do no more than this. The artistneedn't apologize, because by doing this, theartist is telling us what the world should be like,even iJ it isn't that way now. The artist is takingus away from the moments of horror that weerperience everyday-some days more than oth'ers-by showing us what is possible.

    But the artist can and should do more. Inaddition to creating works of. art, the artist isalso a citizen and a human being. The way thatsociety tends to classify us scares me' I am a his-torian. I don't want to be just a historian, butsociety puts us into a discipline. Yes, disciplinesus: you're a historian, you're a businessman,you're an engineer. You're this or you're that.The first thing someone asks you at a party is,"What do you do?" That means, "How are Youcategorized?"

    The problem is that people begin to think that'sall they are. They're professionals in something.You hear the word professionalism being used

  • .

    lloward Zinn

    Haven't we had enough experience historicallywith leaving the important decisions to the peo-ple in the White House, Congress, the SupremeCourt, and those who dominate the economy?

    There are certain historical moments whenIearning is more compressed and intense thanothers. Since September 11, 2001, we have beenin such e moment.

    One of the things we learned about duringthe Vietnam War was experts. When the warstarted people would ask, "Why are we there?,,These experts would come on television andtell us why. The British actor peter Ustinovspoke out against the war in Vietnam. Thensomebody said, "Ustinov? He,s an actor. Hersnot an expert." Ustinov made an importantpoint. He said that there are experts in littlethings but there are no experts in big things.There are experts in this fact and that fact butthere are no moral experts. It/s important toremember that. All of us, no matter what we do,have the right to make moral decisions aboutthe world. We must be undeterred by the cries

    Artists in Timls of l{ar'of people who say, "You don't know. You're notan expert. These people up there, they know" Ittakes only a bit of knowledge of history to real-ize how dangerous it is to think that the peoplewho run the country know what they are doing.fean-facques Rousseau said, "I see all sorts ofpeople doing this and that but where are the cit-izens among us?" Everyone must be involved.There are no experts.

    So the word transcendent comes to mindwhen I think of the role of the artist in dealingwith the issues of the day. I use that word to sug-gest that the role of the artist is to transcend con-ventional wisdom, to tra-nscend the word of theestablishment, to transcend the orthodoxy, to gobeyond and escape what is handed down by thegovernment or what is said in the media. Somepeople in the arts and in other professions think,"Yes, let's get involved. Let's get involved in theway we are told to." You see them getting intoIine in the way they are expected to when thepresident asks them to do so. And that is echoedby everyone else in politics.

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    , Howard Zinn

    How many times have I read in the press sinceSeptember 11 that "We must be united"? Whatdo they mean by that? I would like us to be unit-ed. But united around what? When people say wemust be united, they state explicitly or implicit-ly that we must be united around whatever thepresident tells us to do.

    CBS news anchor Dan Rather is an anchor ofthe establishment. He has gone on TV and said,"Bush is my president. When he says get intoline, I get into line." After I heard Rather's com-ments/ I thought, here is an important and influ-ential journaiist who's forgotten the first rule ofjournalism: Think for yourself. He's forgottenwhat I.F. Stone, one of the greatest journalists ofthe twentieth century once said. Stone used towrite for major newspapers until he realized hewasn't allowed to say certain things. So he leftthe mainstream media and set up his ownnewsletter, L F. Stone's Weekly. It became famousfor providing information that you couldn't getanywhere else. He was invited to speak to jour-nalism classes. He told the students, "I am going

    Artists illimes of lfgr

    to tell you a number of things, but iI you reallywant to be a good iournalist you only have toremember two words: governments he. Not iustthe U.S. govemment, but, in general, all govern-ments lie." That may sound like aq anarchiststatement, but the anarchists have somethingthere. They are right to be skepticd and suspicious of those who hold official powe! becausethe tendency of those who hold that power is tolie in order to maintain it.

    When Dan Rather made his statement, he vio-lated the Hippocratic oath of iournalists, whichimplies that you must think for yourself.Rather's cornment is the kind you would expectfrom a journalist in aiotalitarian state, but notfrom someone in a democracy.

    Then you have Al Gore, who accepted hisdefeat so graciously that he became humble.Overwhelmingly humble. So much so that whenSeptember 11 happened Gore announced, "Bushis my commander in chief." I thought, I dontthink he's read the Constitution. The Constitutionsays the president is the commander in chief of the,I

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  • , Howard Zinn

    armed forces only. He's not the commander inchief of the entire country. Gore's behavior isanother example of people rushing to get into line,to get inside the perimeter of power.

    It is the job of the artist to transcend that-tothink outside the boundaries of permissiblethought and dare to say things that no one elsewill say. Fortunately, throughout history wehave had artists who dared to do this. I think ofMark Twain, the great novelist who wrote sto-ries that everyone loved. When the United Stateswent to war against Spain.in 1898, Tlvain spokeout. Spain was quickly defeated in what wascdled "a splendid little war." But when theUnited States went after the Philippines, thatwasn't a splendid little war. It was long and ugly.The Filipinos wanted to rule themselves.

    TWain was one of the voices speaking outagainst this war, which in many ways foreshad-owed the Vietnam War. By 1906, the war hadbeen going on for five years and several hundredthousand Filipinos were dead. You won't findmuch in your history books about that. The U.S.

    Army committed a massacre. You might call itan act of terrorism in the sense that innocentpeople were mowed down. Six hundred men,women, and children were murdered. PresidentTheodore Roosevelt sent a me$sage to GeneralLeonard Wood who carried out this operationagainst virtually unarmed Muslims in the south-ern Philippines: 1'I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the bril'liant feat of arms wherein you and they so wellupheld the honor of the American flag." TWaindenounced Roosevelt. He became one of theleading protesters against the war in thePhilippines. He stepped out of his role as iust astoryteller and jumped into the fray.t

    TWain dared to say things that so many in thecountry were not saying. Of course, right away, hispauiotism was questioned. As soon as you speakoutside the boundaries, 4s soon as you say thingsthat are different from wliat the establishment, themedi4 and leading intellectuds als gslling you tosay, the question of your patriotism arises.

    Tkain wrote something very interesting

  • Howard Zinnabout loyaity in his novel A Connecticut yankeein King Arthw's Court:

    You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty toone's country, not to its institutions or itsofficeholders. The country is the real thing,the substantial thing, the eternal thing it isthe thing to watch over, and care {or, and beloyal to; institutions are extraneous/ theyare its mere clothing, and clothing can wearout, become ragged, cease to be comfort-able, cease to protect the body from winteqdisease, and death. To be loyal to rags, toshout for rags, to worship rags, to die forrags-that is a loyalty of unreason, it ispure animal; it belongs to monarchy, wasinvented by monarchy; let monarchy keepit. I was from Connecticut, whose Consti-tution declares "that all political power isinherent in the people, and dl free govern-ments are founded on their authority andinstituted for their benefit; and that theyhave at all times an undeniable and inde-feasible right to alter their form of govern-ment in such a manner as they may thinkexpedient."2

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    Artists in Times of War

    Mark Twain's idea of loyalty is importantbecause, in the present discussion, boundarieshave been set and lines have been drawn. Thosewho go outside those boundaries and criticizeo{ficial poiicy are called unpatriotic and disloyal'When people make such accusations against dis-senters, they have forgotten the meaning of loy-alty and patriotism. Patriotism does not meansupport for your government. It means, as MarkTivain said support for your country' The femi-nist anarchist Emma Goldman said, at roughlythe same time as TWain, that she loved the coun-try but not the government.3

    To criticize the government is the highest actof patriotism. If someone accuses you of notbeing patriotic, you ought to remind him or herof the Declaration of Independence. Of course,everyone praises the Declaration when it is hungup on a classroom wall, but not when people readit and understand it. During the Vietnam War, asoldier was disciplined for putting it up on hisbarracks wall. The Declaration of Independencesays that governments are artiJicial creations'

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    Howard Zinn

    They are set up by the people of the country roachieve certain objectives, the equality of allpeople and the right to "Life, Liberty and the pur-suit of Happiness." And "whenever any Form ofGovernment becomes destructive of theseends," the Declaration says, ,,it is the Right ofthe People to alter or to abolish it, and to insti-tute [a] new Government." That,s democraticdoctrine. That's the idea of democracy.Therefore, ,there are times when it becomesabsolutely patriotic to point a finger at the gov-eilrment to say that it is not doing what it shouldbe doing to safeguard the right of citizens to life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

    Today everybody is talking about the fact thatwe live in one world because of globalization,we are all part of the same planet. They talk thatway, but do they mean it? We should test theirclaims. We should remind them that the wordsof the Declaration apply not only to people inttris country but also to people all over theworld. People everywhere have the same right tolife, liberty, and the pursuit of'happiness. When

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    Artists in Times of llar

    the government becomes destructive of that,then it is patriotic to dissent and to criticize-todo what we always praise and call heroic whenwe look upon the dissenters and critics in totali-tarian countries who dare to speak out.

    I want to point to some other artists whospoke out against war. The poet E. E' Cummingswrote "I sing of Olaf giad and big":

    i sing of Olaf giad and bigwhose warmest heart recoiled at war:a conscientious obiect-or

    but-though all kinds of officers(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride|their passive prey did kick and curseuntil for wear their alarion ,voices and boots were much the worse,and egged the firstclassprivates onhis rectum wickedly to teaseby means of skilfully apPlied

    - bayonets roasted hot with heat-Olaf(upon what were once knees)does almost ceaselesslY rePeat"there is some shit I will not eat"4

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  • Howard Zinn

    E. E. Cummings and other writers were reactingto World War I, to that geat martial spirit thatwas summoned up in 1917 to get the UnitedStates into the war. People were being herdedinto line, and the flag was being waved. Whenthe war ended, people looked at the 10 milliondead in Europe and asked, "What was this allabout?" AIter the initial period of flag wavingand bugle blowing, people began to think again-and to look at the terrible things they did. In war,terrible things are done on one side and terriblethings are done on the other side. Then, after awhile, the second thoughts come: What have wedone? What have we accomplished? That's whathappened after World War I.

    That experience of Wgrld War I led to thewritings of |ohn Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford,Ernest Hemingway, and to that great antiwarnovel lohnny Got His Gun,by Ddton Trumbo.sI recommend that book to everyone. You canread it in one evening. You won't forget it.

    It is important !o remember that wars lookgood to many people in the beginning because

    Artists in Times of l{ar

    something terrible has been done, and people feelthat something must be done in retaliation. Onlylater does the thinking and questioning begn.

    Remember that Worid War tr was the "goodwar." It wasn't until I was in a war that I realizedthat there are no such things as good wars andbad wars. I had a student who once wrote in herpaper/ "Wars are like wines. There are good yearsand bad years. But war is not like wine. War islike cyanide. One drop and you're dead."

    Eugene O'Neill, the great playwright, wrote thisto his son six months after Pearl Harbor, when thewhole country was being mobilized for war:

    It is like acid always b*"it;in my brainthat the stupid butchering of the last wartaught men nothing at all, that they sankback listlessly on the warm manure pile ofthe dead and went to sleep, indifferentlybestowing custody of their future, theirfate, into the hands of State departments,whose members are trained to be conspira-tots, card sharps, fouble-crbssers and secretbetrayers of their own people; into thehands of greedy capitalist ruling classes so

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    ' l|oward Zinnstupid they could not even see when theirown greed began devouring itself; into thehands of that most debased type of pimp,the politician, and that most craven of alllice and job-worshippers, the bureaucrats.6

    Well, I would never use such strong languagemyself, but I am willing to quote it when some-body else says it.

    When I talk about acting outside the bound-aries that are set for us, I am thinking of the ideaof our national power and our national good"ness-the idea that {,e ere the superpower in theworld, and we deserve to be because we are thebest, and we have the most democracy and free-dom. It's not only kind of arrogant to think thatterrible things are done to us because we are thebest-it is also a sigrr of a loss of history. We needto bring ourselves down a peg, to the level ofother nations in the world. We need to able tocome down to eatth and to recognize that theUnited States has behaved in the world the wayother imperialist nations have. It's not surprising.

    We have to be honest about our country. If we

    Artists in limes of War

    are going to be anything, if there is anything anartist should be-if there is anything a citizenshould be-it's honest. We must be able to look

    at ourselves, to look at our country honestly and

    clearly. And just as we can examine the awfulthings that people do elsewhere, we have to bewilling to examine the awful things that aredone here by our government.

    Langston Hughes, the great African Americanpoet, wrote a poem called "Columbia.t' For him,

    "Columbia" meant the United States:

    Columbia,My dear girl,You really haven't been a virgin {or so longIt's ludicrous to keep up the pretext.You're terribly involved in world assignationsAnd everybody knows it.You've slept with all the big PowersIn military uniforms,$.nd you've taken the sweet lifeOf all the little brown fellowsIn loin cloths and cotton trousers.When they've resisted,You've yelled, "Rape,"

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    Being one of the world's big vampires,Why don't you come on out and say soLike |apan, and England, and France,And all the other nymphomaniacs of powerWho've long since dropped theirSmoke-screens of innocenceTo sit frankly on a bed of bombs?7

    We live in a rich and powerful country and, yes,a country with great'-'traditions like theDeclaration of Independence and the Bill ofRights. But our greatest traditions and proudestexperiences have come not from government butfrom what the people of the United States havedone when they have banded together to fightagainst injustices like slavery. They have comefrom what working people have done to changethe conditions of their own lives because thegovernment would do nothing. Well, the govern-ment would do something. It would send thetroops and the National Guard and the police outto club and shoot workers.

    We have to think about what kind of country

    A[tists in Times of l{arwe want to be in the world and whether it is

    important for us to be a superpower' Whatshould we take pride in? That we are thestrongest? That we are the richest? That we havethe most nuclear weapons? That we have themost TVs and cars? Are those the things we wantto be most proud of? Is that really strength, or isit something else?

    One of the artists whose work I think of astranscendent is |oseph Heller, the author ofCatch-22.e If, right after World War II, someonehad written a nonfiction book on the ambiguitiesof war and the atrocities committed by the sup-posed good gpys-if someone had written sug-gesting that "the greatest generation," as TomBrokaw calls it,9 was not necessarily the greatest;that the con{lict was fiiuch niore complicated,because wal corrupts everyone who engages in it,and soon the good guys wouid begin to look likethe bad guys-such a book would have been dif-ficult to publish. There was such a glow sur-rounding that war. But Heller could write a novelllke Catch-22. Artists can be sly. They can point

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    l|oward Zinnto things that take you outside traditional think-ing because you can get away with it in fiction.People say, "Oh, well it's fiction." But rememberwhat Pablo Picasso said: "Art is a lie that makesus realize truth."lO Aft moves away from realityand invents something that may be ultimatelymore accurate about the world than what a pho-tograph can depict.

    |oseph Heller was one of these writers whocould use fiction to say things that could not easi-ly be said in non-fiction. Yossarian is Heller's crazybombardier protagonist. He's crary because hedoesn't want to fly *y more missions. He's hadenough of war. If he wanted to bomb, he'd be sane.

    At one point in the novel, another character inthe book, Nately, is in a brothel in Italy talkingto an old Italian. He's puzzled because fhe mansays that America will lose because it's so strongand ltaly will survive because it's so weak.ll Theold man wasn't talking about losing or winningthe war. He was talking about the long run ofhistory. It makes you think again about what wedefine as strength and what we define as weak-

    Artists in Iimes of l{ar

    ness. The strong, by extending their strength toevery corner of the world, become more andmore vulnerable-and, as a result, ultimatelyweaker. The old man and Nately have anotherinteresting exchange about nationalism:

    "There is nothing Sb absurd about riskingyour life for your countryl" [Nately]declared.

    "Isn't there?" asked the old.man."What is a country? A country is a piece ofIand surrounded on all sides by boundaries,usually unnatural. Englishmen are dyrngfor England, Americans are" dying forAmerica, Germans are dying for Germany,Russians are dying for Russia. There arenow fifty or sixty countries fighting in thiswar, Swely so many countries can,t dl beworth dying for."r2

    Heller also has a powerful passage in Catch-22about the impact of the war on civilians. Whena number of his troops are about to go out on abombing run, Gend?al Petkem explains,"They'll be bombing a tiny undefended village,

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    lloward Zinnreducing the whole community to rubble.,,lBHelier had been a bombardi", i" ,i.-"rr force.He understood thryou orten n,.,"'0',1;:T*iilTi,il,i i::gets so you will believe it. But ii is the natureof bombing that you never bomb only militarytargets.

    Kurt Vonnegut also wrote a novel set duringY"ttd War II, Slaughterhouse-Five.-lq i" *ror.about the British and Americ"., bombing ofDresden, in which perhaps 100,000 civiliansdied. To write about this and denounce it innonfiction would have been d;f;t.rlr, butVonnegut was ablt

    Dresden in a novel. : to reveal the horror of

    During the Vietnadif f e,ent-war.,;;;;f,il1;:H:'J;j._T:l:Lowell was invited to the White House and herefused. Arthur Miller also refused * alrrl,rorr.The singer EarthaKitt was invited to the WhiteHouse for a social event in lanuary 196g. Herewas a singer who was Dof srrnnno-r'.^ r. _-'

    any attention to the ;:;Tji::':r:""?::1T:

    Artists in limes of l{arspoke out against it. She told Lady Bird fohnson,"You send the best of this country off to be shotand maimed."ls It was shocking. An artist wasnot supposed to do such things.

    But artists were doing all sorts of things dur-ing that period to show that they were citizensand that they were thinking outside the bound-aries. They showed that they were transcendingthe given wisdom. An artist named SeymourChwast did a poster that was reproduced every-where. It was a very simple poster. It iust said,"War is Good for Business-Invest your Son.,,

    Great music was being written and performedduring that era by musicians who insisted onbeing considered not just as musicians but aspeople who were so moved by what was going onthat they had to say something. Bob Dyian wrotehis song, "Masters of War,,:

    Come you masters of warYou that build all the gunsYou that build the death planesYou that build the big bombsYou that hide behind walls

  • g||oward ZinnYou that hide behind desksI iust want you to knowI can see through your masks

    You that never done nothin'But build to destroyYou play with my worldLike it's your little toyYou put a gun in my handAnd you hide from my eyesAnd you turn and run fartherWhen the fast bullets flv

    Like |udas of oldYou lie and deceiveA world war can be wonYou want me to believeBut I see through yoru eyesAnd I see through your brainLike I see through the waterThat runs down my drain

    You fasten the triggersFor the others to fireThen you set back and watchWhen the death count gets higherYou hide in your mansionAs young people's blood

    Artists in Times of l{atFlows out of their bodies

    ' And is buried in the mud

    You've thrown the worst fearThat can ever be hurledlear to bring childrenInto the worldFor threatening mY babYUnborn and unnamedYou ain't \Morth the bloodThat runs in Your veins

    Let me ask You one questionIs your money that goodWill it buy you forgivenessDo you think that it couldI think you will findWhen your death takes its tollAll the moneY You madeWill never buY back Your soul.16

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    The trick in acting transcendentally is to think,Whag questions are the voices of authority notasking?

    I am saying all this at a time when it is unpop'ular to speak against the bombing of Afghanistan

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    . Howard Zinn

    or lraq. The undeniable truth is that some fanat-ical group killed 3,000 people in New York Cityand Washington. The government has leapt fromthat to "Therefore, we must bomb.',

    We've always met violence with violence. Butil you knew some history when this happened,you would ask, "What was the result?"

    It would help to redefine the word "terror-ism." What happened on September 11 was anact of terrorism. But to isolate it from the histo-ry of terrorism will dangerously mislead you.This act of terrorism exploded in our facesbecause it was right next door. But acts of ter-rorism have been going on throughout theworld for a long time. I bring that up not to min-imize or diminish the terror of what happenedin New York and Washington but to enlarge ourcompassion beyond that. Otherwise, we willnever understand what happened and what wemust do about it.

    When we enlarge the question and defineterrorism as the killing of innocent people forsome presumed political purpose, then you

    Artists in Times of l{ar

    find that all sorts of nations, as well as individ'

    uals and groups, have engaged in terrorism'Along with individual and group tetrorism'there is state terrorism. When states commit

    terrorism, they have far greater means at theirdisposal for killing people than individuals ororganizations.

    The United States has been responsibie foracts of terrorism. When I say that, people mightsay, "You are trying to minimize what wasdone." No, I'm not trying to do that at all' I'mtrying to enlarge our understanding' The UnitedStates and Britain have been responsible ior thedeaths of large numbers of innocelt people in theworld. It doesn't take too much knowledge ofhistory to see that. Think of Vietnam, Laos, and

    Cambodia. Miliions died because the UnitedStates was interested*in "the rubber, tin andother commodities" of the region'l7 Think ofCentral America. Think of the 200,000 dead inGuatemala as a result of a government that theUnited States armed and supported'

    I know all this is unsettling. We don't want to

  • , Howard Zinn

    hear criticism of the U.S. government when wehave been the victims of a terrorist act. But wehave to think carefully about what we have to doto end terrorism. We have to think aboutwhether bombing and occupying Afghanistan orIraq is going to stop terrodsm. Is further terror'ism going to stop it? Because war is terrorism.War in our time inevitably involves the killing ofinnocent people.

    So far, the United States has killed.as manyor more people in Afghanistan as lost their liveson September 11.18 There are perhaps hundredsof thousands of Iraqis who have died in Iraq as aresult of the current and previous Gulf Warsand the sanctions we have imposed andenJorced. It is not a matter of measuring-theykilled more than us or we killed more thanthem. We have to see all these things as atroci-ties and figure out what to do about it. You can'trespond to one terrorist act with war, becausethen you are engaging in the same kind ofactions that terrorists engage in. That thinkinggoes like this: "Yes, innocent people died, too

    Artists in llfnes ofl{ar'bad. It was done for an important purpose' It

    was 'collateral damage'' You must accept 'col-

    lateral damage' when you are doing something

    important." That's how terrorists fustifu what

    they do' And that's how nations justifu whatthey do.

    I am asking all of us to think carefuIly and

    clearly. For iJ we are all being herded into actions

    that will make the world even more dangerous

    than it is now, we will later regret that we went

    along silently and did not raise our voices as cit-

    izens to ask, "How can we get at the roots of this

    problem? Is it right to meet violence with vio-

    lence?" All of us can dfsomeifuin& can ask ques-

    tions, can sPeak uP.I want to end by quoting a poem by the peace

    activist Daniel Berrigan' He has long struggled

    against war and militarism' He wrote this poem

    ii the memory of his friend Mitch Snyder' who

    had wsrked for many years for the homeless in

    Washington, D.C. Snyder became disconsolate

    that the goverlunent was fuilding jet planes'bombers, nuclear submarines, and missiles' but

  • IO 20&l by Howard Zinn

    Open Media series editor, Greg Ruggiero.

    All rights reserved. No pelt of this book may be reproduced, storedin a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means,including mechanical, electric, photocopyr+g, recording or other-wise, without the prior written pelmission of the publisher.

    In Canada: Hushion Houee,35 Northline Road, Toronto, OnterioM4B 382

    ln the U.K.: TL[naround Publisher Servicee Ltd., Unit 3, Olympiaftsding Estate, Coburg Road, Wood Green, London N22 6T2

    ln Australia: Palgrave Macmillart,62T Chqel Street, South Yarra,v lc 3l4l

    Cover photo and design: Greg RuggieroPhoto taken September 14, 2A01, Union Square, New York City

    Zim, Howerd, 1922-Artists in times of war / Howard Zinn.

    p.cm.Includes bibliographical references {p. ).ISBN l-58322-602-8 {pbk : alk. paper)l. Peace movements-United States-History. 2. Government,Resistance to-United States-History. 3. Art and society-UnitedStates. 4. Artists-United States-Political activiry-History. 5.War on Terrorisn, 2001- 6. Goldman, Emma, 1869-1940. 7.Anarchists-United States-Biography. 8. Motion pictures-Political aspects-United States. 9. Pamphleteers-United States-History. 10. Prctest movements-United States-History. I. Title.fzss84.u6z56 20033O3.6'6-dc22

    Printed in Canada.

    987654321

    Contents

    Artists in Times o{.War 7

    Emma Goldman, Anarchism, andWar Resistance 39

    Stories Holiywood Never Tells 63

    Pamphleteering in nmerica gg

    Notes 109

    About the Author I I I

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  • n\,

    l|onard Zinnit didn't have enough money to take care of thehomeless. Snyder became so depressed by thissituation that he killed himself. Berrigan wrotethis poem:

    ln Loving Memory-Mitchell Snyder

    Some stood up once and sat down,Some wdked a mile and walked away.Some stood up twice then sat down,I've had it, they said.

    Some walked two miles, then walked away,It's too much, they cried.Some stood and stood and stood.they were taken for foolsthey were taken for being taken in.

    Some walked and walked and walked.They walked the earththey walked the watersthey walked the air.

    Why do you stand?they were aske{ andwhy do you walkl

    Artists in Times of lfor

    Because of the children, they said, andbecause of the heart, andbecause of the bread.

    Beiause athe causeis the heart's beatand the children bornand the risen bread.l9

    36 37