The images on
television have been heartbreaking. People on fire
leaping to their deaths from a hundred stories up.
People in panic and fear racing from the scene in
clouds of dust and smoke. We knew that there must be
thousands of human beings buried alive, but soon dead
under a mountain of debris. We can only imagine the
terror among the passengers of the hijacked planes as
they contemplated the crash, the fire, the end. Those
scenes horrified and sickened me.
Then our political leaders came on television, and I
was horrified and sickened again. They spoke of
retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment. We are at
war, they said. And I thought: they have learned
nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the
twentieth century, from a hundred years of
retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of
terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with
violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.
We can all feel a terrible anger at whoever, in their
insane idea that this would help their cause, killed
thousands of innocent people. But what do we do with
that anger? Do we react with panic, strike out
violently and blindly just to show how tough we are?
"We shall make no distinction," the
President proclaimed, "between terrorists and
countries that harbor terrorists." Will we now
bomb Afghanistan, and inevitably kill innocent
people, because it is in the nature of bombing to be
indiscriminate, to "make no distinction,"
as Bush said. Will we then be committing terrorism in
order to "send a message" to terrorists? We
have done that before. It is the old way of thinking,
the old way of acting. It has never worked. Reagan
bombed Libya, and Bush made war on Iraq, and Clinton
bombed Afghanistan and also a pharmaceutical plant in
the Sudan, to "send a message" to
terrorists. And then comes this horror in New York
and Washington. Isn't it clear by now that sending a
message to terrorists through violence doesn't work,
only leads to more terrorism?
Haven't we learned anything from the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Car bombs planted by
Palestinians provoke air attacks and tanks by the
Israeli government. That has been going on for years.
It doesn't work. And innocent people die on both
sides.
Yes, it is an old way of thinking, and we need to
think about the resentment all over the world felt by
people who have been the victims of American military
action. In Vietnam, where we carried out terrorizing
bombing attacks, using napalm and cluster bombs, on
peasant villages; in Latin America, where we
supported dictators and death squads in Chile and El
Salvador and other countries. In Iraq, where a
million people have died as a result of our economic
sanctions. And, perhaps most important for
understanding the current situation, in the occupied
territories of the West Bank and Gaza, where a
million and more Palestinians live under a cruel
military occupation, while our government supplies
Israel with high-tech weapons.
We need to imagine that the awful scenes of death and
suffering we are now witnessing on our television
screens have been going on in other parts of the
world for a long time, and only now can we begin to
know what people have gone through, often as a result
of our policies. We need to understand how some of
those people will go beyond quiet anger to acts of
terrorism.
We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion military
budget has not given us security. Military bases all
over the world, our warships on every ocean, have not
given us security. Land mines, a "missile
defense shield," will not give us security. We
need to rethink our position in the world. We need to
stop sending weapons to countries that oppress other
people or their own people. We need to decide that we
will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by
the politicians or the media, because war in our time
is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a
war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a
hundred times.
Our security can only come by using our national
wealth, not for guns, planes, bombs, but for the
health and welfare of our people -- for free medical
care for everyone, education and housing, guaranteed
decent wages and a clean environment for all. We can
not be secure by limiting our liberties, as some of
our political leaders are demanding, but only by
expanding them.
We should take our example not from our military and
political leaders shouting "retaliate" and
"war" but from the doctors and nurses and
medical students and firemen and policemen who have
been saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first
thoughts are not violence, but healing, not vengeance
but compassion.
Howard Zinn
is the author of A People's History of the United
States. For more of his articles go to www.tompaine.com.
