Memorial Day Musings On "Just War"

Howard Zinn/photo by Robin Holland

We're in the middle of another Memorial Day Weekend in the US.

By happenstance, I've been reading the tail-end of NONVIOLENCE IN AMERICA edited by Staughton and Alice Lynd. (If you haven't heard of it, or the Lynds, it would be well worth a little time to become acquainted.)

The collection is made up of 56 documents that include Howard Zinn's "Just and Unjust Wars."

Zinn is more famous for his A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. But this essay is just as powerful. His basic premise is that there really is no such thing as a just war. Here's some of it:

"I have a friend in Japan who was a teenager when the war [WWII] ended. He lived in Osaka. He remembers very distinctly that on August 14, five days after the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese agreed to surrender on August 15. After Nagasaki, it was very clear that they were about to surrender in a matter of days, but on August 14, when everybody through the war was over, the bombers came over his city of Osaka and dropped the bombs. He remembers going through the streets and the corpses and finding leaflets also dropped along with the bombs saying: the war is over.

"Just causes can lead you to think that everything you then do is just. I suppose I've come to the conclusion that war, by its nature, being the indiscriminate and mass killing of large numbers of people, cannot be justified for any political cause, and ideological cause, any territorial boundary, any tyranny, and aggression. Tyrannies, aggressions, injustices, of course they have to be dealt with. No appeasement. They give us this multiple choice: appeasement or war. Come on! You mean to say between appeasement and war there aren't a thousand other possibilities? Is human ingenuity so defunct, is our intelligence so lacking that we cannot devise ways of dealing with tyranny and injustice without killing huge numbers of people?...

"Somehow at the beginning of it is some notion of justice and rightness. But that process has to be examined, reconsidered. If people do think about it they have second thoughts about it.

Howard Zinn

"One of the elements of this process is simply to play on people's need for community, for national unity. What better way to get national unity than around a war? It's much easier, simpler, quicker. And of course it's better for the people who run the country to get national unity around a war than to get national unity around giving free medical care to everybody in the country. Surely we could build national unity. We could create a sense of national purpose. We could have people hanging out yellow ribbons for doing away with unemployment and homelessness. We could do what is done when any group of people decides and the word goes out and the airwaves are used to unite people to help one another instead of to kill one another. It can be done.

"People do want to be part of a larger community. Warmakers take advantage of that very moral and decent need for community and unity and being part of a whole and use it for the most terrible of purposes. But it can be used the other way too."

THE ECONOMIC COSTS OF WAR

Issues of morality aside, the cost of war is enormous.

Take the US' war against Afghanistan.

Begun in 2001, it is now in its nineteenth year, making it the US' longest-running war.

During that time more than 24,000 civilians, 62,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers and 2,400 US soldiers have been killed.

The economic cost has been staggering: more than $1.07 trillion as of FY 2017.

And we still have US soldiers there.

It doesn't take much imagination to wonder what most of Afghanistan looks like after nineteen years of bombing.

According to World Vision there are 2.6 million Afghans living outside of their country mostly due to war, poverty and other related issues. There are another 2.4 million Afghans who are displaced living within their own country.

Besides Afghanistan, the top refugee-producing countries are: Syria 5.6 million, South Sudan 2.3 million, Mynamar (Burma) 1.2 million and the Democratic Republic of Congo 833,400. The vast majority, by far, of these refugees fled their countries because of war.

Yes, it is correct to remember those who have given their lives in combat. But it is also just as correct to pause and somberly reflect on the price we, as the human race, are paying for war, and summon the courage to figure out an alternative way of settling differences.