Howard Zinn's criticisms of the American revolutionary war

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The Three "Holy" Wars

Howard Zinn's criticisms of the American revolutionary war and others:

 
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Extremist political activists tend to see extremism on the other side even when it doesn't exist. So after not buying his premise, I didn't get past 2 minutes.
 


Extremist political activists - a label.
I didn't get past 2 minutes. - an admission of limited attention span?

You should listen to more. IMHO

He speaks of :

Canada - England
US - England

Who gains what? due to war?

Life Liberty and Property.

It's not like this guy is just 'Joe the Plumber'
PHD in History.

He asked what is the real cost of WAR.
Human cost of war. Each and EVERY person. Was it worth it?

Draft riots?
( I will not kill for another person ... )
... I ABSOLUTLY agree ... For ME ...
NO ..People 'at the top' do not...can not .. will not.. EVER ... tell ME to kill another human..on their say so. Not for ANY reason of theirs.

Did the WAR succeed? Was the goal of the WAR do what it intended?

The simple conclusion ... WAR cannot be accepted. You get my point. I enjoyed the listen. I can agree with most of his points.
I think everyone should be able to get beyond a few sentences. and just listen to the whole thing.

thanks Pythagorean. Good listen.
 


come on Russ :)

I've read your thoughts before. You had some good points, Well articulated.
Often I agree with you.
This time you ... dismiss this guy because ... "So after not buying his premise"
but .. without saying why?
non-typical for you.

Go for it... tell us ( me ) what the dude said that is incorrect.
 


His premise is that people can't/don't criticize the three "holy" wars in the US. But people do criticize them, so his premise is flawed. So since his premise is flawed, what would be the point of listening to an argument based on a faulty premise?

And logically, the reason why he sees these wars to be not criticized enough even though they actually are criticized, must be that he criticisms them too much or is too focused on the criticism. IOW, he holds an extreme position.
 


I've just read the transcript. He just seems to be saying wars are messy, and are not fought for the reasons stated. I'd agree with him on the first two, in that both could have been met without a war, thankfully he doesn't even ask the question about WWII. IMO that was a just war, it could only not be seen as so from an American-centric perspective, and even then that can't be an easy case to answer. There was a bit more to it than the "end of fascism in Europe". I think you could argue that a war to remove Mussolini may not be necessary, but I don't see how you can argue this for Hitler or Hirohito. There are just wars, no war is a good war. Surely comparisons with conflicts from the First Gulf War onwards are facile (with Munich!), and are only there due to politicians trying to justify these wars. I don't see where the comparison is. Korea and Vietnam have some justification due to Soviet expansion aims. War cannot be tolerated, but sometimes there is just no other choice, such as WWII, and possibly Korea and Vietnam IMO.
 


In high school, I was taught that the revolutionary war was a just war. This is the first I'd heard of american rebels being executed by Washington. They don't teach that in any school I attended all the way through college. That's just one example of the things I "learned" from this talk (admittedly, I don't know the context, though).
 


i don't remember there being much criticism at all in K-12 education. while there is criticism, it is mostly reserved for the few that choose to pursue history degrees, and a few amateurs that will probably be labeled as crackpots if they deviate from the accepted narratives.

problem now is a lack of deviates.
 


Having watched it now, I was as unimpressed as I expected. I watched it while on my exercise bike so I could be sure I wouldn't waste my time. It's just the typical mixture of contradiction, misrepresentation and shortsighted wishful thinking from an anti-war activist. The existence of the speech of course directly contradicts its own premise that people don't criticize those wars, but a deeper contradiction lies in his criticism that wars are fought based on imagining a favorable outcome that may not happen with war or could happen without war. That's true, but his argument is exactly the same, from the opposite direction: imagining, in hindsight, a favorable outcome that could have happened without war.

For misrepresentation, how about his treatment of the Korean war? It didn't have a good outcome because S. Korea was still a dictatorship after the war? I have a hard time accepting that he believes his own argument given the stark disparity in living conditions between the two Koreas today. Note: it is estimated that 3.5 million people died of starvation in N. Korea in the 1990s (from the wiki).

cobalt124 said:
I've just read the transcript. He just seems to be saying wars are messy, and are not fought for the reasons stated.
I'm pretty sure besides the thesis in his title, the main thesis is that just having a just cause doesn't necessarily make for a just war because the favorable outcome that you hope for may not happen or could have happened without war.

While the second part is true and trivially obvious - you don't know for sure what is going to happen until it has happened - it doesn't have an ethical component to it so it really doesn't say anything about whether a war is just. A war doesn't have to be in hindsight the best course of action in order to be just.
I'd agree with him on the first two, in that both could have been met without a war, thankfully he doesn't even ask the question about WWII. IMO that was a just war, it could only not be seen as so from an American-centric perspective, and even then that can't be an easy case to answer. There was a bit more to it than the "end of fascism in Europe".
Actually, he did talk about WWII, 2/3 of the way through or so. What he said strongly implied to me that Hitler could have been defeated without...something...I don't even know what, since Hitler rolling tanks across Europe kinda took the decision out of anyone else's hands.
 
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Pythagorean said:
In high school, I was taught that the revolutionary war was a just war.
It was. The argument that it may have been possible to throw off the British without war doesn't have anything at all to do with the concept of just war.
This is the first I'd heard of american rebels being executed by Washington. They don't teach that in any school I attended all the way through college. That's just one example of the things I "learned" from this talk (admittedly, I don't know the context, though).
I don't remember learning about the PA Mutiny, but I only had the standard history classes and didn't major in it in college. If he didn't learn of it through grad school (and he was studying American History), that would imply to me a flaw. But it is tough to argue that something that gets 500 words on Wikipedia is being suppressed. Maybe that's just one of the beauties of the internet - it's all out there.

Whether the topic was worthy of being discussed in a one-year American history class, I don't know, but it only lasted 7 days and only one person (?) died. I did know that in most older wars, we had deserters and that they were typically shot, though.
 


russ_watters said:
Actually, he did talk about WWII, 2/3 of the way through or so. What he said strongly implied to me that Hitler could have been defeated without...something...I don't even know what, since Hitler rolling tanks across Europe kinda took the decision out of anyone else's hands.

I must have missed that, I may have another look. To me he asked explicitly whether the so called outcomes could have been achieved without war for the first two cases, but did not for WWII, which is fair enough because I don't see what alternative there was. Holocaust aside, as the war started without that being there to be an issue, European nations were fighting for survival, not to eliminate fascism. I find it rather depressing that he felt the need to argue this point because the nature of these wars are being compared with Afghanistan, Iraq and so on, when they are obviously different. I find that scary.
 


The US declared war on Germany after the Germans had declared war on the US.
 


cobalt124 said:
I must have missed that, I may have another look.
He rambles, but at about 30 min he says WWII didn't get rid of fascism and too many people died (as if there is such a thing in war as not too many people dying?)... and then he says, coming out of the WWII talk: "war cannot be accepted, no matter what"...and then he defines war with an incorrect and slanted definition.
 


Russ,

I did not major in history either, and I'm sure there's demographic differences, but my high school history program was about praise for the forefathers and the flag.

russ_watters said:
He rambles, but at about 30 min he says WWII didn't get rid of fascism and too many people died (as if there is such a thing in war as not too many people dying?)...

Wait, so you think one person dying in a war is too many? So what exactly is extreme about his point of view?

The praise-criticisms I've read of him are that while criticisms on the U.S. are generally accurate, he tends to romanticize the U.S. enemy's position.
 


russ_watters said:
he says WWII didn't get rid of fascism

Yes, that aim has been put there in hindsight IMO.

russ_watters said:
and too many people died

Thats an odd thing to say in the case of WWII. I think there's a case for arguing greater numbers dying if the Allies had not gone to war. And even if this was not the case, the measure of the severity of the war in total deaths alone breaks down. Other factors need to be taken into account.

russ_watters said:
"war cannot be accepted, no matter what"

And his sentiment here I just disagree with and seems to slant his argument, which should be an objective one.

Pythagorean said:
Wait, so you think one person dying in a war is too many?

Presumably the point here is that one man dying would never be called a war anyway, so his definition of war weakens his argument.

Pythagorean said:
So what exactly is extreme about his point of view?

To me he doesn't have an extreme point of view, just a wrong one regarding non-U.S. history.

Pythagorean said:
he tends to romanticize the U.S. enemy's position.

Which is something an Historian should not be doing IMO.
 


Zinn: "war cannot be accepted, no matter what"

I disagree with this too because it's only from the basis of "anything is possible" that alternatives to war exist. Of course it's unreasonable to imply that governing peoples always a) have the means or knowledge of an alternative or that they b) don't try to find one.

"extremist"

Yeah. There's really no need to invoke character for the discussion anyway (it's best to talk about ideas and events instead of people).

"accuracy"

I have no knowledge of his accuracy, US or not, as my history is weak. Which is why I posted it. I try to filter out interpretations and pathos and just analyze the logos statements.

"one man dying"

I was the one that quantified one man dying, Russ's effective logical statement was "no man should die" from which follows that "one man dying is too many".
 


Pythagorean said:
Russ,

I did not major in history either, and I'm sure there's demographic differences, but my high school history program was about praise for the forefathers and the flag.
Mine wasn't. We did discuss uncomfortable things such as the what happened to the american indians. I also remember learning about the Whiskey Rebellion. The PA Insurrection that he mentions was pretty small and I doubt we learned about it.
Wait, so you think one person dying in a war is too many? So what exactly is extreme about his point of view?
Just because too many people died that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been done. One can always think of hypothetical ways less people might have been killed and to some, even one death is too many.
 
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Zinn was a scary fellow, to me:
“Objectivity is impossible,” Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”
http://hnn.us/articles/1493.html

The job of an historian is to tell what happened and why as accurately and objectively as possible. But he saw history as a propaganda tool he could use for his social activism. There is nothing wrong with being an activist, but it is dishonest for an historian to manipulate history for that purpose and scary that people don't recognize him for what he was (he sold 2 million books and is on many college reading lists!).
 


russ_watters said:
Zinn was a scary fellow, to me: http://hnn.us/articles/1493.html

The job of an historian is to tell what happened and why as accurately and objectively as possible. But he saw history as a propaganda tool he could use for his social activism. There is nothing wrong with being an activist, but it is dishonest for an historian to manipulate history for that purpose and scary that people don't recognize him for what he was (he sold 2 million books and is on many college reading lists!).

I was giving him the benefit, I thought he was misguided or sloppy. If he is actually justifying this stance, that isn't good.
 


russ_watters said:
Mine wasn't. We did discuss uncomfortable things such as the what happened to the american indians. I also remember learning about the Whiskey Rebellion. The PA Insurrection that he mentions was pretty small and I doubt we learned about it. Just because too many people died that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been done. One can always think of hypothetical ways less people might have been killed and to some, even one death is too many.

There were two PA insurrections. For the small one, Washinton had them executed. For the larger one, jail time.

I still think "one death is too many" is an extreme point of view. What I find not to be an extreme point of view is that enlisting masses that have little to do with the conflict between leaders is "wrong". Determining whether the enlisted masses have anything to do with the leader's conflicts is the difficult part. We can always argue hypotheticals (i.e. "if it wasn't for the atomic bomb, you'd speak Japanese instead of English") but that's not very satisfactory or compelling.
 


Pythagorean said:
We can always argue hypotheticals (i.e. "if it wasn't for the atomic bomb, you'd speak Japanese instead of English") but that's not very satisfactory or compelling.

I think this does not apply for WWII from Europes perspective. What Hitler planned for Europe, and Hirohito for East Asia was pretty clear and wasn't pretty. Less clear from a U.S. perspective maybe.
 


cobalt124 said:
I think this does not apply for WWII from Europes perspective. What Hitler planned for Europe, and Hirohito for East Asia was pretty clear and wasn't pretty. Less clear from a U.S. perspective maybe.

What Hitler planned is not arbitrary or hypothetical. What "would have actually happened" is hypothetical.
 


Pythagorean said:
What Hitler planned is not arbitrary or hypothetical. What "would have actually happened" is hypothetical.

Yes point taken. I'll confess I'm not as objective as maybe I should be, but in the case of WWII I find it hard to see not fighting the war as ever having a better outcome (and how Hitlers plans would have been stopped), and doesn't compare with Zinns previous two examples. This war affected at least two continents, not one nation, and the only questions I can see that need asking is how the war could have been prevented post WWI. But yes, what ifs and hypotheticals are not much use.
 


Yeah, I really don't see any alternative to WW II either. But I'm politically and historically ignorant.
 


I don't agree with his premise. I've heard and read people criticising various aspects of all three of the wars he mentions.

Bottom line, war sucks. Unfortunately, sometimes the only alternative is to be a dead doormat.