Historian and social activist Howard Zinn died Wednesday 1/27 at age 87. I first corresponded with Howard Zinn in 2005 to request that he write an afterword to a book I was doing on the 2003 U.S. war on Iraq.

The book, which never got published, was a compilation of several of my articles containing a Millsian analysis of the war on Iraq and other contemporary issues involving war and global underdevelopment. Zinn sent me his comments on the first chapter of the book that dealt with the Iraq war. This is what he wrote, giving me permission to reproduce it with the book:

“M. Asadi's essay on the United States war in Iraq is both passionate in its commitment to human rights and rich in its use of data. It draws skillfully on C. Wright Mills and other scholars to paint a devastating portrait of the war, but also to reflect profoundly on the policies of the United States and their human consequences all over the world.”

Within those articles that formed the book, I used several excerpts from Zinn’s book “Declarations of Independence” and his “A People’s History of the United States”. Some of the more prominent ones are reproduced below:

On an artificial creation of segregation that is mimicked both in the Suburb/Black Ghetto division as well as the First World/Third World division:

“My air crew sailed to England on the Queen Mary. The elegant passenger liner had been converted into a troop ship. There were 16000 men aboard, and 4000 of them were black. The whites had quarters on the deck and just below the deck. The blacks were housed separately, deep in the holds of the ship, around the engine room, in the darkest dirtiest sections. Meals were taken in four shifts (except for the officers, who ate in prewar Queen Mary style, in a chandeliered ballroom- the war (World War II) was not being fought to disturb class privilege), and the blacks had to wait until three shifts of whites had finished eating.” (Zinn 1990:80)

On U.S. wars of “liberation”:

“The U.S. had instigated a war with Mexico and taken over half that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments and right of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had opened Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats…It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years… It had engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the “independent” state of Panama in order to build and control the canal. It sent 5000 Marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution and kept forces there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops there for nineteen years… Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times. By 1924 the finances of half of the twenty Latin American states were being directed to some extent by the United States. By 1935, over half of U.S. steel and cotton exports were being sold in Latin America. Just before World War 1 ended, in 1918, an American force of seven thousand landed at Vladivostok as part of an Allied intervention in Russia and remained there until early 1920. Five thousand more troops landed at Archangel, another Russian port…”. (Zinn 1995:399-400)

On the elite’s Higher Immorality and mass murder:

“… Wars continued (after World War 2), which the superpowers either initiated or fed with military aid or observed without any attempt to halt them. Two million people died in Korea; 2 to 5 million in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; one million in Indonesia; perhaps 2 million in the Nigerian Civil War; one million in the Iran-Iraq war; and many more in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. It is estimated that in the forty years after 1945; there were 150 wars, with 20 million casualties.” (Zinn 1990: 99)

On war and its human consequences:

 (Zinn 1990:280)
"The weapons addiction of all our political leaders… is a colossal waste of human resources, it dangers the survival of us all…If we think holding hostage the passengers of an airliner is unspeakably evil and call it terrorism, what name shall we give for holding hostage the entire human race?"

References:

Zinn, Howard. 1990. Declarations of Independence: Cross Examining American Ideology. New York: Harper Perennial.
Zinn, Howard. 1995. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Perennial Books