America’s Sacred Wars and the Case Against War

Claire Brooks

On May second, 2009, in Madison, Wisconsin, the historian Howard Zinn stood in front of an audience and asked a question that makes almost everyone immediately uncomfortable. Why are three specific American conflicts treated as completely holy, as event three wars you are simply not allowed to criticize?

Oliver Hart

He meant the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II.

Claire Brooks

Right. The sacred triad. And Zinn argued that American culture makes this instant, unthinking leap. We take a moral goal, like ending tyranny or abolishing slavery, and we automatically assume war was the only possible way to get there. But as Zinn put it, there is a distinction between a just cause and a just war.

Oliver Hart

That distinction is where the entire debate sits, isn't it? Because nobody sane argues that British colonial rule or slavery or Nazi aggression were good things. The cause was just. But Zinn is asking us to look at the actual mechanism we used to solve those problems, which was massive organized violence.

Claire Brooks

Exactly. Take the American Revolution. In school we learn independence from England, simple as that. Good guys win, liberty reigns. But Zinn brings out the numbers. Between twenty five thousand and fifty thousand American combatants died. Out of a population of three million, that is proportionally equivalent to two point five million deaths today.

Oliver Hart

Two point five million. That is an astounding number for a war we usually romanticize as a few skirmishes on country greens.

Claire Brooks

And it wasn't some unified, egalitarian uprising either. When poor soldiers mutinied over lack of pay in the New Jersey line, George Washington didn't negotiate. He ordered the leaders executed on the spot, shot by their own fellow mutineers. Meanwhile, wealthy landowners and merchants gained political power, while poor farmers, enslaved Black people, and Native Americans gained virtually nothing.

Oliver Hart

And didn't Zinn point out that before seventeen seventy five, farmers in Western Massachusetts had already effectively shut down British authority through pure nonviolent resistance?

Claire Brooks

Yes! They literally blocked the courthouses, refused to obey British officials, and drove royal authorities out of the area without firing a single shot. The political victory had already happened in places, but the narrative that took over was that bloody war was mandatory.

Oliver Hart

I, I, I see his point on the Revolution, Claire, but this is where I start pushing back on Zinn's broader frame. When you lump World War II into this sacrosanct triad, aren't you collapsing a critical moral boundary? Fighting an imperial power over taxes or territory is fundamentally different from stopping an active genocidal regime invading an entire continent in nineteen thirty nine.

Claire Brooks

Zinn would answer that by looking at the pure ethical math. His central argument was that war by its definition is the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends which are uncertain. The horrors, the corpses, the destruction, those are guaranteed means. But the noble outcome you were promised? That remains totally uncertain.

Oliver Hart

The guaranteed means versus the uncertain ends. Look at the Civil War. Over six hundred thousand dead. The actual human reality was field hospitals, thousands of amputations performed in muddy tents without anesthetics. And what happened after all that blood was shed? Slavery officially ended, yes, but the federal government abandoned millions of emancipated Black Americans into sharecropping, vagrancy laws, and decades of racial terror. Other nations, like Britain, ended slavery without slaughtering six hundred thousand of their own citizens.

Claire Brooks

And look at World War II. Fifty million dead worldwide. In March of nineteen forty five, American bombers hit Tokyo with firebombs, creating a firestorm that killed one hundred thousand civilians in a single night. I remember reading about that for the first time and just stopping. We incinerated women and children in their sleep, and we called it the Good War.

Oliver Hart

And did it end the broader forces we claimed to be fighting? Hitler and Mussolini were defeated, absolute praise for that, but did fifty million deaths eradicate global fascism, or militarism, or racism? We marched straight from nineteen forty five into decades of endless proxy wars, military expansions, and nuclear standoffs.

Claire Brooks

That brings us to what Zinn called the historical inevitability trap. Once a major event plays out a certain way in history, we fall into this mental trap where we assume it could only have happened that way. Hitler invades Poland, war lasts six years, fascism falls. Therefore, war was the only possible path. But Zinn insists that between military war and passive surrender, there are a thousand possibilities.

Oliver Hart

Like economic boycotts, mass labor strikes, general resistance movement strategies. He cited how the African National Congress dismantled Apartheid in South Africa without turning the country into an all out civil war.

Claire Brooks

Exactly. But I still wrestle with the practical limit here, Oliver. If a totalitarian regime is actively rounding people up for extermination, can nonviolent resistance work fast enough? Or does Zinn's absolute refusal to accept war leave vulnerable populations completely undefended while we try the other thousand possibilities?

Oliver Hart

That is the ultimate tension. Zinn's challenge isn't that nonviolence is easy or guaranteed to work every time. His challenge is that we have become so addicted to war that we don't even try to invent alternative paths before we unleash absolute horror. We treat violence as the automatic default instead of the ultimate failure.

Claire Brooks

And if we never question our standard stories about the holy wars of the past, we will keep accepting the next war as inevitable, too.

Oliver Hart

Well, that is certainly something to think about. Good chatting, Claire.

Claire Brooks

Talk soon, Oliver.