A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
By Howard Zinn
(City Lights, 2006)
308 pp. $16.95
In a new compilation of essays, activist historian Howard Zinn tells the story of Sergeant Jeremy Feldbusch who wakes up blind five weeks after a shell explosion in the Iraq War puts him in a coma. Jeremy's father sits beside him in the army hospital and wonders "if God thought you had seen enough killing."
Zinn, our elder statesman of progressive American history, begins his opening essay with this story to reflect back on a long, painful pattern of young people enticed to enlist in seemingly just military causes whose devastated lives become forgotten statistics. This flashback narrative approach is Zinn's compelling trademark, bringing history alive by casting current political controversies in a stark historical light that reveals how today's injustices echo through American history.
As in A People's History of the United States, which many conscientious high school teachers use to counterbalance the ideological slant of standard history texts, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress will help students harness history as a critical tool. Zinn details the ugly underside of oppression in U.S. history, while celebrating long-ignored examples of courageous resistance that can inspire the activist looking for models. In one essay he describes how a speech he gave to memorialize the Boston Massacre at the city's landmark Faneuil Hall became an occasion to reflect on massacres American forces have perpetrated since Puritan settlers slaughtered over 600 Pequot Indians in 1636.
Zinn not only brings home the visceral realities of war, but asks troubling questions about the connection between war and other manifestations of violence in America. Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, killing 168 people, also fought in the first Gulf War when an American bomb dropped on a Baghdad air raid shelter killed three times as many innocents. Zinn's point is not to evaluate the relative horror of atrocities, but to establish a link between aggressive military action abroad and violence at home. He speaks unequivocally about the connection between war and terrorism. "War is terrorism magnified hundreds of times," he writes. "If an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians."