Howard Zinn on History
I'm reading Howard Zinn on History at work on my lunch breaks. After reading several of his articles in The Progressive and TomPaine.com, I decided that I wanted to pick up his A People's History of the United States. They didn't have it when I stopped at Borders the other day so I picked up this one. It's a collection of his articles on history and how it applies to the present day that were published in several magazines. In the article I read today, he wrote how the dehumanization of the "enemy" has been a necessary accompaniment to war. "It is easier to explain atrocities if they are commited against infidels or people of an inferior race."

In the Gulf War, the dehumanization of the Iraqis consisted of not recognizing their existence. We were not bombing women, children, not bombing ordinary Iraqi young men in the act of flight or surrender. We were acting against a Hitler-like monster, Saddam Hussein, although the people we were killing were the Iraqi victims of that monster. When Colin Powell was asked about the Iraqi casualties he said that was "really not a matter I am terribly interested in."

The American people were led to accept the violence of the war in Iraq because the Iraqis were made invisible- because the United States only used "smart bombs." The major media ignored the enormous death toll in Iraq, ignored the report of the Harvard medical team that visited Iraq shortly after the war and found that tens of thousands of Iraqi children were dying because of the bombing of the water supply and the resultant epidemics of disease.

-Howard Zinn, Howard Zinn on History