Just War Is Unjust

(Return to CO.Quaker.org Home Page) 2013-07-09T16:58:18#BeginEditable "Heading" Just and Unjust War2013-07-09T16:58:18#EndEditable 2013-07-09T16:58:18#BeginEditable "body" by Howard ZinnReprinted (with permission of the author) from the book Declarations of Independence, (...also found in The Zinn Reader, and Howard Zinn on War) I enlisted in the Army Air Corps in World War II and was an eager bombardier, determined to do everything I could to help defeat fascism. Yet, at the end of the war, when I collected my little mementos--my photos, logs of some of my missions--I wrote on the folder, without really thinking, and surprising myself: "Never Again." In the years after the war, I began to plumb the reasons for that spontaneous reaction, and came to the conclusions which I describe in the following essay, published as a chapter in my book Declarations of Independence (HarperCollins, 1990). Years before (in Postwar America, Bobbs Merrill, 1973), I had written an essay called "The Best of Wars," in which I questioned--I was unaware of anyone else asking the same question--the total acceptance of World War II. After my own experience in that war, I had moved away from my own rather orthodox view that there are just wars and unjust wars, to a universal rejection of war as a solution to any human problem. Of all the positions I have taken over the years on questions of history and politics, this has undoubtedly aroused the most controversy. It is obviously a difficult viewpoint to present persuasively. I try to do that here, and leave it to the reader to judge whether I have succeeded. There are some people who do not question war. In 1972, the general who was head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command told an interviewer, "I've been asked often about my moral scruples if I had to send the planes out with hydrogen bombs. My answer is always the same. I would be concerned only with my professional responsibility." It was a Machiavellian reply. Machiavelli did not ask if