Original_To:  JNET%"disarm-l@albnyvm1"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.disarm-l
Date:         Thu, 16 Apr 1992 18:32:00 PDT
From:         ORWELL@TRIUMFRG.BITNET
Subject:      WWII History for Adults (1)

I see Jay is up to his old tricks --  and common ones they are -- using the
mythological history of WWII (and here I mean mythological in the
Joseph Campbell sense, as a story which structures meaning, not as a
simple pejorative dismissal) to justify the continued massive
nation-state violence of the United States.
But one might draw very different conclusions when one knows the
real history.  One might decide, for example, from knowing the
prehistory of WWII, that the foreign policy of the United
States should be determined by committed American socialists, since it was
they who understood most clearly that the Spanish Civil War
was a clash between fascism and democracy, and the defeat of
democracy in Spain would encourage the forces of fascism
throughout Europe.

Howard Zinn effectively challenges the Manichean mythology of WWII
in his "A People's History of the United States"
(1980; 1990 HarperPerennial paperback edition.  This book, IMO, is required
reading for every American who wishes a history of the United States
from a viewpoint other than that of white males in the top few percent
of the income distribution), Chapter 16, "A People's War?":

""[WWII] was a war against an enemy of unspeakable evil.  Hitler's
Germany was extending totalitarianism, racism, militarism, and overt
aggressive warfare beyond what an already cynical world had
experienced.  And yet, did the governments conducting this war --
England, the United States, the Soviet Union -- represent something
significantly different, so that their victory would be a blow to
imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the world?

Would the behavior of the United States during the war -- in military
action abroad, in treatment of minorities at home -- be in keeping
with a "people's war"?  Would the country's wartime policies respect
the rights of ordinary people everywhere to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness?  And would postwar America, in its policies at
home and overseas, exemplify the values for which the war was
supposed to have been fought?

These questions deserve thought.  At the time of World War II,
the atmosphere was too dense with war fervor to permit them to be
aired.

For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless
countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks,
but not its record in world affairs.  ...

...[later in the chapter]  Was the war being fought to establish that
Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over
"inferior" races?  The United States' armed forces were segregated by
race.  When troops were jammed onto the "Queen Mary" in early 1945 to
go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed
down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as
possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the
slave voyages of old. ...""
[Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States".]

A more recent essay by Zinn included in his collection of essays
"Declarations of Independence" (1991, in paperback) is an even more
direct challenge to the mythology of WWII.

Ron Balden
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU