ARCHIVES: Howard Zinn’s take on Hollywood’s alliance with the Pentagon
Private Ryan Saves War
by Howard Zinn
REPOSTED BECAUSE THE DRUMS OF WAR ARE BEATING EVER LOUDER
Originally posted on 5 December 2012
Like so many World War II veterans (I could see them all around me in the theater audience), I was drawn to see Saving Private Ryan. I had volunteered for the Air Force at the age of twenty. After training as a bombardier, I went overseas with my crew to fly some of the last bombing missions of the European war.
I did not want the suffering of men in war to be used-yes, exploited-in such a way as to revive what should be buried along with all those bodies in Arlington Cemetery: the glory of military heroism.
The admiring critics of the movie give their own answer to that: It is a war movie, they say, not an anti-war movie.
Some viewers have asked how can anyone want to go to war after seeing such horror? But knowing the horrors of war has never been an obstacle to a quick build-up of war spirit by patriotic political speeches and an obsequious press.
All that bloodshed, all that pain, all those torn limbs and exposed intestines will not deter a brave people from going to war. They just need to believe that the cause is just. They need to be told: It is a war to end all wars (Woodrow Wilson), or we need to stop Communism (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon), or aggression must not go unpunished (Bush), or international terrorists have declared war on us (Clinton).
Yes, getting rid of fascism was a good cause. But does that unquestionably make it a good war? The war corrupted us, did it not? The hate it engendered was not confined to Nazis.
We put Japanese families in concentration camps.
We can argue endlessly over whether there was an alternative in the short run, whether fascism could have been resisted without fifty million dead. But the long-term effect of World War II on our thinking was pernicious and deep. It made war-so thoroughly discredited by the senseless slaughter of World War I-noble once again. It enabled political leaders- whatever miserable adventure they would take us into, whatever mayhem they would wreak on other people (two million dead in Korea, at least that many in Southeast Asia, hundreds of thousands in Iraq) and on our own-to invoke World War II as a model.
Communism supplanted Nazism as a reason for war, and when we could no longer point to Communism as a threat, a convenient enemy, like Saddam Hussein, could be compared to Hitler. Our leaders used glib analogies to justify immense suffering. The presumed absolute goodness of World War II created an aura of rightness around war itself (note the absence of a great movement of protest against the Korean War), which only an adventure as monstrously evil, as soaked in official lies as Vietnam, could dispel.
Vietnam caused large numbers of Americans to question the enterprise of war itself. Now, Saving Private Ryan, aided by superb cinematographic technology, draws on our deep feeling for the GIs in order to rescue not just Private Ryan but the good name of war.
I will not be surprised if Spielberg gets an Academy Award. Did not Kissinger get a Nobel Prize? The committees that give prizes are, too often, bereft of social conscience. But we are not bound to honor their choices.
To refresh my memory, I watched the video of All Quiet on the Western Front. With no musical background, without the benefit of modern cinematography, without fields of corpses, with no pools of blood reddening the screen, that film conveyed the horror of warfare more powerfully than Saving Private Ryan. The one fleeting shot of two hands clutching barbed wire, the rest of the body gone, said it all.
Our culture is in deep trouble when a film like Saving Private Ryan can pass by, like a military parade, with nothing but a shower of confetti and hurrahs for its color and grandeur.
Howard Zinn, was the author of the (justly) celebrated “A People’s History of the United States.”