Bomb After Bomb: Howard Zinn

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I will say this without preamble. There is nothing noble or honourable about "our brave troops," they are nothing more than the killing machine of the government.

They would, if ordered, kill you and me, just as readily as in the past they have killed millions of other civilians and that does not make them brave troops, it makes them a very scary bunch of mercenaries dressed up in a uniform.

This then from the middle of the article by Howard Zinn, which goes someway to endorse my feelings.

Patriotism is defined as obedience to government, obscuring the difference between the government and the people. Thus, soldiers are led to believe that "we are fighting for our country" when in fact they are fighting for the government - an artificial entity different from the people of the country - and indeed are following policies dangerous to its own people.

And some of the rest.

I am stunned by the thought that we, the "civilized" nations, have bombed cities and countrysides and islands for a hundred years. Yet, here in the United States, which is responsible for most of that, the public, as was true of me, does not understand--I mean really understand--what bombs do to people. That failure of imagination, I believe, is critical to explaining why we still have wars, why we accept bombing as a common accompaniment to our foreign policies, without horror or disgust........


We might think that at least those individuals in the U.S. Air Force who dropped bombs on civilian populations were aware of what terror they were inflicting, but as one of those I can testify that this is not so. Bombing from five miles high, I and my fellow crew members could not see what was happening on the ground. We could not hear screams or see blood, could not see torn bodies, crushed limbs. Is it any wonder we see fliers going out on mission after mission, apparently unmoved by thoughts of what they have wrought.more