RETALIATION
By Howard Zinn
 
The images on television have been heartbreaking. People on fire 
leaping to their deaths from a hundred stories up. People in panic 
and fear racing from the scene in clouds of dust and smoke. We knew 
that there must be thousands of human beings buried alive, but soon 
dead under a mountain of debris. We can only imagine the terror among 
the passengers of the hijacked planes as they contemplated the crash, 
the fire, the end. Those scenes horrified and sickened me. 
 
Then our political leaders came on television, and I was horrified 
and sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of 
punishment. We are at war they said. And I thought: they have learned 
nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the twentieth 
century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a 
hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met 
with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity. 
 
We can all feel a terrible anger at whoever, in their insane idea 
that this would help their cause, killed thousands of innocent 
people. But what do we do with that anger? Do we react with panic, 
strike out violently and blindly just to show how tough we are? "We 
shall make no distinction", the President proclaimed, between 
terrorists and countries that harbor terrorists". Will we now bomb 
Afghanistan, and inevitably kill innocent people, because it is in 
the nature of bombing to be indiscriminate, to "make no distinction"? 
Will we then be committing terrorism in order to "send a message" to 
terrorists?
 
We have done that before. It is the old way of thinking, the old way 
of acting. It has never worked. Reagan bombed Libya, and Bush made 
war on Iraq, and Clinton bombed Afghanistan and also a pharmaceutical 
plant in the Sudan, to "send a message" to terrorists. And then comes 
this horror in New York and Washington. Isn't it clear by now that 
sending a message to terrorists through violence doesn't work, only 
leads to more terrorism? 
 
Haven't we learned anything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 
Car bombs planted by Palestinians bring air attacks and tanks by the 
Israeli government. That has been going on for years. It doesn't 
work. And innocent people die on both sides. 
 
Yes, it is an old way of thinking, and we need new ways. We need to 
think about the resentment all over the world felt by people who have 
been the victims of American military action. In Vietnam, where we 
carried out terrorizing bombing attacks, using napalm and cluster 
bombs,on peasant villages. In Latin America, where we supported 
dictators and death squads in Chile and El Salvador and other 
countries. In Iraq, where a million people have died as a result of 
our economic sanctions, And, perhaps most important for understanding 
the current situation, in the occupied territories of the West Bank 
and Gaza, where a million and more Palestinians live under a cruel 
military occupation, while our government supplies Israel with high-
tech weapons. 
 
We need to imagine that the awful scenes of death and suffering we 
are now witnessing on our television screens have been going on in 
other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin 
to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our 
policies. We need to understand how some of those people will go 
beyond quiet anger to acts of terrorism.
 
We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion dollar military budget 
has not given us security. Military bases all over the world, our 
warships on every ocean, have not given us security. Land mines, 
a "missile defense shield", will not give us security. We need to 
rethink our position in the world. We need to stop sending weapons to 
countries that oppress other people or their own people. We need to 
decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by 
the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always 
indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War 
is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
 
Our security can only come by using our national wealth, not for 
guns, planes, bombs, but for the health and welfare of our people - 
for free medical care for everyone, education and housing guaranteed 
decent wages and a clean environment for all. We can not be secure by 
limiting our liberties, as some of our political leaders are 
demanding , but only by expanding them. . 
 
We should take our example not from our military and political 
leaders shouting "retaliate" and "war" but from the doctors and 
nurses and medical students and firemen and policemen who have been 
saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not 
violence, but healing, not vengeance but compassion.

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