TD: Let me turn to another issue you certainly wrote about in the 60s, war crimes. But "war crimes" was the last charge to arrive in the mainstream in those years and the first to depart. We've certainly experienced many crimes in the last few years, from Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to Afghanistan. I wonder why, as a concept, it sticks so poorly with Americans?
Zinn: It does seem like a hard concept -- war crimes, war criminals -- to catch on here. There's a willingness to say the leadership is wrong, but it's a great jump from there to saying that the leadership is vicious. Unfortunately, in American culture, there's still a kind of monarchical idea that the President, the people up there, are very special people and while they may make mistakes, they couldn't be criminals. Even after the public had turned against the Vietnam War, there was no widespread talk about Johnson, [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara, and the rest of them being war criminals. And I think it has to do with an American culture of deference to the President and his men -- beyond which people refuse to think.
TD: How does an American culture of exceptionalism play into this?
Zinn: I would guess that a very large number of Americans against the war in Vietnam still believed in the essential goodness of this country. They thought of Vietnam as an aberration. Only a minority in the antiwar movement saw it as part of a continuous policy of imperialism and expansion. I think that's true today as well. It's very hard for Americans to let go of the idea that we're an especially good nation. It's comforting to know that, even though we do wrong things from time to time, these are just individual aberrations. I think it takes a great deal of political consciousness to extend the criticism of a particular policy or a particular war to a general negative appraisal of the country and its history. It strikes too close to something Americans seem to need to hold onto.
Of course, there's an element that's right in this as well -- in that there are principles for which the United States presumably stands that are good. It's just that people confuse the principles with the policies -- and so long as they can keep those principles in their heads (justice for all, equality, and so on), they are very reluctant to accept the fact that they have been crassly, consistently violated. This is the only way I can account for the stopping short when it comes to looking at the President and the people around him as war criminals.
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