[994] in peace2
Re: Fwd: FW: "Violence Doesn't Work" (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeff Fabijanic)
Mon Sep 17 17:26:42 2001
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Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 16:52:44 -0400
To: Marc Rios <mrios@MIT.EDU>, eit@tep.org, peace-list@MIT.EDU
From: Jeff Fabijanic <jeff@primordialsoft.com>
At 11:27 AM -0400 9/17/2001, Marc Rios wrote:
>>
>>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>
>>September 14, 2001
>>
>>Howard Zinn: "Violence Doesn't Work"
Lest anyone here is inclined to consider Howard Zinn an ivory-tower dreamer
with no real-world experience in matters of mass murder and terror, be
aware that he was a member of the aircraft crew that dropped the very first
gelegnite (napalm) bombs on enemy troups. As Prof. Zinn tells it, these
German infantrymen had been surrounded by Allied forces very near the end
of the European part of WWII, and thinking that they would soon be releaved
of their equipment and transported off the field of conflict, were more or
less camping out in a forested area near the coast of Normandy. They had
actually stood down a lot of their big guns to show that they were in a
non-combat mode. Zinn claims that Allied commanders, knowing that the end
of the war was very near, were anxious to try out the new type of
anti-personel bombs in a real-world environment in order to judge their
effectiveness.
Zinn and his crew roasted thousands of the German soldiers in just a few
minutes of bombing. Several weeks later he suffered a nervous breakdown.
Prof. Zinn attributes his social awareness and the impetus for all that he
has done in the last 50 years to the psychic aftermath of this traumatic
experience.
I did not read this in a book or hear it on TV. Prof. Zinn told this story
to a class full of students in the final year of his teaching career (I
specifically registered with BU that semester so that I could take his
class before he retired).
- jeff
