Tuesday, December 02, 2003

Howard Zinn on Artists and War

By Tanweer Akram

Zinn, Howard (2003). Artists in Times of War. New York, N.Y.: Seven Stories Press. Price: US$ 9.95. ISBN: 1-58322-602-8.

Howard Zinn’s pamphlet, Artists in Times of War, is a collection of four short essays.

In the first essay, Zinn probes what could be the relationship between the artist and society rather than what is the relationship between them. His view is that the artist can help society overcome the limitations of ideology of nationalist frenzy that pervades society in time of war. He cites the artist work (in the broadest sense) of Mark Twain, E.E. Cummings, Eugene O’Neill, Langston Hughes. Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Eartha Kitt, and Bob Dylan as examples of artists who creatively used art against war. While Zinn recognizes that some art can be for the sake of art and that art can be light-hearted entertainment or tragedies of everyday life, he argues that great art in the times of war should help realize common humanity by resisting the divisions and violence generated by war.

His second essay on the feminist and anarchist activist Emma Goldstein gives an overview of her remarkable life and her contribution.

His third essay is on Hollywood. Zinn argues that Hollywood generally does not make movies that may cause people to question war and the concentration of power. Antiwar movies, such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Dr. Strangelove, or The Quiet American, are the exception rather than the rule. He does not discuss the oligopoly structure of the film production and distribution industry. Arguably, due to the industry’s oligopoly structure and the high cost of entry, it is difficult for independent filmmakers to attain commercial success. Hollywood (and Bollywood too) mainly serve to “entertain” without challenging the basic relations of power and privilege or imperial foreign aggression. Zinn mentions a number of topics from history (such as mutinies against Washington’s army during the Revolutionary war, Shays’ Rebellion, the Mexican War, and the Philippines War) that would make great movies. Yet it is unlikely that Hollywood producers would step forward to make such movies, even if these ideas have every chance of being commercially successful. There, however, are some excellent independent documentaries, such are Manufacturing Consent, Power and Terror, Bowling for Columbine, and Jenin Jenin.

Zinn’s final essay is on pamphleteering in America. He discusses the role of a few pamphlets in U.S. history, such as Common Sense, An Essay on the Liberty of the Press, Patriotic Reflections, and A Peace Appeal to Labor. He also cites a number of European feminist and socialist pamphlets that affected life in the United States. I wish that Zinn provided a more complete history of pamphleteering in America, discussing the pamphlets that were published during the eras of the Great Depression, Cold War, Vietnam War, détente, and the first Gulf War. I would argue that with the advent of the Web, pamphleteering is quantitatively and qualitatively quite different with thousands of weblogs that are regularly published. These already have affected public opinion in societies as diverse as Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia. Whether the weblog will be a substitute for the historic role of pamphlets in the United States remains to be seen.

While Artists in the Times of War will not match the success of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, or Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, or even Zinn’s own majestic book, A People’s History of the United States, this pamphlet does combine radical polemics and historic scholarship. Seven Stories Press, the publisher of Zinn’s booklet, has been publishing a number of innovative and interesting pamphlets, such as Chomsky’s 9-11, Feffer’s North Korea South Korea, As’ad AbuKhalil’s Saudi Arabia and the U.S., and Rahul Mahajan’s Full Spectrum Dominance.

The essays are all elegantly written and relate history to the great crisis of current times: war of aggression, western state terrorism, and obedience to state power under the guise of patriotism. This pamphlet should be widely read, and would make an excellent gift to awaken one’s consciousness in the holiday season.

Tanweer Akram is an economist. His papers have appeared in Applied Economics, Bangladesh Development Studies, Journal of Economic Studies, Kyklos, Savings and Development, Third World Quarterly, and other professional journals.

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