Zinn, War, and The Banality of Evil

On PBS's NOW, Bill Moyers interviews historian Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States: 1492–Present on Bush's war with Iraq and his own experiences with preemptive warfare:

"If we go to war, we will kill thousands, tens of thousands, we don't know how many people. A hundred thousand? We will kill huge numbers of people. And who will we kill? We will kill the victims of Saddam Hussein. If we go to war against Iraq, we are killing the victims of the tyrant. That to me creates a moral equation which is intolerable."

Zinn also recounts his experiences as a pilot in World War II. Two weeks before the war ended, he was called up to bomb the small French town of Royan, where a few thousand German soldiers were hiding. 1200 heavy B-17 bomers dropped "jellied gasoline"--the first use of napalm in the European theater of war:

"I can understand how atrocities are done by ordinary people... What Hannah Arendt called 'the banality of evil.' I understand how--because I--I didn't even think about it. I was just trained to drop bombs. There is the enemy, you make a decision at the beginning of the war, they're the bad guys, you're the good guys, and therefore everything goes. And so we just did this. And so, we destroyed the town of Royan. Killed Frenchmen, killed women, children, killed the German soldiers. Victory. And it was only afterwards-- it was only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that I thought about that. And then I thought about Dresden. And then I thought about the other-- killing civilians in the war. Unnecessary even from the point of view of winning the war. And I thought war brutalizes everybody involved in it."