Just War Book

Two things that I never consciously decided were going to be "my thing" but which are definitely my thing now:
- Being a more-than-casual Howard Zinn reader
- Impulsively reading short books where a celebrity intellectual casually holds forth on a narrow subject.

Just War happens to be both, and I only wish I could say that it represented the best that either the author or the format has to offer, rather than highlighting their limitations.

Basically, the speech presented here can be condensed into one thesis and two tactics:

Thesis:
1) "War cannot be humanized, only abolished"

Tactics:
1) Civil disobedience (people refusing to fight)
2) Education around the costs of war and the motives of those who stand to gain from it (feeds into #1)

The rest is just some unremarkable sharing of personal history (which anyone already familiar with Zinn's work will know) and rhetorical water-treading.

The topic of why wars are waged and what we can do to prevent them is one that, relatively fresh off of Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, I have a particular interest in lately, but unfortunately, it's not one that Zinn can bring any particular expertise to. In response to this incredibly diverse and thorny question, he settles for the obvious: the motives of the aggressors are always self-serving, and the results are horrifying.

Tell us something we don't know, Howard.

To be more specific, here are some things that, at the very least, I don't know, and hoped might be brought up in this speech:
- When a ruler openly flaunts international law and kill or terrorizes his own people, what are options besides effecting regime change to minimize violence?
- What are strategies besides military invasion to effect regime change if the people themself are clamoring for it?
- How should the international community decide which repressive regimes ought to tolerated, which reformed, and which overturned?
- What ought to be the terms of engaging with a fanatically violent non-state entity, operating within states that are unable or unwilling to eliminate it? (Think Boko Haram, the Janjaweed, Mexican drug cartels, etc)
- When a major state power declares war in bad faith - say, the US with Iraq, or Russia in the Crimean Peninsula - what tools ought the international community use to ... can't think of a Poli Sci / International Relations way to put this, but "call them out on their bullshit"?
- Basically: how do you prevent the use of violent force without the credible threat of equally violent force?

As a historian, you'd think Zinn would be in a good position to draw from historical examples to enlighten listeners / readers on the specifics of how we move forward with this intractable problem; unfortunately, in this particular case, Zinn is the tender-hearted hot air bag his worst critics accuse him of being. Yes, the wars initiated by the US government, at the very least since the end of WWII, have largely been self-serving and ideological in nature, but our wars are not the only wars, and as long as there remains even a tiny fraction of people willing to fight them, or any variety of reasons, obtaining a moral majority against the idea of war at all won't be enough to abolish them.

But hey; 3 stars for being a nice, heart-warming speech that I agree with on principle.