War & Peace Quote by Howard Zinn

War doesn’t just rearrange borders; it rearranges what a society is allowed to say about itself. Howard Zinn’s line lands with the blunt certainty of someone who’s watched “national security” become a master key that opens every lock on dissent. The phrase “one certain effect” is doing quiet but brutal work: it strips war of its romantic fog and treats censorship as a dependable byproduct, as predictable as casualties or rationing. Not “sometimes,” not “can,” but certain.

Zinn’s intent is less moralizing than diagnostic. He’s naming a pattern: when governments mobilize armies, they also mobilize narratives. Unity becomes a political demand, and speech that complicates unity gets recast as sabotage. The subtext is that repression isn’t an accident of wartime panic; it’s an instrument. War requires consent, and consent is easier to manufacture when critics are marginalized, surveilled, or smeared as unpatriotic. Even the press can be “free” in name while being corralled by access journalism, embedded reporting, and the constant insinuation that asking the wrong questions helps the enemy.

As a historian and public intellectual, Zinn is speaking out of a 20th-century American record: World War I-era prosecutions under the Espionage Act, McCarthyism’s aftershocks, Vietnam’s credibility gap, and the post-9/11 normalization of secrecy. His broader project was to puncture official mythmaking; this sentence is a warning label. It suggests the real battlefield is partly domestic: a contest over who gets to define reality while the cannons are firing.