Politics & Power Quote by Howard Zinn

Zinn doesn’t argue for “peace” in the sentimental register; he argues for refusal as a civic discipline. The line is structured like a preemptive strike against the usual machinery of consent: “whatever reason is conjured up” treats casus belli as stagecraft, not destiny. That verb, conjured, drips with suspicion toward elite narrative production, putting politicians and the media in the same sentence as co-authors of permission.

The moral core lands with the word “indiscriminate.” Zinn is not debating whether a particular war is justified; he’s collapsing the category. In “our time,” he insists, the technology and logistics of modern conflict make precision a comforting myth. Even when the rhetoric promises surgical strikes and clean victories, the predictable output is civilian bodies - and he goes straight to “children” to puncture abstraction. It’s emotionally blunt, but also rhetorically strategic: children are where the language of “collateral damage” goes to die.

Context matters. Zinn was a World War II bombardier turned historian of dissent, writing in the long shadow of Dresden, Hiroshima, Vietnam, and later the first Gulf War and the post-9/11 era’s open-ended interventions. His biography gives the sentence its edge: this isn’t a pacifist who never touched a weapon; it’s a witness to how states rebrand violence as necessity.

The subtext is a challenge to liberal comfort. If war is structurally indiscriminate, then the ethical act isn’t to argue about better wars; it’s to withdraw participation from the storymakers before the first bomb falls.