Howard Zinn: Free Radical

Filmmakers Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller couldn't have asked for anything better for their Howard Zinn bio-pic You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train than an opening that coincides with the arrival of Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Sure, Moore's film will get more attention. But along with a propitious confluence of current events, from the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions to the ongoing revelations about the realities of the war in Iraq, Moore's film has raised the general level of political awareness. And that's exactly the kind of atmosphere Howard Zinn thrives in. It's almost as if he, Ellis, and Mueller had been planning this all along. Because if Fahrenheit 9/11 unveils the problem, then You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train offers the hope that there indeed are solutions.

"The emergence of the film wasn't planned for any particular time," Zinn, a former Boston University history professor, confirms over the phone from his home in Auburndale. "I don't think they had in mind the idea of timing the film for anything that was going on. And maybe they felt they didn't have to because they thought that no matter when the film came out, the US would be in a foreign-policy crisis. The war in Iraq and the fact that we're in an election year is just a particularly extreme manifestation of what goes on normally in American political life."

That sort of bold yet understated analysis is characteristic of Zinn. He's a human-rights crusader who has always managed to temper moral outrage with a sense of humor, an anti-war activist who volunteered to fight in World War II, an academic who has never confined himself to the classroom, and a celebrated if controversial historian (most famously of "A People's History of the United States") who remains in touch with his blue-collar roots. He may be as liberal as they come, but there's nothing knee-jerk about the philosophical underpinnings of his positions. In contrast to Moore, who has a talent for identifying and then demolishing obvious targets like Charlton Heston and George W. Bush, Zinn is a big-picture guy who has been around and involved himself in enough history in the making (WW2, the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam protests, etc.) to take a broad view of current events, including the war in Iraq.

"There's no doubt that what has happened with the torture photos has brought far more critical attention to the war than there was before," he says. "But even before the photos came out, every day the American people were being faced with the body count of American soldiers and the numbers going up from five to six to seven hundred. And there was a lot of talk in the press about deception about weapons of mass destruction. I still don't doubt that close to half of the American people still believe that the war is right. But the figures are going down, and Bush's credibility is going down. I'm sure that if you have a graph for Bush's support going slowly down, there's been a sharper turn at this point. But even with this sharper turn, there are still many, many Americans who will not be swayed by anything. There's a reason for this: It's not elitist to say that the American people are ignorant of what's been going on in the Middle East. Because it's not a commentary on them that they have not known the facts. It's just that the media in the United States have not given them the information. And the media have given enormous attention to the statements and the position of the administration."

As You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train documents, Zinn learned about government deception the hard way when, as a WW2 bombardier, he was ordered to drop barrels of "jellied gasoline" on a small French village just weeks before Germany surrendered. It was one of the first uses of what would become one of the nastier tools in the Vietnam War arsenal – napalm. And as he recounts in the film, it was used late in the war to kill German soldiers who were simply sitting around waiting for the fighting to end. It makes you wonder whether, given the opportunity to go back in time, he'd have opted to take the automatic military exemption afforded him as a dock worker instead of volunteering to fight.