[In the following review of Declarations of Independence, Knoll praises Zinn for offering new ways of thinking about issues of social and political justice.]

Howard Zinn is a radical in the true sense of that much-abused word. In discussing the most important issues of public policy, he gets down to the roots, deep down to the bedrock questions: Why do we believe what we believe? How much of what we believe is true? Why are things the way they are? Whose interests are served? How should things be changed to serve the common interests of suffering humanity?

A decade ago, Zinn's splendid A People's History of the United States ignored the conservative conventions of historiography to disinter parts of the past that had been buried alive or mutilated beyond recognition. Declarations of Independence is a worthy successor to that modern classic.

Zinn's purpose here is to challenge “the old orthodoxies, the traditional ideologies, the neatly tied bundles of ideas … so that we can play and experiment with all the ingredients, add others, and create new combinations in looser bundles.” He perceives that we desperately need new, imaginative approaches to the problems of our time.

Zinn, a professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, tackles with zest and intellectual rigor the formidable task of rethinking questions many would regard as settled. He is not burdened by the niceties of scholarly “objectivity” and feels no obligation to stand in awe of “experts.” His reexamination of traditional assumptions culminates in the declarations of independence of his title.

“To depend on great thinkers, authorities, and experts is, it seems to me, a violation of the spirit of democracy,” Zinn writes. “Democracy rests on the idea that, except for technical details for which experts may be useful, the important decisions of society are within the capability of ordinary citizens. Not only can ordinary people make decisions about these issues, but they ought to, because citizens understand their own interests more clearly than any experts.”

Zinn's bold and incisive approach is at its exemplary best in his discussion of “just and unjust war.” Like the Sixteenth Century scholar, Erasmus Desiderius, he holds that “there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome” than war. But unlike many of today's antiwar activists, Zinn—a U.S. Army Air Corps bombardier in World War II—subjects his pacifism to the ultimate test: the war against Nazism.

It was, he writes, “a war of high principle, and each bombing mission was a mission of high principle. The moral issue could hardly be clearer. The enemy could not be more obviously evil. … If there was such a thing as a just war, this was it.”

That was how the young Howard Zinn felt in 1943. But as he undertook the study of history, he began to wonder what had really motivated the United States in World War II. Washington had, after all “observed fascist expansion without any strong reactions”: the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the destruction of the Spanish republic by fascist forces aided by Germany and Italy, the German annexation of Austria, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland.

“It was only when Japan threatened potential U.S. markets by its attempted takeover of China.” Zinn notes, “but especially as it moved toward the tin, rubber, and oil of Southeast Asia, that the United States became alarmed and took those measures that led to the Japanese attack [on Pearl Harbor]: a total embargo on scrap iron and a total embargo on oil in the summer of 1941.” But wasn't it, after all, a war to save the Jews? Zinn points out, “Even after we were in the war against Germany (it should be noted that after Pearl Harbor Germany declared war on the United States, not vice versa), and reports began to arrive that Hitler was planning the annihilation of the Jews, Roosevelt's administration failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives.”

Zinn's conclusion, supported by citations from authoritative studies of the Holocaust, is that “not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis, but there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds.”

Though Declarations of Independence went to press before the Bush Administration dispatched a massive U.S. expeditionary force to the Persian Gulf, Zinn marshals impressive historic, political, and moral arguments against this and any military intervention. And he is equally persuasive in discussing other aspects of what he calls American ideology: the imperial cast of U.S. foreign policy, the class structure of our irrational economy, racism, the use of the legal system to suppress dissent and harass dissenters, and the draconian limits imposed on freedom of speech and press.

In each of these areas, Zinn points the way not to solutions but to new ways of thinking that may help us find solutions. History, he observes, “does not offer us predictable scenarios for immense changes in consciousness and policy. Such changes have taken place, but always in ways that could not have been foretold, starting often with imperceptibly small acts, developing along routes often too complex to trace. All we can do is to make a start, wherever we can, to persist, and let events unfold as they will.”

A careful reading of Declarations of Independence will help anyone ready to make that start.