Historian Howard Zinn had no intention of sugar-coating his message to students Friday night.
"We cannot depend on the leaders of the United States to stop a war that is killing several million people," he said. "Their interests are opposed to the interests of ordinary human beings."
Zinn spoke to over 100 people in the ASEAN Auditorium at the Fletcher School with Gino Strada, a war surgeon, in a program entitled "Silent Casualties: Civilian Victims of War."
Strada, who founded the American branch of Emergency: Life Support for Civilian War Victims, spoke first. He discussed the atrocities, intended and unintended, committed against civilians in war-torn countries. He spoke about his organization's role in providing war and trauma surgery, pediatric care and cardiac surgery to people in these countries.
The Boston chapter of Emergency organized the event.
Strada began his presentation by saying that in World War I, the ratio of military to civilian casualties was ten to one. In World War II, though, this ratio shifted in the opposite direction. Over 90 percent of all war casualties from 1946 to 2005 have been civilians, he said.
"Some of the pictures I am going to show you are quite rough," Strada said before he began his PowerPoint presentation. "War is exactly this and nothing else."
His presentation included several graphic photographs of the results of different types of landmines. His focus was on children injured by mines. Landmines "create an army of mutilated children in the country you consider your enemy," he said.
"Landmines have cancelled the postwar concept," Strada said. "Landmines do not care if a peace treaty is signed. They will continue to kill and maim."
He closed with a quote from Albert Einstein: "War cannot be humanized, it can only be abolished."
Einstein's words also fit well with Zinn's lecture. After calling the abolition of war "something that has to be put on the agenda of the human race at this point in history," Zinn outlined the progression of his feelings towards war.
Zinn, an historian best known for his book "A People's History of the United States," said he grew up reading war stories that romanticized war. He cited Dalton Trumbo's 1939 book "Johnny Got His Gun" as the cause of the reversal of his feelings.
His change of heart was put on hold with the outbreak of World War II, during which he fought in the United States Air Force. "That powerful anti-war feeling I had developed was pushed aside in the flow of this idealistic war against fascism," he said.
His feelings about war once again changed drastically after the war ended. Another book - John Hersey's "Hiroshima" - allowed him to think about the actual human beings affected by war.
"Once you've made a decision that they are the bad guys and you are the good guys then you don't question anything you do," Zinn said. "Then you can bomb Hiroshima and bomb Nagasaki. You don't even stop to ask the question: Were these 600,000 civilians who died... bad guys?"
Zinn said he came to realize World War II was nothing more than an imperialist war. "If you can question the war that has the most 'goodness' attached to it, what can you say about all the other wars?" he said.
He last spoke at Tufts on Oct. 17, 2002.
Spurred on by the Vietnam War protest movement, Zinn became an anti-war activist. He concluded with a vehement condemnation of war. "The technology of modern war is such that, whatever the cause... war, because of what it does to human beings, cannot be justified," he said.
He called upon the audience to work toward this common cause. "We are going to have to figure out how to solve the problems that exist in the world without war," he said. "That's something that involves all of us."
