Zinn’s chapter “War Is The Health Of The State” was very interesting to me for many reasons. Something that I never knew the extent of was the suppression of people’s right to free speech. Which was carried out by the Espionage Act, which prohibited people from speaking out against the war effort, as that would be considered treason. While I knew that during war times propaganda was common, I was unaware of the lack of regard for free speech rights. In the US at the time, many middle and lower class people, whether a part of the socialist party or not, opposed the war. Debs, a prominent man in the opposition effort said, “The master class has always declared wars; the subject class has always fought the battles” (367). The sentiment of this statement was nothing new; we have seen this idea repeated throughout history. The people that opposed the war rejected the draft and were often jailed. I then ask, why was this blatant violation of the constitution allowed?
Through Zinn and the Youtube video, “Who started World War I” I learned more about the US motivations and involvement in the war. While I did have some previous knowledge I was never certain exactly how we came to be involved in a war in which President Woodrow Wilson originally promised the US to stay neutral. Two of the main reasons for involvement were the desire to become more involved in foreign markets and the spread of capitalism. Wilson also went back on his promise to remain neutral when Germany sunk one of his ships carrying military supplies to help England. After this, Wilson joined the war effort and these anti-war protests began in the US.
From this video, I also learned a lot about how the war even started and where the blame should’ve gone. Although German ended up taking the blame for the war, they definitely weren’t the only ones responsible. I think it was a combination of decisions that weren’t necessarily that caused the war. I think it is interesting to think about how different things would be if certain events didn’t happen the way they did or when they happened. Or, to even think about how of if WWII would have happened if German wasn’t forced to take the blame in the first place.
You make an interesting point about the suppression of freedom of speech during wartime. It is not hard to draw a parallel between the suppression during WWI and today’s time, with Trump’s attempted TIkTok ban. Although we are not directly engaged in war in the same sense as is true back in the early 20th century, we are certainly at a tumultuous and politically stressful point for our country. TikTok is a popular platform that Generation Z and millenials use to share their disapproval of the president, and his attempts to ban the platform could be seen as a type of suppression of freedom of speech during “wartime”.