The Boston Globe had a glowing article on last week’s death of radical Marxist academic Howard Zinn, starting with the very title:
Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87
Yes, in 1964, 1967, 1970, et al. Zinn challenged the status quo. Then what happened? The challengers became the status quo—in Washington, in the media, in academia, and in Hollywood. God help you now if you challenge the status quo. Suddenly it wasn’t so praiseworthy, was it, Boston Globe? Rush Limbaugh challenges the status quo, but lib media slanders him. Sarah Palin challenges the status quo, but the lib media lambastes her. The Tea Parties challenge the status quo, but the lib media ridicules them.
Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as “A People’s History of the United States,” inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.
Why does the Globe simply call Zinn a “historian and political activist”? He was as left-wing as they come, and extremely controversial. The lib media can’t write about Limbaugh or Beck or Palin without labelling them “conservative” and/or “controversial.”
Eventually, the Globe brings in the Hollywood useful idiots:
In 1997, Dr. Zinn slipped into popular culture when his writing made a cameo appearance in the film “Good Will Hunting.” The title character, played by Matt Damon, lauds “A People’s History” and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up. “Howard had a great mind and was one of the great voices in the American political life,” Ben Affleck [Coming from a Hollywood dimwit, Affleck, that is no complement.], also a family friend growing up and Damon’s co-star in “Good Will Hunting,” said in a statement. “He taught me how valuable—how necessary—dissent was to democracy and to America itself [Unless the dissenters are Republicans and the target of the dissent is a president you support] He taught that history was made by the everyman, not the elites [Except when the elites are you and your elitist Hollywood buddies telling us everymen that we should change our lifestyles to combat man-made global warming climate change or that we should worship the president like some sort of cult figure.] I was lucky enough to know him personally and I will carry with me what I learned from him—and try to impart it to my own children—in his memory.”
Enough with the whitewashing. Howard Zinn was an America-hating radical, all right? His fancy Columbia degrees notwithstanding, he was an intellectually dishonest activist posing as an academic. His personal and professional goal was not to teach history, but to historic revisionism in the style of the Stalinist Soviet brainwashers. The man lived in an ultra-leftist fantasy world, protected and encouraged by the circles he associated with.
You think I’m being hyperbolic? Let’s talk about that “history” book for which Zinn was most famous. The Globe itself writes:
“A People’s History of the United States” (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers—many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out—but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s.
You got that? Screw Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, etc. Just a bunch of rich white slave-owners. Didn’t do or write anything important. The real Amerian heroes are union organizers.
Need a more complete description of A People’s History? Here’s a description by Benjamin Kerstein at the New Ledger:
Thus far, the major obituary making the rounds is the generic wire-service report from the AP; itself a model of dissembling and misdirection. It pronounces that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States “was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003.” In fact, as the article goes on to state, “his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country” meaning, for those who can put two and two together, that the book became a bestseller largely because a generation of professors forced their students to buy it — a fitting metaphor for Zinn’s view of “the people.”
Exactly right. How in the world could Zinn’s book be considered a “people’s bestseller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth” if elitist professors and lefty history teachers pushed on impressionable students? And it took 23 years to reach one million sales? That’s nothing. You want a real people’s bestseller that attracted a wide audience through word of mouth and reached 1 million sales in one year? Try Mark Levin’s Libery and Tyranny. Curiously, the lib media devoted virtually no coverage of Levin’s status-quo-challenging book, and what little coverage they did provide was negative.
Next, Kerstein describes Zinn’s completely un-academic un-intellectual approach to his field:
... Unfortunately, as we all know, rewriting history does not necessarily make for good history, or even history at all. Indeed, even in regard to his own work, Zinn was quite incapable of accuracy.
In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Professor Zinn acknowledged that he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter, not the last, of a new kind of history.
“There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,” Professor Zinn said. “My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.”
One can go on endless arguments about the right of the historian to express his opinions, to pick and choose, to emphasize or minimize as he sees fit; and there is no doubt that revisionism – the right to rewrite – is essential to the historian’s profession. What is striking about Zinn, however, is the utter banality of his ostensible insights. That all histories are incomplete is, in fact, not even an insight, but a statement of the obvious; and his “orthodox viewpoint” is at best a straw man of dubious provenance. Nonetheless, these two statements – empty, pathetic, and juvenile as they may be – essentially formed the basis of Zinn’s entire life’s work. There is perhaps no greater insight into the poverty of the American academy today, no greater testimony to its utter lack of depth or imagination, than the fact that it made this empty charlatan whose watchword was no better than the wisdom of an arrested adolescent one of its heroes.
Indeed, Zinn’s entire outlook on history, the totality of his grasp of the historian’s profession and his art, and the sole justification for his tendentious and consciously biased revisionism, was nothing more than the rusty cliche which holds that history is always written by the powerful, the wealthy, and the victorious. As an ostensibly revolutionary historian, writing a “new kind of history,” it was therefore the duty of the glorious Zinn to write for the powerless, the poor, and the defeated.
This is, put generously, a self-serving fantasy; but this is somewhat beside the point, since what is most striking about it is the extraordinary ignorance it displays of Zinn’s own chosen profession. It is true that the powerful, wealthy and victorious sometimes write history—and that they sometimes write it very well, witness Caesar’s histories of the Gallic war and Churchill’s numerous historical writings—but it is equally true that, from its very origins, history has also been written by the weak, the poor, and the defeated, who somehow managed this feat without the help of Howard Zinn. …
Needless to say, this is not really a thesis. It is not even really an idea. It is a sentiment, an unfalsifiable article of faith that bears out Karl Popper’s merciless but valuable observation that vast explanatory power is not a virtue but a vice; since any theory that explains everything by definition explains nothing at all. …
Author Daniel Flynn wrote the following sobering critique in 2003, when Zinn released an updated edition to the 1980 original:
The recently released updated edition continues to be plagued with inaccuracies and poor judgment. The added sections on the Clinton years, the 2000 election, and 9/11 bear little resemblance to the reality his current readers have lived through.
In an effort to bolster his arguments against putting criminals in jail, aggressive law enforcement tactics, and President Clinton’s crime bill, Zinn contends that in spite of all this “violent crime continues to increase.” It doesn’t. Like much of Zinn’s rhetoric, if you believe the opposite of what he says in this instance you would be correct. According to a Department of Justice report released in September of 2002, the violent crime rate has been cut in half since 1993.
According to Zinn, it was Mumia Abu-Jamal’s “race and radicalism,” as well as his “persistent criticism of the Philadelphia police” that landed him on death row in the early 1980s. Nothing about Abu-Jamal’s gun being found at the scene; nothing about the testimony of numerous witnesses pointing to him as the triggerman; nothing about additional witnesses reporting a confession by Abu-Jamal—it was Abu-Jamal’s dissenting voice that caused a jury of twelve to unanimously sentence him to death. [What the hell Mumia story is doing in a textbook that has only x number of pages to retell American history from 1492 to the present is beyond me—unless the auther has an agenda.]
Predictably, Zinn draws a moral equivalence between America and the 9/11 terrorists. He writes, “It seemed that the United States was reacting to the horrors perpetrated by the terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan.” Scare quotes adorn Bush’s “war on terrorism,” post-9/11 “patriotism,” and other words and phrases Zinn dislikes.
Left-wing editorializing posing as scholarly prose in a history textbook. Disgusting.
Next, Flynn discusses that in Zinn’s book, both the original and updated edition, omits of whole major events that make America look good, and includes of completely minor events making America look bad. In Dennis Prager’s words, Zinn has a “proctologist’s view of America.” Facts and truth are ignored, unsubstantiated, and unannotated—yes, the book has no footnotes!
When fact and theory clash, the ideologue chooses theory. Time and again, A People’s History of the United States distorts or simply ignores the truth to make the facts, or the alleged facts, or the invented facts, fit the theory that justifies his “social aims.”
Zinn claims that “George Washington was the richest man in America.” He wasn’t, but it makes for a good Marxist tale. George Washington certainly rose to accumulate great wealth in his lifetime—even if he was chronically cash-poor. (For example, he had to borrow money to travel to New York upon his election to the presidency.) It is generally conceded that Robert Morris was the Founding era’s wealthiest merchant, while Moses Brown, whose family’s name graces an Ivy League university, was another Washington contemporary whose wealth exceeded his.
“When the Scottsboro case unfolded in the 1930s in Alabama,” Zinn writes in an even more egregious fit of historical amnesia, “it was the Communist party that had become associated with the defense of these young black men imprisoned, in the early years of the Depression, by southern injustice.” Perhaps the Party had become “associated” with the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, but in reality the Communists merely used the embattled youngsters. Richard Gid Powers points out in Not Without Honor that the Communists had raised $250,000 for the Scottsboro Boys’ defense, but had put-up a scant $12,000 for two appeals. At the time, a black columnist quoted a candid Party official who stated, “we don’t give a damn about the Scottsboro boys. If they burn it doesn’t make any difference. We are only interested in one thing, how we can use the Scottsboro case to bring the Communist movement to the people and win them over to Communism.” As a fellow-traveler, Zinn has the identical view. He is only interested in history so long as it serves as a weapon of socialist ideology.
“Unemployment grew in the Reagan years,” Zinn claims. Statistics show otherwise. Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent in his first month in office. By January of 1989, the rate had declined to 5.4 percent. Had the Reagan presidency ended in 1982 when unemployment rates exceeded 10 percent, Zinn would have a point. But for the remainder of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment declined precipitously.
Not surprisingly, Zinn’s book contains not a single source citation (perhaps footnotes would discourage his Pearl Jam fans).
More striking than Zinn’s inaccuracies—intentional and otherwise—is what he leaves out. Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate all fail to merit a mention. Nowhere do we learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are entirely absent. Instead, the reader is treated to the exploits of Speckled Snake, Joan Baez, and the Berrigan brothers. While Zinn sees fit to mention that immigrants often went into professions like ditch-digging and prostitution, American success stories like those of Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, and Louis B. Mayer—to name but a few—are off the Zinn radar screen. Valley Forge rates a single fleeting reference, while D-Day’s Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other important military battles are skipped over. In their place, we get several pages on the My Lai massacre and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during the Gulf War of the early 1990s.
My God. This is the garbage that is the most used history book in the country? The fact that even turns up in a classroom is ample evidence that American history classes don’t educate; they indoctrinate. If you use an avowed socialist’s book that incessantly bashes America’s founders, values, traditions, and economic system, what do you get? A generation of students who come to hate America’s founders, values, traditions, and economic system, that’s what! Anybody who tells you that this was not the goal of Zinn himself or the teachers in hundreds of schools who use his book are bullsh*tting you.
When Zinn died last week, so many Facebook friends were posting their remorse over his death! It was as if we lost Martin Luther King, Jr. or the like. Even some of their parents were distraught! In other words, two generations of Americans were simultaneously mourning the loss of this supposed American hero.
So when I was compelled to reply with objections to their beatification, I was confronted with ridicule and criticism. These people actually had no idea why I would think those things about their hero. I would ask any of those people, if they have the wherewithall to read this blog, to address any of these facts and actually tell me with a straight face that Zinn was nothing other than a dangerous America-hating radical. Several friends challenged me on that charge.
If the above information is not enough for such people, here’s more from David Horowitz’s indispensable Discover the Networks site:
Zinn describes the founding of the American Republic as an exercise in tyrannical control of the many by the few for greed and profit: “The American Revolution … was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers ... created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” In Zinn’s reckoning, the Declaration of Independence was not so much a revolutionary statement of rights as a cynical means of manipulating popular groups into overthrowing the King to benefit the rich. The rights which the Declaration appeared to guarantee were “limited to life, liberty and happiness for white males”—and actually for wealthy white males—because they excluded black slaves and “ignored the existing inequalities in property” (in other words, they were not socialist rights). …
In A People’s History, greed is the explanation for virtually every major historical event:
Regarding America’s separation from Great Britain, Zinn writes: “Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies … found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire.”
Zinn describes antebellum America as a uniquely cruel slaveholding society whose goal was subjugating man for profit. On the other hand, the war of the Union against the slaveholding system is portrayed in exactly the same terms: “It is money and profit, not the movement against slavery that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country.”
The same explanation is given for America’s entry into World War I: “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor.”
According to Zinn, it was America and not Japan that was to blame for Pearl Harbor. The fight against fascism, he says, was a manipulated illusion to conceal America’s real goals, which were empire and money: “Quietly, behind the headlines in battles and bombings, American diplomats and businessmen worked hard to make sure that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none in the world. United States business would penetrate areas that up to this time had been dominated by England. The Open Door Policy of equal access would be extended from Asia to Europe, meaning that the United States intended to push England aside and move in.”
Now, anti-Americanism is almost always accompanied by two other positions: pro-communism/socialism and anti-Israel. Predictably, Howard Zinn fit the fill on both (again from Discover the Network):
(1) Pro-communism/socialism:
In Professor Zinn’s view, Maoist China was “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control”; Castro‘s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression”; and the Marxist dictators of Nicaragua were “welcomed” by the people, while the opposition Contras, whose candidate triumphed when free elections were held as a result of U.S. pressure, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” …
In a March 2009 speech, Zinn spoke positively about President Barack Obama, and said the following about capitalism:
“Obama has become president at a very special time, when the American capitalist system is falling apart. And good! I’m glad it’s falling apart, because unless the system falls apart, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re not going to fix it.... The market system—be wary when you hear about the glories of the market system. The market system is what we’ve had. Let the market decide, they say. The government mustn’t give people free health care; let the market decide.
“Which is what the market has been doing—and that’s why we have 45 million people without health care. The market has decided that. Leave things to the market, and there are 2 million people homeless. Leave things to the market, and there are millions and millions of people who can’t pay their rent. You can’t leave it to the market. If you’re facing an economic crisis like we’re facing now, you can’t do what was done in the past....” …
Dan Flynn, in his above-cited article, also points out the overt anti-capitalist prism through which Zinn wrote A People’s History:
If you’ve read Marx, there’s really no reason to read Howard Zinn. The first line of The Communist Manifesto provides the single-bullet theory of history that provides Zinn with his narrative thread— “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.” It is the all-purpose explanation of every subject that Zinn covers. On other hand, why study history when theory has all the answers?
Thumb through A People’s History of the United States and you will find greed as the motivating factor behind every act of those who don’t qualify as “the people” in Zinn’s book. According to Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and both World Wars all were the result of base motives of the “ruling class”—rich men to get richer at the expense of others.
Zinn’s Marxist explanation of the New World begins with Columbus who like every other settler in the New World was driven by the (evil) profit motive. “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private profit.” This malicious view of people who often came to the New World to escape persecution in the old, who sometimes championed the rights of indigenous peoples and who mostly attempted to live peacefully alongside them is characteristic of the extreme anti-European, anti-white, any American prejudice of this book. The idea that the Indians who themselves were “invaders” by Zinn’s standards (they came on a land bridge from Asia and exterminated the then native peoples) somehow owned the continent is a much a fantasy as the idea that they were simply passive victims of the settlers. Zinn’s account omits the unprovoked aggressions of the Indians on each other and on the settlers. But then doing so, would spoil his leftist melodrama.
(2) Anti-Israel
Just as Zinn held the United States in contempt, so did he despise America’s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. According to the professor, Israel’s creation in 1948 “meant the dispossession of the Arab majority that lived on that land,” and led not only to “the occupation and subjugation of several million Palestinians,” but also to ”what we would today call ‘ethnic cleansing.’“
Zinn recalled that “after the Six-Day War of 1967 and Israel’s occupation of territories seized in that war (the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai peninsula),” he personally “began to see Israel not simply as a beleaguered little nation surrounded by hostile Arab states, but as an expansionist power.”
With regard to the ongoing Mideast conflict today, Zinn placed most of the blame for “the cycle of violence” on Israel’s allegedly provocative use of disproportionate force: “a rock-throwing [Palestinian] intifada met by [Israeli] over-reaction in the form of broken bones and destroyed homes, [Palestinian] suicide bombers killing innocent Jews followed by [Israeli] bombings which killed ten times as many innocent Arabs.”
Zinn lamented that “in the occupied territories ... a million and more Palestinians live under a cruel military occupation, while our [U.S.] government supplies Israel with high-tech weapons.”
According to Zinn, Israeli society was replete with deep-seated “xenophobia, militarism, [and] expansionism.” Added the professor:
“Some of the wisest Jews of our time—Einstein, Martin Buber—warned of the consequences of a Jewish state. Einstein wrote, at the very inception of Israel: ‘My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain....’“
Lovely. I wonder if my liberal Jewish friends who were among those mourning Zinn’s loss last week know—or even care—about the man’s adversity towards Israel.
Now, lest I be accused of defaming the deceased or spitting on their grave, note you will not find me popping open a celebratory bottle of champagne or hoping Zinn is burning in hell (unlike the oh-so-tolerant left when Ronald Reagan or Bush press secretary Tony Snow died). Benjamin Kerstein, in his above-cited article notes that “kicking a man when he’s dead” was Zinn’s forte:
One of the unwritten laws of opinion journalism is to never kick a man when he’s dead, at least, not until an appreciable amount of time has passed. The question is whether this can or should hold true for those who make their living by doing precisely that. The death at the age of 87 of pseudo-historian Howard Zinn raises this issue all over again, since very few academics have made a better living defaming the dead, with everyone from Columbus to Ronald Reagan, and thousands in between, being accused by the jocular old harpy of any number of hideous crimes, not one of whom, needless to say, being alive to answer the charges. It is, of course, the job of the historian to examine the acts of the deceased; and some consider it an equal part of their profession to pass judgement upon them. In the case of Zinn, however, he passed judgment with such slothful ease, and such obvious sadistic pleasure in issuing his condemnations, that one cannot muster up much sympathy at the prospect of the man’s memory dying by his own sword.
Well said.
Also, to Zinn’s credit, he did agree to interviews with right-leaning opponents, among them Dennis Prager. Here is Part 1 and Part 2 of Prager’s 2006 radio interview with him. I will conclude with this part of the interview:
Prager: What would you say … we [The U.S.] have done more bad than good, we’re in the middle, or what?
Zinn: Probably more bad than good. We’ve done some good, of course; there’s no doubt about that. But we have done too many bad things in the world.
Now there’s a man who really loved his country and whose farcical fantasy of a history book was brought within even a 10-mile radius of thousands of American schoolchildren!
But, dead or not, don’t you dare question his patriotism.
Other bloggers on the death of Howard Zinn: Jammie Wearing Fool, The Other McCain
Recent Comments