Howard Zinn, "Outed" as Communist and a Liar

Apologies about the title. It should read: Leftist ‘Historian’ Howard Zinn Lied About Red Ties

The other title is from a comparable piece by Trevor Loudon

http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2010/07/howard-zinn-outed-as-communist-and-liar.html

Why, that’s almost surprising as the outing of Liberace.

When are we going to out Zer0 as a Communist?

. . . Calling Robert Mueller to the Courtesy Phone!

I wonder why he is the hero of all the Hollywood Libtards?

Captain Obvious to the rescue.... I knew that Zinn was Commie scum.

HOORAY Cliff Kincaid!

Zinn is a cr*apper. I was paid by a media company to write radio commercials in the late ‘90’s for the AFRTS. The guy in charge insisted I use Zinn as a source. I was young and stupid out of J-school. I know better now. The guy was higher up in the military. This crap is insidious.

Should’ve said late 80’s....not 90’s.

The last time I saw the Rasmussen poll, he had Barack Obama down 20 points in his index. Yet many of us on these threads wondered aloud how a man with these policies and with this record could still garner support of more than 40% of the people. Many of us have asked since before the election, how could a man with his biography and his associations possibly he seriously considered for the office of President of the United States of America?

Well there's several answers, his race, the ineptitude of George Bush, the ineptitude of the Republicans, the ineptitude of John McCain, and the connivance of the media come to mind. But what we saw in the election of Barack Obama, made more stark because of his race, we see also in the careers of William Ayres and of Howard Zinn. It is small wonder that a Marxist like Barack Obama could find a nest in academia which nurtures the likes of William Ayres and Howard Zinn.

The bald truth is that we have a culture in America that covers for Communists. Sometime ago I wrote a reply which goes down memory lane back to the times referred to in the article headlined here, the early 1950s when America first started to grapple with communism in my lifetime. The reply tries to find the explanation for the phenomenon of covering for Communists:

Once upon a Time in America the great divide in our society was expressed by where you stood on Joe McCarthy. Of course, that was all wrapped up with Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss and which one of those two you believed. Did you think the Rosenbergs were guilty? The answer to that question told everyone whether you were a Democrat or a Republican.

The other American dramas I can invoke to describe the hold the Army -McCarthy hearings had on the nation are the OJ Simpson trial and the Clarence Thomas hearings. I can remember as a boy coming home from school and finding my mother transfixed before a black-and-white television over the Army McCarthy hearings. In our house we believed McCarthy, and Chambers, and we thought that the Rosenbergs were certainly guilty. But this was not the universal opinion of suburbia and certainly not the politically correct version to which I was exposed to in middle and high school which was connected to a university.

The impact of McCarthy was not limited to the era which bears his name. In subsequent years in college I learned that my parents must have been real Neanderthals to believe the way they did. Most of this was imparted to me by my professors through innuendo; we quickly absorbed the culture of the University and knew what sort of opinions were acceptable and which were not acceptable to say out loud in learned company.

Today the term "McCarthyism" has assumed a meaning which contains its own DNA and expresses a whole left-wing point of view. We see the same thing now happening with the phrase, "Swift boating." These phrases have been turned on their head by a consensus in academia and in the media which simply ignores any other interpretation of events except the one favoring the left.

McCarthy was connected to Chambers who was connected to Nixon. If the left was irrational in its support of Alger Hiss, it was almost psychotic in its hatred of Richard Nixon. There was a chain of events that led to the impeachment of Richard Nixon for actions that had mostly been done already by previous Democrat presidents. What I find so fascinating so many years later is the question, why was the left so irrational, so emotional in its judgments about the Communists and the anti-Communists? Why was the left so purblind to Communists in high places where they could mortally wound the nation and so viscerally obsessed about the men like McCarthy, Chambers, and Nixon who exposed them?

Why, for example, was President Truman so indifferent to the evidence of Communists in the State Department? Perhaps Truman's inertia can be explained by his parochial Midwestern background, his naïveté, his partisanship, his ignorance of the lay of the land on the day he assumed office. But Roosevelt's involvement was more than indifference. It strikes me that Roosevelt was almost the model of the patrician who sees himself as larger than his own country. John Kerry, of Swift Boat fame, seems to be cast in the same mold, although without Roosevelt's political acumen.

Do men of great wealth like George Soros or Franklin Roosevelt regard the concept of national sovereignty to be merely the outmoded belief systems of the masses, akin to the belief in God which provide some comfort and meaning to their lives, but which is outmoded and not particularly useful in the grand games played for world stakes. Just a thought, but one prompted by knowledge that the financial backer of THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL was also a man of great wealth who founded the school which has done so much damage to our culture. The school was founded for the express purpose of breaking down those institutions which frustrated the victory of communism.

Roosevelt must have known that there were Communists in his government. His vice president was virtually an avowed communist. I believe he just didn't care. Either he was so arrogant that he believed he could control events even as he was being undermined by a fifth column, or, more likely, he didn't care because he didn't think it mattered when viewed from the exalted perspective of his world.

George Soros does not care what passport he holds except as it advances his interests. Patricians in general do not see the world as contained and defined by national boundaries but by markets, routes, and centers of supply and demand.

McCarthyism, like Swift Boating, has been distorted and twisted into a widely accepted definition by political correctness. Political correctness is the explicitly contrived belief system created by THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL. The Frankfurt school was founded by a character who could change skins with George Soros and each could live comfortably in the other's century. They view the rest of us as either impediments or as useful idiots.

They could be right. The useful idiots enforce the rules of political correctness and obligingly define against the weight of history the meaning of phrases like, " McCarthyism" or, "Swift boating." I for one choose to count myself among the impediment class.

bookmark.

It isn’t exactly a revelation. Anyone who ever had to slog through the sewage that is the “People’s History of the United States” knows perfectly well where the guy is coming from. Any university for which it’s required reading has excluded itself from credibility.

Well said.

If you ask your average college student today to name one historian, “Howard Zinn” will be the name most commonly regurgitated.

Which is pathetic.

Reached for comment, Matt Damon opined, "Matt Damon!"

http://www.wbur.org/2010/07/31/howard-zinn-fbi-file

http://www.scribd.com/doc/35158029/FBI-File-On-BU-Professor-Howard-Zinn

Meanwhile here in Santa Cruz County California

Channeling Zinn

Tuesday, 29 June 2010 13:36 Elizabeth Limbach News - Local News

Local history teacher brings the Zinn Education Project to the classroom

The wall behind Jeff Matlock’s desk is covered with photographs and paintings of his heroes from American history: Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Abraham Lincoln, and Jane Adams among them. There is a photograph of women marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1913 with a sign that reads, “I wish Ma could vote!” And, as if to encapsulate Matlock’s “nothing is black and white” view on history, he also has two contrasting photographs beside one another: one of a group protesting World War I with signs that say “Don’t send our boys to die in a useless war,” and the other, a shot of U.S. soldiers wading ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day. “There are two sides to every story,” he says simply.

Squeezed in beside these notable figures from history is the one who instilled this all-inclusive attitude in him, and perhaps his favorite hero of them all: late historian, author and activist Howard Zinn.

Matlock was a history buff from an early age. He hardly had to study for tests and could spout off historical dates without fail. But it wasn’t until he picked up a copy of Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” as a teenager that history became more than dates and places for him. “I felt like my world totally opened up into something I’d never thought of before,” he remembers. “I never saw history as being something that could be less than concrete. I thought ‘these are facts, this is the way it is.’ But what Zinn taught me was that nothing is absolute.”

Now an eighth grade U.S. History teacher at Scotts Valley Middle School, where he’s been teaching for 18 years, Matlock finds endless opportunities to incorporate Zinn into the lesson plans. This will be easier for him to do next school year thanks to the Zinn Education Project (a joint effort of nonprofits Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change), which has awarded him with a full classroom set of “A People’s History” and other Zinn teaching materials. Matlock was one of 20 teachers from across the country to win The Zinn Education Project’s “Teaching Outside the Textbook” essay contest.

“It wasn’t hard to write,” he says with a shrug. “I wrote about how Howard Zinn has affected my teaching and therefore my classrooms throughout the years.”

His examples of this are numerous. One lesson comes at the beginning of the school year, when he has the class review the story of Christopher Columbus. Half of the class reads about it in the textbook (“They know the story, they’ve been told a thousand times,” he says), and the other half reads from Zinn. Afterward, they make a list contrasting the stories and discuss which is the truth. It leads seamlessly into the over-arching, Zinn-infused theme in Matlock’s teaching: “It usually takes a few minutes but eventually someone will say, ‘They’re both right,’” he says. “[The kids realize that] they are both telling the same story but they’re leaving things out. That there are no absolutes in history.”

As with their similar discussions of the Seneca Falls Convention, the Revolutionary War, and the Mexican-American War, hearing the alternate story is quite an eye-opener. “They respond the way I did when I was in high school—I was shocked,” says Matlock. “Why didn’t I know this? Who is leaving this out, and why is this person being silenced?”

Matlocks finds the wealth of primary stories in “A People’s History”—letters, speeches, and other firsthand accounts Zinn includes—to be invaluable additions to the bland state-approved textbook. “The approved list of textbooks consists of books that are so wiped clean by the Left and the Right so as not to offend anybody, that it’s just a lot of pictures, a lot of color, a lot of bold face, and hardly any meat,” he says.

Although he has only just returned from a two-week trip to the East Coast with 96 of his students, Matlock is already pining to start renovating his lesson plans using “A People’s History” and the other Zinn Education Project materials. There’s only one catch.

“Zinn isn’t on the STAR test, so I do have to focus on what the textbook is saying and be aware of what questions they’ll be asked,” says Matlock. The Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) exams are annual evaluations of what students are learning in California classrooms—in the minds of many teachers, making it more about “teaching to the test” than teaching toward understanding. The test does not affect a student’s grades, class placement, or college application; the results are strictly used for determining a school’s statewide rank (and, thus, their level of funding). Scotts Valley Middle School already has a “bare bones” budget due to the small district size, says Matlock. But, according to 2009 STAR test results, the school’s eighth graders did very well on the history portion, with the largest group of them (39 percent) receiving “Advanced” marks.

Still, for Matlock—a man, like Zinn, who believes that history is never simply told—the trick remains how to fit it all into one school year. And now that they’re fully equipped with Zinn materials, the eighth-graders at Scotts Valley Middle School will find their curriculum more full than ever.

“We might get behind, but I have to decide what my role is,” says Matlock. “Is my role to make sure they do well on the test, or is my role to make sure they are thinking critically, developing their minds and appreciating history?

“I just have to give them as many sides of the story as I can,” he continues. “You can never have enough, and the story will never be complete—but that doesn’t mean you don’t try to complete it.”

According to “The Venona Secrets”, Roosevelt’s 2 closest associates, Harry Hopkins and Laughlin Currie who lived in the White House, were both Russian spies. When the Roosevelt’s discovered that the Army Signal Corp was monitoring Russian spy dispatches, they ordered the practice stopped. Fortunatley, the Signal Corp ignored their order. Read Roosevelt’s second bill of rights which was his post war aim.

I did not know this about Hopkins but then I don't know very much about Hopkins at all except that he is very fulsomely praised by Churchill in his war volumes.

Of course VP Wallace was almost certainly a communist and that is the main reason the party bosses forced Roosevelt to accept Trueman as a substitute. Evidently Roosevelt was so sick or so arrogant in his belief in his own powers and immortality that he was indifferent to the possibility of his death and the consequent importance picking a proper vice president. He was either so sick were so indifferent that gave the party bosses Truman.

Can you imagine if Wallace had inherited the presidency and the atomic bomb just as Russia was sweeping toward the channel? Against whom would he have used the bomb? So if we now add Hopkins to Wallace and do not forget Alger Hiss standing behind the Roosevelt shoulder at Yalta, we have something that would make any good McCarthyite like me very nervous.