Why Howard Zinn is a Daschole (without apologies to either rectum)
Posted by [a furious] nicollo
On News/Activism 03/17/2003 11:19 PM EST
I’ll try not to curse. I turned off my antenna-bound television. Amazingly, the only other station running commentary on the President’s speech was Petie Jennings and ABC. The rest went back to regular programming. I’ll take this as an expression of the triumph of cable and cable news programs. Nevertheless, the networks and their affiliates ought have the guts to broadcast their news programs across the public airwaves rather than restrict it to cable. That appears to be my problem, not theirs. As for Zinn, here’s his deal: Zinn champions “the people.” His “History” discusses the “common man.” Yes, that common man whom Abraham Lincoln decided God loved best since he made so many of them. But the most uncommon Abe makes the index of Zinn’s “History” all of six times (plus in “passim” another four times). Imagine that, a “history” of the United States in which the most important President excepting Washington appears barely. The great Washington shows up all of ten times. By comparison, the socialist Eugene Debs has eight citations, including several of multiple pages. Understand that Zinn considers Debs a traitor to socialism and “the people” as Debs abhorred violence and anarchy, and Zinn felt that Debs sold out to business. In “A People’s History” of the USA, Fidel Castro gets six pages of attention, and his friend, Jimmy Carter gets cited on 20 pages. George H.W. Bush gets a load of citations, and you can imagine why. His sub-categories include “Panama Invasion,” "business and industry,” “factory and mill system,” “foreign investment and markets,” “insurance and compensation,” “monopoly and merger,” and so on. (Amazingly, Ronbo got off easier with only fourteen pages cited.) That’s plenty enough to know Zinn’s intentions, as Jacques Chirac would say, “n’est-ce pas?” I know Zinn from my study of the Progressive Era of the first decades of the 20th Century. Here’s why he’s such a clymer: The people of 1911 whom Zinn championed, blacks, laborers, the city poor, etc. are what today? Folks descended from Zinn’s oppressed are today National Security Advisors, Supreme Court Justices, CEO’s of G.E., AOL-Time Warner and other major corporations, and so on. The majority of their kind are proud and secure members of the middle and upper classes. Had they followed Zinn’s advice of today back in 1911, none of these people would be members of the dominant classes of modern America. Zinn’s vision for 1911, and for all of American history, today included, is privilege for the poor and the working so that they stay that way. Hear me? Zinn’s solution to the problems of 1911 was that the oppressed of 1911 stay oppressed. He would simply change their oppression, squalor, and dependence from business and social conditions to oppression, squalor, and dependence by the government. I almost pity Zinn, for history has made him its fool. Too bad Jim Lehrer doesn't know it. The American Founding and its political and social structures that Zinn so hates have freed peoples from oppression and poverty like nothing else in world history. America is about freeing peoples, about bringing happiness and opportunity to them. Those who today live in squalor and oppression do so according to Zinn’s structures and in denial of those of the American Founding that have liberated so many. What Zinn hates of 1911 is exactly what liberated the descendents of 1911. Zinn says, writes, and does nothing to help those he champions. Do I hate Zinn? No. I loathe him.
Following the President’s speech tonight Jim Lehrer of PBS hauled out of the socialist mud one Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States.” You might know Zinn from that, or from his desperate and NY Times publicized rants against the UsofA following the 9-11 attacks. Zinn blames it all on the power structures of the US that, by his theory, abuse and deceive the people in the name of capitalism and Bush family investments.