Howard Zinn’s FBI Files: What It Reveals
The announcement last week by the FBI that it was releasing the FBI files of the late radical historian, Howard Zinn, was not met with universal acclaim. In fact, many leftists were enraged. Typical was the reaction of Noam Chomsky, who was quoted by writer Clark Merrefield. Zinn’s files, Chomsky said, were “mostly a mixture of things that they’ve picked up here and there which is mostly false, things they’ve gotten from informants that are mostly false. We took for granted that obviously we were being monitored by the FBI.” For Chomsky, anything coming from the FBI obviously has to, by definition, be lies.
The most recent comment from the ranks of the Left is by frequent Nation writer Chris Hedges, whose column in Bob Scheer’s inappropriately named Truthdig reflects the most common take on Zinn’s work by liberal/left intellectuals. Hedges writes how he used Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as a text for the American history class he was giving to prison inmates. “We’ve been lied to,” students would comment at the end of class. He assigned Zinn’s work because he says it opened the “eyes of young, mostly African-Americans to their own history and the structures that perpetuate misery for the poor and gluttony and privilege for the elite.” (Wonder no more about why so much of the American underclass get a bad education.)
So what is in these files? First, the FBI had evidence that Zinn was a member of the Communist Party of the United States, and lied about his membership when being interviewed by FBI agents. The first file on the subject appeared in March of 1949, when an informant noted “that he (ZINN) is a Communist Party member and attends meetings five days a week.” Zinn was then employed by the American Labor Party, which itself gives credence to the informant’s report. By that date, the ALP — created in the early forties to give NYC labor a left-wing ballot on which to vote for FDR — had been taken over lock, stock and barrel by the CP. It never would have hired non-Party members as full-time employees.
Another informant described Zinn as a “person with some authority” in the CP group to which they belonged. Zinn, he said, taught a course for his comrades on “basic Marxism.” On June 12, 1957, another informant told the Bureau that when he was transferred to the Williamsburgh branch of the Party in 1949, “HOWARD ZINN was already a member of that section.” It was his impression that “ZINN was not a new member, but had been in the CP for some time.”
Zinn, however, denied he was a Communist when questioned by the FBI in 1953. It is important to note here that unlike those who testified before Congressional investigating committees, Zinn was not under oath. The reason Zinn denied his membership was the same as that for other Communists. The Party instructed them not to, even when asked to testify before committees like HUAC. As some of the Hollywood Ten members revealed years after their own investigations, if they said they were Reds, that would only prove that the Red-baiters were right when they called them Communists! It would undermine their pose as good liberals, who were only taking pro-Soviet positions because they genuinely believed in them, not because it was the Party line.
And this is precisely the pose Zinn took to the agents who questioned him in 1953. Zinn “acknowledged that perhaps his activities in the past had opened him to charges that he was associated with the CP as a member; however,” he told the FBI, “he was not. … He stated that he was a liberal and perhaps some people would consider him to be a ‘leftist.’” He admitted that he participated in the work of groups that had been considered CP fronts — in fact, he belonged to and worked in scores of them, not just one or two; “but his participation was motivated by his belief that in this country people had the right to believe, think and act according to their own ideals.” He went on to note that if he had knowledge of anyone who sought to overthrow the U.S. government by force or violence, he would advise the Bureau. Zinn added that “he would advise the FBI if he observed persons committing acts of sabotage or espionage against the Government.” He also declared that he “would defend this country in the event of war against any enemy including the Soviet Union.”
I’m no fan of either Zinn or Chomsky, but…
Chomsky: Zinn’s files…were “MOSTLY a mixture of things that they’ve picked up here and there which is MOSTLY false, things they’ve gotten from informants that are MOSTLY false.”
Radosh: “For Chomsky, ANYTHING coming from the FBI obviously has to, by definition, be lies.”
“The reason Zinn denied his membership was the same as that for other Communists. The Party instructed them not to….”
The year was 1953. An admission of CP membership would certainly have made him unemployable.
Zinn: He also declared that he “would defend this country in the event of war against any enemy including the Soviet Union.”
Radosh: ‘Would he have defended the US if indeed the Cold War had escalated into a real war with the USSR? Note he says “any enemy,” and his eyes at that time, the Soviet Union was a peacemaking power and a friend….’
[Note also that he says, "the Soviet Union."]
Sidney Hook convincingly argued that Communists should not be teaching in our schools. Empirical evidence, according to them, supposedly cannot contradict the doctrines of their Communist masters. Academic institutions cannot survive this sort of existential attack on their core reason for existence. They must be committed to the objective and dispassionate search for the truth. Someone like Howard Zinn should never be allowed to teach students. Such individuals should literally be perceived as similar to child molesters.
Howard Zinn’s major work A People’s History of the United States was released in 1980. It would have been ignored ten years earlier. Inflated grades became the norm for black students in the mid 1960s. White students and mostly everyone else jumped aboard the gravy train no later than 1975. The majority of soft science credentials awarded in the last forty some years are fraudulent. Even conservative parents looked the other way while this nonsense occurred because their children were befitting from the scam. Howard Zinn and his buddies essentially bribed them.
Matt Damon, the very popular and wealthy actor, is, I believe, producing a TV series based on Zinn’s history. Damon makes much of his Harvard ‘degree’ by the way.
Lost all respect for Damon and the rest. He’s one of the few with a degree of any sort and it isn’t even a “real” degree.
Virtually all the rest are the drop outs the teacher told to join the thespian club because they pointed to Greenland instead of China on the map.
.
Good article, but I think you made a mistake:
“In 1978 he and other went to North Vietnam in a solidarity trip, and to arrange the release of a tiny minority of American POW’s, a propaganda coup for the North Vietnamese government.”
I thought all of the prisoners were released around 1973? Plus, by April of 1975 we were treated to an inglorious helibourne rooftop departure from Saigon, were we not? What prisoners would have remained in 1978 in Hanoi?
Just asking for the sake of accuracy.
W
Starting with Stalin, the communists always retained some of their captured POW’s after the war ended. Thousands of Nazi soldiers died in the Gulag as late as the ’50′s. Why do you believe the North Vietnamese treated our American prisoners any differently? Of course, I have never seen any conclusive evidence. Has anyone?
A good corrective for Zinn’s book is Paul Johnson’s History of the American People.
I recall reading of Zinn’s CP membership many years ago–and not from an FBI-approved source. The relationship may have been murky, and he, like many CP people, may have chosen his words carefully to conceal his situation. I doubt, however, that we will find him ever saying, “I am not now, nor have I ever been . . . .”
Radosh, having been there, knows the drill.
Matt Damon is indeed.
His friends.. Ben Affleck and George Clooney have an affinity for current policy as well.
Sean Penn’s father….Registered communist who was blacklisted at one time.
I read Zinn a good number of years ago in college while majoring in history. The professor was clear-headed enough to use his book as an example of ‘writing history with a point of view’, though that point of view was never overtly labeled. I now guess the clever old professor could tell lefty colleagues he was teaching Zinn while not explaining exactly how he was teaching him.
[Zinn’s files, Chomsky said, were “mostly a mixture of things that they’ve picked up here and there which is mostly false, things they’ve gotten from informants that are mostly false. We took for granted that obviously we were being monitored by the FBI."]
Who to believe, who to believe: Chomsky for whom lying is like breathing or the FBI who occasionally fibs.
Depends on what Chomsky is referring to. The FBI’s raw files contain all sorts of unsubstantiated stuff about all sorts of people. Ernest Hemingway’s belief that the FBI was following him around was considered a symptom of his craziness. It turned out that they had quite an extensive file on him.
“By this time, it is clear that Howard Zinn had long departed from CP ranks. If anything, he was far to the left of the official American C.P.”
Is this supposed to be considered a defense of Zinn – that by the 1960s he had moved to the left of the American Communist Party?
Zinn most get things right with regard to the facts. The history he describes as ‘The People’s History’ mostly happened, it was real, and it did represent real oppression and immorality on the part of people in the United States. That such things did happen is necessary to explain the existance of Howard Zinn and those like him.
The real flaw however is the interpretation of these facts, beginning with the labeling of said history as ‘The People’s History’ when it is no such thing. Zinn gives a very narrow view of history which accepts only a narrow range of facts from a narrow range of actors in the rich tapestry of American history. Much more was going on than Zinn admits to, and many of his actors are animated by more forces and sometimes more important forces than the comicly simply class warface account he believes his history reveals. Simply put, Zinn’s history explains himself, but does little to explain the origins of the larger US community. This deficit Zinn can only explain by claiming that the wider US community is and has continiously been duped and victimized, but this view is no more than an attempt to claim that anyone that Zinn doesn’t claim to have been an active actor in the story of American history isn’t one.
One of the most common political debates about US history today is the question, “Did the founding fathers intend America to be a Christian nation?” There are those that present facts that they claim prove ‘Yes’ and there are those that claim to have facts that prove ‘No’. The truly educated individual says neither ‘Yes’ nor ‘No’, but rather asks “Which founding fathers?” and “What do you mean by a Christian nation?” The two sides are really arguing past each other and just as importantly, missing the most salient point, which is, that this question is not a new one but which has animated debates about our nation since the time of its founding. There is no one answer to the question, just as there is no one single simple story that explains America. Any attempt to explain the whole of America with a single simplistic narrative is not only doomed to failure, but is tantamont to lying to someone. Perhaps those young prisoners had been lied to, but if they have, listening to Howard Zinn was just trading one set of lies and mythologies for another one.
I’ve long held that the best way to understand US politics is to read the Federalist Papers, and the Anti-Federalist papers.
I generally agree with celebrim’s remarks. Bad things happened, and all the policies and events that Zinn described did occur, but what he left out is the contested nature of U.S. history. Indian removal, slavery, the oppression of women, bad conditions for workers, nativism, all were opposed by important voices, Herman Melville and Charles Sumner for instance: indeed, the Republican Party was founded in opposition to the extension of slavery. I don’t believe that any leftist has resuscitated Sumner for instance, and Melville (a more ambivalent figure) has been trashed by his “revivers.” Please see these blogs of mine for examples: http://clarespark.com/2010/06/10/herman-melville-dead-white-male/. And Melville’s detractors were either Stalinists or high up in the social democratic left. For Sumner’s chief ideas see http://clarespark.com/2009/10/05/charles-sumner-moderate-conservative-on-lifelong-learning/, and http://clarespark.com/2008/05/03/margoth-vs-robert-e-lee/.
Excellent post. American history is rich and complex, and people like Zinn pick and chose things out of context to create an ‘alternate universe’ United States that never existed.
Another thing about our history is that we get our views of some events in America’s past tangled up with our modern sensibilities, and end up misinterpreting or even dismissing historical events that may have some disturbing aspects to them. It is this latter habit that makes many people easy targets for the Zinns of the world.
Mine eyes have seen the horror of the coming of the Reds
They’re hiding in the closets and they’re underneath the beds
They’re in the pop-up toaster and they’re in my US Keds
The Reds go marching ooonnnn
Glory,glory halleluia,
Don’t let the Communists subdue ya,
Glory,glory halleluia,
Let’s fight until they’re gone!
The 100 million victims of 20th Century communism are unfortunately unavailable to appreciate your humor.
I would have to argue with two of Radosh’s points, in what is otherwise a fine article.
First, Zinn didn’t enlist in the US Army to defend America, he did it to defend the Soviet Union. Zinn once explained that “There was a need to defeat the monstrosity of fascism. It was that belief that drove me to enlist in the Air Force and fly bombing missions over Europe.” It had nothing to do with the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the defense of the United States, or Japanese imperial ambition. It was all couched in the language of the CPUSA and Popular Front’s talking points about “fighting fascism”. Talking points that only became widely disseminated by the Popular Front after the German invasion of Soviet occupied Poland on June 22nd 1941.
The American Veterans Committee was not an entirely Communist dominated group. The AVC non Communist members were able to purge the organization.
Why do we allow the teaching of Zinn’s book (or of radical Islamism) in our prisons?
Do we really need to teach them ideologies of hatred and resentment toward American society?
Our world has gone crazy.
I work in educational publishing, where the 5 percent or so of center-right employees have to keep their heads down! It’s sobering to see the effect that The People’s History has on editors and teachers I know. They have neither the knowledge base nor the common sense nor the life experience to see through it. It bowls them away. An Upward Bound teacher I know is basing her lesson plans on it for the upcoming semester. But with or without The People’s History, the incoming books reflect the same percentages I mention above. Fact-checking stops a surprising amount of it, when it can be done. Thanks Dave (25): As important as reading is, these real-life experiences are what most turned me against the left.
I remember Howard Zinn as one of my professors when I attneded BU. Yes his ideas were different than mine in a myriad of ways, yes he challenged your thought processes. But one thing he did not do is make fun of the students that disagreed with him (me being a very open Reagan republican) or threaten their grades. As long as you had a cogent argument and did your work you recieved that oft saught after A. Many of today’s liberal and leftist professors could learn from Prof. Zinn, he above everything else sought to teach.
Whatever the merits of Zinn as a teacher might have been, the widespread and uncritical adoption of his version of American history has had terrible consequences. His tome has been used by teachers much less tolerant of differing viewpoints in the classroom to brainwash an entire generation of American students into believing that the history of the US is nothing but oppression, imperialism and racism.
Of course Hedge’s convict students eagerly accepted Zinn’s history – what criminal wouldn’t like being handed what basically amounts to the “Sgt. Krupke” excuse from “West Side Story”: “Hey! We’re depraved on account of we’re deprived!” (Gee, that line provides cover for so very, very much doesn’t it? Everything from inter-city gangs to Palestinian suicide bombers.)
Joseph: As far as Hemingway goes, well, the FBI was not following him around for no reason whatsoever.Hemingway was indeed a card-carrying Commie during the Spanish Civil War and berated John dos Passos when dos Passos raised the issue of Spanish Republican atrocities and Stalinist involvement in that little WWII dress rehearsal. Like Orwell, dos Passos’ idealism crashed on the rocks of the Spanish Civil War and dos Passos later moved to the right. Hemingway, however, never renounced the Party as far as I know. Old Papa was indeed a harbinger of today’s pampered celebrity lefties: he said that his sympathies were with the oppressed, even if he did enjoy hunting and drinking and hanging out with the landlords instead of the serfs.
Hemingway wasn’t a card-carrying anything. And while his sympathies were indeed with the oppressed (which you seem to hold against him), he did in fact like hunting, drinking and hanging out with certain “serfs,” as you call them, as well as certain landlords.
Ah, Joseph, I misspoke; according to Paul Johnson’s “intellectuals,” Hemingway never formally joined the CP. On the other hand,he was hardly an brave, independent thinker, as you seem to believe:
“He said that anyone who took an anti-CP line was ‘either a fool or a knave’ and he would not allow his name to appear on the masthead of the new left-wing magazine Ken, launched by Esquire, when he discovered it was not a CP vehicle. On the Spanish Civil war, he accepted, from start to finish, the CP line in all its crudity.”
That led to his break with dos Passos. A mutual friend of theirs, Jose Robles, who fought for the Republicans, was tortured and murdered by Stalin’s minions in Spain. Dos Passos refused to accept Robles’ guilt. Hemingway rebuked him: “‘ If with your hatred of the Communists, you feel justified in attacking the people who are fighting the war, you should at least try to get your facts right.’ But dos Passos, it turned out, had got his facts right: Hemingway was the naif, the innocent, the dupe.”
BTW, when did Hemingway become acceptable again to the left? When I was in college in the late ’70′s, he was distinctly unfashionable; his macho act and hunting and fighting made him an figure of derision in those days of the Alan Alda male. The radical feminists I knew then hated him with the heat of a thousand suns. Since I admired him as a writer (not as a man)and recognized his spare prose style as truly revolutionary in its’ day, I always thought they were a bit hard on him.
Was Hemingway unfashionable in the ’70s? Is he fashionable now? Fashion comes and goes. His best writing is wonderful. As for Hemingway himself, I think he was a man of enormous courage, not because of the macho persona he constructed, but because of the true facts of his sad and conflicted life.
As for Hemingway’s politics, here I’m conflicted. On one hand, I believe Franco’s victory was ultimately good for the world, since he was able to keep Spain largely out of the war and unoccupied (I believe Hitler would have invaded a Republican Spain and occupied Gibraltar, etc.). But, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, I can’t imagine siding with an ally of Hitler, no matter who was on the other side.
Howard Zinn… a Communist?! Say it ain’t so!
Why is Chomsky bent out of shape? You’d think that being labeled a Communist by Hoover’s FBI would be a badge of honor to these folk.
I was a graduate student at Boston University in the early 70′s. I got to know Howard quite well and also got acquainted with Noam Chomsky. I was involved in a march on the JFK government center in May of 71. Prior to this march, I was in several meetings with Howard and a professor from MIT and was a former analyst with the CIA (Daniel Ellsberg.)During the preparation meetings for the march, Howard never referenced his work in the late 40s or early 50s. He was a popular academic and was clearly known for his progressive views. The problem with Howard and Chomsky, is the distortion of facts that meets their self-prescribed paradigms. Unfortunately, most students (me included) did not have the cognitive discipline to see through their faulty logic. Further, I find both Howard and Chomsky as self-hating individuals who viewed their birth religion as an onerous burden which contributed to their animosity to the State of Israel. Unfortunately for a lot of young people, Howard and Chomsky trained a number of existing academics who preach a leftist and progressive philosophy that is muddied and distorted. Young people are not given an opportunity to really think, analyze and learn critical reasoning skills. Instead, they sit and swallow the “juice.”
Who is this “reliable source” they keep quoting? The truth or falsity hangs on that. And in any event Zinn was under no obligation whatever to divulge to the FBI what his political affiliations were. As a citizen, taxpayer and veteran he was entitled to believe whatever he wanted.
Where I live in Michigan we have a militia problem (i.e, The Hutaree. Google it for more info) and the feds show up all the time asking people about their neighbors and friends affiliations. I don’t agree with any of that militia stuff but I still don’t tell the feds anything either and I never will (unless they have a subpoena).
This is one thing I don’t understand about the left – you’re so mistrustful of the feds and yet you want a huge nanny state with a huge of amount of control over people’s lives. So, what is big government – evil daddy or all-nuturing mama? “Progressives” can’t seem to make up their mind about that. How naive, to yearn for a massive domestic bureaucracy without ever imagining that one day it might be used against you and yours.
As for the Hutarees, well, good God, I know the Left is chomping at the bit to find real violent “wingnuts” (and meanwhile all the real mob violence comes from the Left – see Toronto, G-8 summit. Not just threatened or imagined violence but the real thing, but since mainly small business owners suffer, why would the left give a rat’s butt? They’re only kulak nobodies, right, Kenny?)
The Hutarees are a tiny band of losers. The Commies who actually did worm their way into the American establishment had far more influence and did much more damage. (Google: Verona. P.S. This might be news to ya, Kenny – but the Rosenburgs were really and truly as guilty as sin. And so was Alger Hiss.)
Donna, there is a slight typo in your Google hint: it should be VENONA, not Verona. You are surely referring to the Venona Transcripts which proved Communist attempts to infiltrate American life, not Verona, which is a city in Italy.
Also, the couple that were executed for treason for giving (some of) the secrets of the atom bomb to the Soviets were the Rosenbergs, not Rosenburgs.
I don’t mean to nitpick your spelling, I’m just trying to make sure that people have the right spelling so that they can further research Venona or the Rosenbergs if they like….
Thanks for the corrections, Henry. I was pretty tired last night and neglected to preview before posting.
I am a big fan of the History Channel and didn’t know anything about Zinn.(that he was a fellow traveler of Obama) but HC said they were doing a special on our History.I watched the previews with Matt Damon running down the founding fathers and that was enough for me….then later I found out that Zinn wrote it.I complained to no avail.
Leftists continue to deny the plainly visible truth. Bill Press, promoting hs book yesterday on the Michael Medved Show, asserted that NPR is “centrist”. As proof he noted that “insiders” called NPR “National Pentagon Radio”.
So, for Bill Press, the fact that the Leftists within NPR consider it’s overwhelmingly Left-leaning bias to be insufficiently Leftist (too friendly to the Pentagon) is proof of it’s centrist “straight up the midddle” posture.
Riiiight.
NPR- you mean National Palestine Radio? really?? LOL x 100
So how many of his admirers are in this White House? How many universities are using
his book as text? How many future Supreme Court judges agree with him? Useful Idiots.
Right-wingers immediately call Zinn a liar, without having read any of his work for sure, yet always fail to mention the biggest liar in American history, George W. Bush, who started two illegal wars against Muslims because they didn’t tote the Bible everywhere or have white skin. Of course, Bush scapegoated them as terrorists and fear-mongered for 8 years in order to make his buddies on Wall Street, Haliburton, and especially Big Oil rich at the expense of the poor. Stop talking about a dead guy, and get back to the real issue: Bush’s lying and policies that caused America to go into the worst economy since the Great Depression, which by the way was caused by Republicans too. You don’t need to read Professor Zinn’s book to know that.
Gee Vinny, don’t let any facts get in your way. What a bozo
Bush has been out of office longer than Zinn has been dead so why do you not move on and deal with the real issues raised by Mr. Obama?
Zinn lied and he lied repeatedly in a propaganda piece that other leftist claim as history. I have read Zinn and it is an insult to call the man a historian. He was not bound by source material or rules of evidence. He simply made stuff up to support his leftist agenda.
Hmm, did you write obama’s talking points perhaps?
Trolls, dime a dozen.
Yeah PTL, we got us a whole passel of ‘em useful idiots, so what say we begin diggin through that
pile the first week in November. Works for me! ann check yer “6″
“In 1978 he and others went to North Vietnam in a solidarity trip, and to arrange the release of a tiny minority of American POW’s, a propaganda coup for the North Vietnamese government.”
I believe the year should be 1968.
Before “People’S History” Zinn wrote “Logic of Withdrawal” about Vietnam.
One of his accusations was that in a certain engagement, the US reported 1800 enemy
dead but only 100 enemy weapons captured. (Numbers approximate, been a long time
since I read that.)
Therefore it was “obvious” that American soldiers had killed 1700 innocent civilians.
I was familar with that battle ground and there were NO, repeat, NO civilians living
in the near proximity of that fight.
What did happen was that the North Vietnamese were able to retrieve both bodies and
weapons of 1700 of their dead. But then when they had to retreat from that area,
they took the weapons but had to abandon the bodies. The captured 100 weapons belonged to the 100 boi doi who were killed at extremely close range after they had
broken through the perimiter.
Reading Zinn’s version/accusation was my first introduction to guilt by narrative,
the facts don’t matter. I trust that I’ve grasped that lesson entirely too well
to be taken in by the unholy ploy.
“During the war in Vietnam, they [the CP] backed the moderate group known as “Negotiations Now,” which sought a negotiated settlement of the war, and had the support of people like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Irving Howe.”
Actually, “Negotiations Now” was not a front group of the American Communist Party. It was a committee of the democratic left, largely created or organized by Mary Temple and Penn Kemble. If anything, it was a creature of the democratic Socialists. The Americans for Democratic Action, under the leadership of John Kenneth Galbraith, also supported Negotiations Now.
I’m sure this is an honest mistake made by Dr. Radosh. The article would also benefit from a disclosure by Dr. Radosh of this own experience with the American Communist Party. If Dr. Radosh is turning over everyone’s cards, perhaps he should begin with his own very rich hand, to reinforce his objectivity, if for no other reason.
RR’s red past is no secret. On the contrary, he wrote a very interesting book about it, “Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.”
Zinn lied to the FBI. Martha Stewart lied to the FBI and went to jail. Is it a criminal offense to lie to the FBI? Analyze ahd discuss.
Miriam you just hit on a sore point with me. Lying under oath, perjury, is properly considered a crime. When the FBI interviewed Zinn lying when not under oath was not a crime. Not so in Martha Stewart’s time.
The older standard should be reinstated ASAP. Why?
Army interrogators are taught to avoid the type of questions that inspire falsehoods. You cannot get good intelligence that way. However, prosecutors
like cheap convictions. So they all too often encourage their investigators
to extract lies that they can take to court under present atatutes.
This of course comes at the expense of gaining accurate information, which is
much more important than anybody’s “conviction average”. This is but a variant
on coerced confessions. Could also say that it violates the spirit, if not the letter, of doing away with bills of attainder.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to sound off on this matter.
First, Zinn had defended his country, serving as a bombardier in the US Air Force during World War II.
Or: Zinn defended what he believed was the one great hope for mankind, the Soviet Union, by fighting, most importantly, against the Nazis, and only incidentally for the United States.
Guaranteed that Zinn was against US involvement in the European war until the moment when Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Stalin. As all good CPUSA members were.
From what I’ve heard, the more appropriate term for NPR is “National Proletarian Rado.”
Really? Do you think that many proles listen to it? As far as I can tell it is definitely more of a middle/upper class thing.
Wouldn’t that depend on how far left your views are?
Howard Zinn was not a historian. Historians study history and fact. They are confined in what they write by rules of evidence and interpretation.
Howard Zinn was a propagandist. He writes his history to support his ideology. When the actual truth does not support the ideology, he lies and makes up his own truth. The next time you are in a bookstore, pick up a copy of The People History – don’t buy it just look at it. When you open it you will find the absence of any footnotes that would point to the evidence, source material, for his narrative. They do not exist. He simply made a lot of stuff up or distorted actual events to suit his narrative.
Example: The embalmed beef scandal during the Spanish American War. Never happened. No evidence that it every happened. However, Zinn takes the allegations originally made by Commanding General Nelson Miles, which he later back-tracked on, and prints them as facts. He does not point out that Congressional and military investigations found no evidence. He also does not point out that Miles was the only one making the allegations. Evidence would have only gotten in Zinn’s way.
“Right-wingers immediately call Zinn a liar…”
Probably because Zinn couldn’t complete a paragraph without telling a whopper or three.
Guaranteed that Zinn was against US involvement in the European war until the moment when Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Stalin. As all good CPUSA members were.
My father, the son of immigrants, a self-described “Scoop Jackson” Democrat, WWII vet, and patriotic American, shocked me when I was a teenager by telling me he was a frequent attendee of Communist rallies in the 1930′s.
“I went to them because I was a poor farm kid and they gave out free sandwiches,” he said. “My friends and I went for the free food; we couldn’t have cared less about the politics. We never even listened to the speeches.”
(Who was footing the bill, ultimately, for those sandwiches? Stalin? Ironic when you consider the USSR suffered a severe and entirely self-induced famine in the 1930′s.)
My dad, a naive farm kid, might have eaten Commie ham on rye, but even he didn’t buy Commie ideology. The workers and farmers of the US weren’t fooled – only highly educated boneheads swallowed that poison. The morally decrepit Zinn couldn’t see through Stalinism even after the Hitler-Stalin pact, just as his doofus spiritual descendants can’t see through Che and Chavez. I’m willing to cut some slack to those who naively bought into Communism prior to that date – after all, it’s not like the NYT was reporting the truth about Stalin’s show trials. But anybody who supported the USSR after that point was truly a moral nitwit and pathological liar. Zinn was one such, Lilian Hellman another.
This is more of the fallout from the botched McCarthy era. If McCarthy had been smarter, we could have nipped the enemy in the bud.
Zinn was a communist? Really? Who would have known?
So what do the FBI files say about Barack Obama?
His communist associations are at least as extensive as Zinn’s, and there’s evidence they go directly back to the KGB’s successor, the Russian SVR.
Using a history textbook written by Zinn would be akin to using a history textbook written by a nazi.
Utterly worthless.
Brennan: McCarthy Vindicated At Last
http://www.federalobserver.com/archive.php?aid=12078
Well, stick a feather in my cap and call it macaroni. Who would’ve guessed.
Considering the number of highly-regarded McCarthy-era finger-pointers who later turned out to be liars (Matt Cvetic, Harvey Matusow, and of course Joe McCarthy himself, to name just a few), and bearing in mind that many of these folks got paid to provide information to the feds, we should regard anonymous FBI informants as roughly on par with jailhouse snitches in terms of their general trustworthiness.
The claim that the American Veterans Committee was “entirely made up of Communists” is utterly false. Almost all of the leading figures in the AVC during the 1940s were outspoken anti-Communist liberals, folks like Gil Harrison and Charles Bolte. Not sure where the author got his ‘information’ from here…perhaps from an anonymous FBI informant?
There’s always opportunists. Pathetic but true. But doesn’t change the fact that the country was riddled with communist conspirators (and still is). The real travesty is they spun McCarthy so well that they shielded themselves oh-so-well. The real victims of the McCarthy era weren’t the so-called blacklisted commies — they had a hell of a support system. The real victims were all the honest ones who exposed the commies (Elia Kazan, for instance). Those people were often destroyed. I would never give a shred of the benefit of the doubt to the communists. They deserved (and deserve) a much worse fate than they got.
Just a note for you. There was no US Air Force during World War II. The US Air Force did not come into being until AFTER the war. If you want to be taken seriously, and I DO want to take you seriously, you do not need to make sophomoric mistakes like this. If Zinn served as a bombardier during WWII it would have been either in the Navy, the Marine Corps, or the Army Air Corps.
During WWII, according to Wikipedia, the official name was Army Air Forces. I remember it, from my reading, etc., as Army Air Force.
P.S. – But l do remember WW2 movies that featured the stirring battle song that began, “Off we go, into the wild, blue yonder” and ended “Nothing can stop the Army Air Corps!”
I am curious about the people who are criticizing Zinn’s book – People’s History of the United States: Has anybody ever challenged Zinn on the accuracy of the facts stated on the book? To my knowledge, none yet. So how does your perspective on killing of innocent people for the progress of another group of people become a more valuable view than Zinn’s?
I don’t know how many of you have actually read the entire book but right at the beginning of the book he writes clearly how he’s viewing history. That to me was integrity of thought.
We celebrate Columbus day in America. Columbus discovered the Americas so he’s often referred to as one of the greatest explorers in the history of mankind especially in America. Would it to be too unacceptable to look at his real intent of sailing the Atlantic to find a route to India so the Spaniards could plunder the riches of India just like the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Brits were already doing? His discovery added a new horizon to European colonization (to be read as plundering) of Ancient lands. For Europeans it was progress; for the Native Americans it was slow and brutal death.
Why should our kids not learn that viewpoint? Are we to teach them forever that our actions were for a higher purpose and it was all worth it when innocent people were sacrificed at the altar of European “progress”. Its amusing to see how many posts refer the the liberal teachers as a bunch of idiots who do not understand history which our government has fed us for centuries while you are all the enlightened ones!
Radosh, like the late Zinn, is a Jew – and, hence, a fake anti-Communist. Note how Radosh seeks to disparage Hoover’s anti-Civil Rights mentality without ever mentioning that Civil Rights and racial desegregation had always been part of the Communist Party platform from earliest days. Neither does Radosh point out that Communism had always been a Jewish movement. Thus, Radosh is no better than Zinn. He is merely a fake “kosher conservative”.