HOWARD
ZINN’S AMERICAN HOLOCAUST
If
folks wonder why youngsters today are less patriotic and more inclined toward socialism, they need look no further
than the most popular “history” textbook in the United States, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States -- a
one-sided work written from the perspective of a Communist activist that contains
a plethora of distortions and outright lies. In 2012, the director of the American Textbook
Council noted that Zinn’s text had sold two million copies and was the
“best-selling survey of American history.” By 2018, it was estimated that the book had sold
more than 2.6 million copies.
Mary
Grabar’s new book, Debunking Howard Zinn, does us the service of
exposing the mendacious, non-scholarly character of this work that was
praised to the hilt by Zinn’s former Cambridge neighbor, Matt Damon.
In Good Will Hunting the film’s protagonist exclaims, “It will
knock your socks off!” making an even
greater rock star of Zinn and solidifying for impressionable teens the bona
fides of a propaganda tome composed in a scant year. Even a sympathetic leftist historian, Michael
Kammen, called the book “simpleminded” and a “scissors-and-paste-pot job.” The well-known liberal scholar Arthur
Schlesinger was even more critical, labeling Zinn “a polemicist, not a
historian.” Grabar herself notes that
after his graduate school book on Fiorello La Guardia, Zinn produced not a
single piece of historical scholarship until decades later he slapped together
his People’s History -- a work that relies overwhelmingly on secondary
sources and for which “there is no evidence that Zinn ever actually made
extensive notes,” as he claimed, in preparation for its writing.
Grabar
provides scores of examples of Zinn’s modus operandi that ignores,
distorts, or simply lies about evidence to construct a Manichean portrait of
good versus evil as those categories are conceived by a Marxist activist. Zinn’s caricature of Columbus sets the stage
for his presentation of American history as a series of Holocausts. In one case Zinn quotes Columbus’ diary
entries out of context to portray the explorer as a rapacious gold-seeker who
wouldn’t be averse to enslaving the island’s primitive inhabitants. To accomplish this goal Zinn ignores Columbus’
positive comments about “freedom” for the “Arawak” tribe and splices together separate
entries that make the explorer appear a nascent slave trader on first viewing the
island’s inhabitants. In fact, the damning
comments about the natives being “good servants” were made days later and concerned
the perspective of a warring tribe intent on subjugating their more docile
neighbors. The other side of Zinn’s narrative
involves the beatification and Marxification of the Americas’ native population
-- a portrait at odds with any objective history of the New World which was
filled with wars at least as ubiquitous and violent (including the cannibalism that
Zinn omits) as those in “capitalist” Europe!
To
top off the lies about Columbus, Grabar shows that a good deal of Zinn’s
“scholarship” is plagiarized from a 1976 work by fellow anti-Vietnam War
activist, Hans Koning, Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth. Grabar shows how page after page in Zinn’s
history was lifted almost verbatim from Koning’s book. Indeed, “The first five-and-a-half pages of A
People’s History of the United States are little more than slightly altered
passages from Columbus: His Enterprise.” The secondary kicker is that Koning wasn’t
even an historian, much less a Columbus scholar. In fact, Koning’s “slim volume does not cite
any sources.” Grabar also reveals additional
instances of Zinn’s plagiarism -- one of which was discovered by a leftist
Professor who didn’t publicize the truth lest it harm their common ideological
objectives. So much for professional
standards that were applied even to a well-known historian like PBS’s favorite scholar, Doris Kearns Goodwin,
who “resigned from her post on the Pulitzer Prize review board and took a
‘leave’ from PBS NewsHour” when parts of her work were found to be
plagiarized.
Chapter
two of Grabar’s book reviews the life of Zinn as a dedicated Communist activist
whose Marxist beliefs and activities spoke louder than any card he may or may
not have carried. Chapter three shows
how Native Americans are used as props for Zinn’s ongoing Marxist cartoon, with
Europeans and Americans forming the necessary oppressive class. As for his account of the Iroquois Indians,
it was again largely plagiarized from another patently biased historian, Gary
Nash. One critic said the descriptions of
this well-known American tribe resembled “California countercultural rebels,
defenders of women’s rights, and communist egalitarians. . . .” In
Zinn’s telling, any butchery and slavery on the side of oppressed groups (even
the Aztecs) is ignored, distorted, or excused.
Thus, Zinn’s “history” conforms perfectly to Professor Fred Siegel’s
observation about the “New Historians” for whom “American history became a
tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the
African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else.”
Concerning
the second act of that tragedy, Zinn somehow manages to blame capitalism for
American slavery, though the institution has been around for all of recorded
history and still exists in some very non-capitalist African states. He also ignores the fact that only in America,
where slavery was said to be the cruelest, were slaves, despite the evils of
the institution, able to grow their population through natural increase,
something not possible in regions where slaves died or were killed so
frequently that only a constant influx of new victims maintained their numbers.
Grabar
clearly demonstrates that Zinn takes the orthodox Communist line when
discussing any topic: The Founding Fathers were more interested in their investments
than the welfare of oppressed groups. Lincoln
was more a capitalist tool than a President committed to ending slavery -- or a
friend to his adviser and later Republican political official, Frederick
Douglass. Even World War II was fought
to maintain the capitalist system, as was, of course, the Vietnam War, where,
according to Zinn, the My Lai massacre was “typical.” Also in the 60s, radical and violent groups
like the Black Panthers are given greater attention and more credit for (always
inadequate) civil rights progress than traditional groups like the NAACP -- even
though the latter organization clearly accomplished more than the former and was
supported by blacks (despite Zinn’s insinuations) far more than their violent
counterparts.
Earlier
in the book and also in closing Grabar makes a telling point about the
duplicity of modern historians by comparing their vigorous denunciation of
David Irving’s Holocaust-minimizing work with the plenary indulgences given to
Zinn’s unbalanced, unreliable, often-plagiarized volume. Why, she asks, should Zinn’s false American
Holocaust history not be judged by the same standards that make Irving’s
account of Hitler’s crimes totally unacceptable. The obvious answer is that most historians,
even those who think Zinn’s book is more propaganda than history, are still
sympathetic to the ideology that permeates Zinn’s distorted view of the U.S. --
a sympathy illustrated by their spirited defense of the book whenever official
attempts arise to remove it from state-related classrooms. Grabar provides sufficient
evidence to make the case that Zinn’s history is every bit as contemptible as
Irving’s and should be viewed with equal revulsion. That Zinn in 2004 signed a statement
supporting an investigation into a possible 9/11 Bush Administration conspiracy
says all one really needs to know about Zinn’s animus toward America. That professional historians, clueless high
school teachers, and even Google searches (no surprise) present Zinn’s history as reliable is a big reason many
young Americans no longer feel pride in a nation that’s been presented to them
through the jaundiced eyes of a Communist who cares not a whit for professional
historical standards -- or the truth.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in
Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy:
"Who's to Say?" is also available
on Kindle
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