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   

The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return

Only a few decades ago California twice elected Ronald Reagan governor and twice voted for the Gipper as President.  It later chose a series of Republican governors, ending with its former Senator Pete Wilson (1991-1998).  Twenty years later the state has no functioning Republican Party and all statewide offices are securely held by Democrats in the mold of San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris.  What California looks like today is what Democrats want for the whole country.  That Gilded State dystopia is described in detail in the first chapter of Michael Anton’s book The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.  That portrait features super-wealthy coastal elites eager to impose their environmental ideology and social justice agenda on a vanishing middle class as well as on Valley farmers whose irrigation waters and livelihood dry up for the sake of a supposedly endangered fish.  This Democrat lock on political power is based on an ever-growing multitude of legal and illegal immigrants whose voting power and reliance on government assistance turned a relatively red state deep blue. 

Add to this overview crushing home prices, the highest state income tax rate, crumbling infrastructure, traffic nightmares, deteriorating schools, a burgeoning homeless population, and a protected class of illegal aliens with more freedom to violate the law than conservatives have to express opinions about males who identify as the opposite sex and share bathroom facilities with biological females.  This incomplete portrait reveals what’s in store for the rest of the country if current trends continue, trends made possible by the addition of, at a minimum, fifty-nine million immigrants since Ted Kennedy’s 1965 “reform” bill whose every promise to the American people was, as Anton notes, a complete lie.  Anton also observes (in chapter 5, “Immigration”) that fifty-nine million doesn’t include the offspring of those prolific immigrants or the twenty million plus illegal immigrants now in the country.  All totaled, these numbers represent an unprecedented inflow of foreigners  whose presence in the country has lowered working class wages, increased home prices, drained  public coffers, taxed public services, crowded cities, “fundamentally transformed” California, and is quickly transmogrifying Colorado and even Virginia.

Most AT readers are familiar with the execrable state of affairs in California (well summarized by Victor Davis Hanson) but most will find something new to consider when Anton focuses attention on the ultimate objectives of America’s super-wealthy ruling class (chapters 3 and 4), a group consisting of tech, finance, business, and agriculture oligarchs who provide the money that creates and motivates political puppets eager to create their own fiefdoms via influence-peddling and revolving government-business doors.  (Why has Congress, including the GOP, been loath to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s corruption?  Answer:  “because they all do the same thing -- or hope to once they leave office.”)  Anton’s analysis of these super-rich and somewhat hereditary puppeteers focuses more on economics than sheer ideology, and on political power as the means to secure their positions of wealth and status.

 Anton asserts that the primary goal of these elites is “to transform the United States into a deracinated economic-administrative zone with one size-fits-all ‘rules’ whose surface impartiality masks an unbending bias toward capital over wages, management over labor, words over actions, ideas over things, the new over the old, cosmopolitanism over the familiar, foreigners over the native-born. ”  Put more simply, ruling elites pursue a globalist free market that redounds to the benefit of high finance and big business (especially technology) at the expense of American workers, American culture, and the American Constitution.  A “high-low” coalition of the super wealthy plus folks dependent on government is the nationwide ruling class playbook as it was in California.    

Anton doesn’t discount the role of ideology among the ruling class but views it more as a means than an end in itself -- a vehicle employed to pacify true believers (the “Wokerati”) and to secure the power that guarantees their fabulous wealth will continue indefinitely.  Indeed, these elites must employ a juggling act that balances grievance-based identity politics with the need to pay off their various constituencies.  Killing the golden goose of globalist capitalism would surely produce a break-up of their coalition that includes many “Freeloaders” as well as aggrieved minorities unwilling to give up I-phones and hefty government assistance programs just to vilify “the (white, male, heterosexual, Christian) man.”  The vindictive “Avenger” group in this coalition, led by academics like Ta-Nehisi Coates, seeks nothing short of, in the words of one critic, “a program of infinite penance for whites.” Meanwhile a soulmate of Coates, Noel Ignatiev, goes even further by giving his Harvard Magazine article this title: “Abolish the White Race.” While the largely white ruling class elites are content to use this racist hatred for political objectives that now include reparations, they hardly want to see their mega-fortunes turned into dust.  

Whether a global capitalist system can succeed in buying off these competing constituencies given a democratic-in-name-only America is unlikely, thus Anton’s prolonged discussion in chapters 6 and 7 of future possibilities which extend from Blue and Red Caesars to outright war to various secession scenarios.  Anton would have been wise, in my view, to sharply curtail these speculations since the author himself notes Yogi Berra’s prognosticative warning:  “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”  What is perfectly clear, however, is how that globalist system has harmed American workers and how our ruling elites have all but destroyed the country’s traditional political institutions thanks to the ubiquitous rule of activist judges (“kritarchy”) who regularly nullify democratic decisions like the 60 to 40 percent  California vote in 1994 to deny illegal aliens non-emergency government assistance.

With respect to culture, I give Anton major kudos for discussing how the ruling class has pacified and distracted  Americans via mindless and morally vacuous entertainments, drugs, and especially “porn” -- all products that have dulled the cognitive abilities and moral fiber of Americans thanks to their incessant propagation via television, film, music, and the Internet!   Needless to say, the ruling class’s media “Megaphones” eagerly push these tawdry products to keep themselves modestly rich and American consumers “demoralized” -- indifferent to the hollowing out of their country’s working class and Constitution. 

In this hollowed out America justice is anything but Constitutionally equal.  One example among  several  Anton provides is the FBI’s pre-dawn, SWAT-squad raid of the elderly Roger Stone’s house that was filmed “coincidentally” by CNN -- all in response to a non-violent “process crime.”  Compare this wildly disproportionate use of force with the failure to even prosecute a ruling class functionary, Andrew McCabe, who lied to Congress about a coup designed to undermine a legally elected President.  Thanks to a complicit media dedicated to the proposition that most Americans are racist dimwits, this blatant injustice is hidden from the wider public.

Anton’s final chapter provides a political platform that calls for President Trump’s re-election and disavows any Republican Party not committed to protecting American workers, America’s traditional culture, and the American Constitution.  The GOP of the two Bushes and many “conservative” think tanks that push globalist “free trade” policies and give tacit support for open borders and unchecked  immigration must either follow Trump’s pro-American lead or die. 

While Anton would have done well to make his points in two-thirds the space, he nevertheless scores numerous bullseyes that make his tendency to “over-explain” forgivable.  Among these telling hits is the author’s quotation of an English author, Anthony Daniels, who observed that political correctness is “communist propaganda writ small.”  The purpose of both is to humiliate people by forcing them to repeat obvious lies and thereby “lose once and for all their sense of probity.”  An example I would offer is the now-PC claim that men can have babies and menstruate.  Daniels says, “To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself.”  He adds, “A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”  Control is an essential component of the ruling class’s agenda, and one that’s surely at stake in next month’s election. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle