Howard Zinn

A giant among American intellectuals

As I have written, if my companies had not been attacked three times in three years (1, 2, 3) by government-media alliances, I doubt that I would have ever heard of Ed Herman. But I became an eager student who began learning at Ed’s and Noam Chomsky’s feet in 1990. I soon learned that the media purveys its daily ration of lies to control what people think, but I was slower to realize that the history that I was taught in school was more of the same. The first inkling that I got of that was reading Howard Zinn’s chapter on Christopher Columbus in his magnum opus, A People’s History of the United States. I read it in 1992, and it was the first time that I had seen any challenge to the hagiography that I was raised with on Columbus, and it inspired the first essay on my site as it stands today (I wrote both it and my fluoride essay in 1998). Watching Saving Private Ryan in 1998 inspired my war essay, but it was not until I read Zinn’s review of Saving Private Ryan that I really began to understand what a work of propaganda Saving Private Ryan really was.

One thing that made Zinn’s work so powerful about World War II was that he fought in it, thinking that he was one of the good guys, a Jew defeating the Nazis. It was only years later that Zinn learned that instead of saving the world from the Nazis, he slaughtered the very people that he was allegedly saving as well as trapped German soldiers who were waiting for the war to end. It was similar to Ralph McGehee’s belated realization that he was not one of the good guys, as he fought communism for the CIA. Those kinds of authoritative admissions have been extremely rare in American history, or in any history, for that matter. Zinn and McGehee were towering pillars of integrity who are in my pantheon.

In 1999 I hired an editor. When I revised my Columbus essay in 2001, I contacted Zinn less than two weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks and asked for his permission to produce a lengthy quote from his Columbus chapter. I no longer write like that, but I have let that quote remain, as a tribute to Zinn. In late-September 2001, the American left was frantically trying to avert the imperial rampage that was coming. Zinn was 79 years old at the time, I found an email address for him on the Internet, sent my email, and wondered if I would ever hear back from him. I heard back the same day, as he gave his permission and praised my essay. I am still awestruck that he did that.

Zinn was regularly vilified in the popular culture, and a book was written to analyze the attacks on A People’s History. My previous post, on the limitations of intellectuals, spurred this post. The attacks on Zinn’s work were like the attacks on Ed’s and Noam’s work: completely without merit. Those attacking intellectuals were similar to the “skeptics,” in that they could not string two rational thoughts together when they weren’t lying, and they were often professors at places such as Stanford. Those were ethical and intellectual midgets that took aim at Zinn, and his work stands unrebutted, similar to how Ed and Noam’s Propaganda Model has never been credibly rebutted. Ed’s praise after Howard died was about the highest that I saw, especially considering the source.

There have not been many like Howard Zinn in American history.