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His parents were peasants from Russia and the Ukraine. Had they stayed in that part of the world, any children they had would’ve grown up under Stalin – and, if they’d dared to say anything critical of Uncle Joe in public, they wouldn’t have made it to adulthood. In fact, both mom and dad emigrated to America, where their son, like so many other offspring of destitute immigrants, succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. He became rich and famous, in fact. And how did he become rich and famous? By celebrating Communism and savaging America.
That Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was a card-carrying Communist, a daily fixture at Party meetings in New York, an inveterate Soviet apologist, a member of a range of Kremlin front groups, a cheerleader for Mao’s “people’s government,” a supporter of Castro and Ho Chi Minh, a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and an associate of such groups as ACORN, the Democratic Socialists of America, and International ANSWER, is routinely dropped down the memory hole by the countless teachers and professors who enthusiastically use his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States as a classroom text. Those instructors don’t tell their students that they’re being taught to think like Marxists; rather, they tell them that they’re finally learning the real truth about America, not patriotic propaganda.
For example, Zinn maintains that America was founded as – and has always been – a totalitarian state. Yes, Americans today are richer and freer than pretty much everybody else who’s ever lived on this planet; but Zinn’s readers are presented with a picture of an America whose economic inequality and political oppression are virtually without parallel. American heroism? American accomplishment? American ingenuity? Your kids won’t learn about these things from Zinn’s jeremiad. In his hands, even the most admirable chapters of American history become evidence of the depths of American perfidy.
Today, Zinn’s diatribe is used at schools and colleges all over America, at virtually every level, and in a wide range of disciplines. For decades, despite severe criticism by responsible and objective historians, it’s been by far the most influential of all American history textbooks. As Mary Grabar, born in Communist Yugoslavia, demonstrated in her powerful 2019 exposé Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation Against America, it’s proven to be a magnificent tool for left-wing teachers who see it as their role not to educate but to indoctrinate, and has consequently played a huge role in turning young Americans against their own country and transforming them into devout socialists.
But for many of Zinn’s acolytes, his book itself wasn’t enough. In 2008, two non-profits, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, both of which emphasize their devotion to “social justice,” founded the Zinn Education Project (ZEP), which describes itself as “a leading resource for teachers and teacher educators” and as “introduc[ing] students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula.” Rejecting conventional history lessons, with their “trivial pursuit of names and dates,” it provides them “with the analytical tools to make sense of and improve [the] world today.” In other words, it exchanges facts for ideology, training students to spew Marxist rhetoric – without ever actually explaining that that’s what it’s doing.
ZEP’s website “offers free, downloadable lessons and articles” that are based on Zinn’s “approach to history” and that “emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history.” ZEP also offers “workshops in collaboration with school districts, teacher unions, and at teacher conferences” and runs “campaigns” with names like “Teach Climate Justice,” “Teaching for Black Lives,” and “Abolish Columbus Day.” It also promotes Critical Race Theory.
All in all, the project’s influence is staggering: over 150,000 teachers and others are registered users of its materials. Its website features testimonials from dozens of them. ZEP, says one teacher, “invigorates students’ desire to learn and disrupt the status quo.” Another teacher praised one of his students for having recognized “that Columbus is like Trump, and the Tainos are like the Mexican people.” Still another teacher celebrated ZEP resources for “allow[ing] me to infuse social justice throughout everything I do.”
Then there’s singer Regina Belle, who fondly recalls her history teacher who “ thr[ew] our history books in the garbage” – replacing them, apparently, with Zinn. Then there’s the instructor who says he became a historian because of Zinn. “The book is always within arms reach,” he says. “But it’s not just the book that’s important, but the idea that history must be an active pursuit that strives for justice.” Who’s saying this? One Andy Forner, who teaches at – where else? – the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Like Zinn, ZEP is brilliant at omitting uncomfortable truths. The site is awash in material on slavery, but I scoured it in vain for any mention of the fact that the slaves transported to America from Africa had been purchased from fellow blacks. The site is also a trove of progressive cliches: before Columbus arrived, for example, the New World was, don’t you know, a peaceful paradise. If your kid’s school uses ZEP’s materials, he’ll learn that the Black Panthers were a cadre of beautiful souls who sought “social justice…through a combination of revolutionary theory, education, and community program” and were not unlike today’s activists who honor “the unarmed Black men and women regularly murdered by police.”
Look up the Soviet Union on ZEP’s website and you’ll find articles that ignore the horrors of Communism, treat Emma Goldberg as a hero, depict the Rosenbergs as victims, and demonize Senator Joe McCarthy while overlooking the evils of Stalin – all the while depicting America’s Cold War-era anti-Communism as a cynical, colonialist, and hysterical “Red Scare” that was driven in large part by crass economic motives.
It’s chilling to try to imagine the contents of the minds of people who think that by using Zinn’s book and ZEP’s website to teach history they’re – and here I quote again from their own testimonials – “teaching truth,” “teach[ing] history fairly and accurately,” helping “students connect to ideas of justice,” challenging the “generational beliefs” of students “that are often tough to crack,” providing their students with “tangible ways to fight back against the sanitized versions of history given to them,” and being given the tools “to infuse social justice throughout everything I do.”
And it’s even more chilling to imagine the impact of all this pedagogical malpractice on these people’s students, who, even as they’re being propagandized, are being deluded into believing that they’re undergoing a course in liberation from propaganda – and who, even as they’re being taught how to perform what’s laughably known as “Marxist analysis,” are being convinced that they’re learning how to engage in independent critical thinking. I do hope that at least some of the parents who show up at school-board meetings to protest Critical Race Theory and transgender ideology find a free moment to inquire as to whether their children are being fed a vision of America shaped by the execrable Howard Zinn and his now multitudinous minions.
My Uncle was a so-called “Card Carrying Communist” in Old NYC…At least one of my professors at CUNY was too.
Then I learned of a group “old” called the JBS… in California of all places. They called me “Brave” to challenge the school system…that was before the SHTF.
The answer to this problem: Shut it Down. Stop Public Funding. Respect the Constitution (where is Gorsuch!)
One of Ramaswamy’s more interesting pledges is to shut down the Dept. of Education. Don’t know if he has a snowball’s chance in Hades of winning, but that’s a pretty gutsy thing to say.
He has a number of good ideas. But as you say, we don’t know if he has a snowball’s chance in hell to win.
Zinn was a simplistic, commie punk. He wrote in a breezy style that even failures could read and he let them blame all their problems on someone else.
His parents must have despaired of his views having escaped the tyranny themselves, or, like so many alleged refugees, were they sent to undermine the enemy.
Back in the late 1980’s I was a subscriber to Heterodoxy magazine. Because of my poor academic performance, college was out of the question. I have been fascinated with the decline education, every since. I remember being amused and suspicious when the campaign against “dead white males” became a rallying cry on campus. I was suspicious the students weren’t capable of reading the classics.
Zinn and Marcuse were the two individuals who are responsible for the dominance of the woke view
Not to mention Brazilian communist Paulo Freire. Just don’t look him up on Wikipedia which sanitizes him. He was a communist, a big fan of Che and Mao but they refer to him as a “Brazilian educator.” His “critical pedagogy” is taught in virtually all U.S. teacher colleges.
Not to mention Jesus of Nazareth. That dude was completely dedicated to the redistribution of wealth and collectivism. Completely dedicated to some magical utopia where nobody would have to work for the man, some magical utopia like the Garden of Eden.
“The roots of America’s welfare state lie in the Populist-Progressive Era of the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially with the Protestant social gospel movement, which held that Christian ethics and “social justice” should drive public policy, including wealth redistribution, trust-busting, graduated tax rates to punish the rich, cradle-to-grave handouts, and missionary-style imperialistic ventures abroad to spread the faith and make the world “safe for democracy.” The concept of social justice, which jettisoned the idea that we actually earn and deserve what we get in life, was first adopted by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, as drawn from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.” – Richard M. Salsman, “Holy Scripture and the Welfare State”
Ayn Rand was far more articulate and creative than you. Give it a rest. We are all sinners, fallen and forgiven thanks to God’s gift of our Redeemer. One day, you will stand in His presence. What happens next depends on where your faith lies.
“Not to mention Jesus of Nazareth. That dude was completely dedicated to the redistribution of wealth and collectivism.”
Obviously your obsession Jesus and with getting your ass kicked hasn’t lessened.
You haven’t remotely plumbed the depths of ignorance and hate to which you can sink?
Basically Objectivism for you consists of the following:
Altruism…bad.
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good.
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
And there we have the simplistic world according to our rezidentura fraud…..THX
Clear thinking not necessary or required.
I take exception with the categories “Greek philosophers” and “Renaissance and Enlightenment”. This nitwit is obviously too dense to understand what these people thought and stand for.
You’re confused. Jesus advocated charity, which is voluntary, not forcible redistribution, which is not. The former involves virtue, the latter is virtue signaling.
This lesson on extremely basic Christianity brought to you by an agnostic.
You’re welcome.
Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t interested in the pursuit of happiness and wealth on Earth, he wasn’t interested in capitalism. He came to Earth to ask people to follow him to his afterlife, magical, supernatural, utopia in a place called Heaven. To seek salvation from Original Sin by giving everything up for him, including family and loved ones if need be. That’s not the pursuit of happiness on Earth. According to the Bible life on Earth is a punishment for Original Sin to be endured for the sake of Salvation not for the sake of pursuing happiness.
This lesson on extremely basic Christianity brought to you by an Objectivist.
You’re welcome.
“In Matthew and Mark, the discussion is set within the period when Jesus ministered in Perea, east of the River Jordan. In Matthew, a rich young man asks Jesus what actions bring eternal life. First, Jesus advises the man to obey the commandments. When the man responds that he already observes them, and asks what else he can do, Jesus adds:
If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.[4]
Luke has a similar episode and states that:
When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.” – Wikipedia
Jesus was a carpenter who valued hard work. Read the Bible, not Ayn Rand.
Doesn’t surprise me one bit that both were self-hating Jews who encouraged, aided and abetted Jew-hatred.
So many Jews like Howard Zinn and his parents have suffered so many unspeakable horrors under the tyranny of socialism in all its variants of communism, fascism, and Nazism but still they fight for socialism wherever they immigrate. The question is why? Why do so many people think that next time socialism will really work?
The answer lies in the moral code of altruism. Altruism is the only moral code they know, it is they believe the moral ideal, they can’t imagine there is any other alternative and so they proceed by inertia to wash, rinse, and repeat. These Jews have given up Judaism, but they have not given up the central moral code and politics of Judaism which is altruism which leads to collectivism.
Until mankind discovers that selfishness properly defined, rational selfishness, is the alternative and the highest moral ideal, the fountainhead of all human progress and kindness, generosity, and benevolence towards other men, and that altruism is evil, they will not let go of socialism and embrace capitalism.
“Why do so many people think that next time socialism will really work?”
Perhaps for the same reason that fools like you actually believe a pacifist philosophy like Objectivism will work.
What possible appeal can philosophy with a negative message have.
But hey, this is two days in a row your anti-semitism has seeped out. Keep it up, dirt bag.
Objectivism is NOT a pacifist philosophy at all. Self-defense for Objectivism is a moral right and moral imperative of every individual and every free country.
The moral code of rational selfishness entails rational self-preservation and that means the moral imperative of self-defense.
“The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.
If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.” – Ayn Rand
And yet you always preen about how no objectivist or objectivist organization (a contradiction in terms) has ever initiated force to achieve its goals. Sounds like pacifism to me.
You are a pacifist.
“selfishness properly defined, rational selfishness”
Pure gobbledegook word salad. You are obviously incapable of properly defining anything. So I will distill it down for you:
Basically your Objectivism For Dummies course consists of the following:
Altruism…bad.
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
selfishness properly defined, rational selfishness….good
Repeat ad infinitum
And there we have the simplistic world according to our rezidentura fraud…..THX
I would like to read an article on John Dewey, he is ‘father of lies.’
Dewey fathered many lies. However, the Father of Lies said to Eve, “surely you will not die.” Satan is as old as mankind, and as alive as his disciples this very day.
Why don’t you give that mythology a rest?
Why don’t you give your source of lies and mythology, Objectivism, a rest. It’s not getting through to anyone because you have no idea how to garner acolytes. You are simply a petty little hate machine.
If you were the only example of Objectivism I had ever run across, I would run in the opposite direction as fast as I could.
Like me or hate me, or be indifferent to me, sooner or later if Americans want to save the American way of life which is NOT Judeo-Christianity but Laissez-Faire Capitalism they will have to at the very least reject the Judeo-Christian moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice and embrace Objectivism’s moral code of rational selfishness.
“It is only a [second-hander] who could conceive of such absurdity as hoping to win an intellectual argument by hinting: “But people won’t like you!” – Ayn Rand
The day we reject the Judeo-Christian moral code on which our country was founded (in the Constitution and the Declaration) is the day we become no better than the old Soviet Union, Communist China and N. Korea.
We are already well on our way with that Zinn piece of trash book that our schools use as their bible. It won’t take much more to finish Obama’s fundamental transformation.
And then where will you be? With all of your precious Ayn Rand and Piekoff books and silly recycled Objectivist for Dummies articles literally in the history trash heap, you will find yourself in a re-education camp wearing a dunce cap.
You seem to think the masses will rise up and embrace a 4th grade level philosophy that no one knows, understands or cares about. Change doesn’t come from seminars and lectures about pacifist Objectivism. You are a silly, bitter fool.
There won’t be any Constitution, Judeo/Christianity or Laissez-Faire Capitalism (which we have never had anyway). Just the jackbooted system of totalitarianism.
Dewey was the father of lies, in the field of education, it’s an illustration.
“before Columbus arrived, for example, the New World was, don’t you know, a peaceful paradise.”
One thing I like about rigorous, objective history, is that it shows how unfathomably bloodthirsty primitive societies were.
How true! The Anasazi actually practiced cannibalism. So much for a peaceful paradise. Here’s an article the Zinners should read:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/riddles-of-the-anasazi-85274508/
The good, if any, Zinn did was interred with him; the evil endures.
I love Bawer’s articles, but there appears to be a slight error, in the phrase “…treat Emma Goldberg as a hero…”
Is he referring to anarchist Emma Goldman?
In some ways, she was a hero. After being deported to by the Wilson Administration to Russia, for the “crime” of criticizing US involvement in World War I, Goldman saw the horrors of Lenin’s regime up-close; she went on to write two books on the evils of Soviet communism.
I thought she was deported because she was connected to the anarchist Alexander Berkman. I think, in those dim times, you could actually be deported for anti-American opinions, and actions. Not like now when we those people in Congress.
What grabbed me about Zinn’s work was the thinness of documentation.
As a sophomore submission, I’d grant it a D, once, with a warning that repetition would warrant Fs. Unacceptably weak, border line fraudulent.
An argument against tenure.
Howard Zinn was an American-hating communist to the core. He was filled with the kind of vile and evil that drove communist propagandist Saul Alinsky There are tens of thousands of these sociopaths floating around the country with most of them having their roots in the thousands of Soviet infiltrators that Stalin sent to the U.S. in the 1930’s and 1940’s and that Nikita Khrushchev sent in the 1950’s. Zinn was a political science professor, for a while, at the University of California at San Diego and spewed out anti-American propaganda on the pliable minds of his gullible students. The real horror and the real travesty has been that American colleges and universities have been taken over by the Howard Zinns, Saul Alinsky’s and Barack Obamas among us. As a result of this take over of the university system, the new Marxists of the 21st century eventually seized the United States government and taken over all our institutions. Given that these new 21st century totalitarians have corrupt the minds of tens of millions and have in their hands the reins of power, it is doubtful we will ever see constitutional America again.
“Emma Goldberg”???? Do you mean Emma Goldman?
I knew Zinn. When I was president of the Boston University Club of Back Bay in 1969, I invited him to be a guest speaker. I was a BU alum and very familiar with him, and I wanted someone controversial on our program. I also had recently left active military duty and was a supporter of our efforts in Vietnam. He felt otherwise and I wanted to hear his views. You can’t argue effectively unless you know the other side.
His appearance at our meeting was unremarkable. He was very pleasant, shy and not at all arrogant. In fact, he had a good sense of humor. He opened with remarks and then most of the session was a Q&A/open forum. It was more a conversation than a lecture.
Bottom line: He stated his views, and we disagreed with him. He didn’t change our minds. To my knowledge, none of us joined the CPUSA.
And we surely didn’t change his mind, either.
He wasn’t a giant. He wasn’t a fire-breather. He wasn’t a lunatic (or at least it seemed). He wasn’t particularly dangerous unless you consider ideas dangerous. I doubt anyone felt threatened by him.
The problem with Zinn’s work today is that ideologically motivated persons in our society are advancing it to the exclusion of less biased, less cynical works about America and her history. Young Americans are being shown an incomplete and twisted view of our past.
America can stand on her own in a world of competing ideas. I would happily compare our honest history against anyone else’s. In my view, Zinn should be taught as one of many points-of-view. The truth will win. But taught to the exclusion of other viewpoints, it is poisonous, an outsized achievement by one, shy little man with a point of view.
I heard Zinn speak on a number of occasions. As a recovering leftist myself, I can attest that the late professor was one of the few truly nice people I met in my radical travels.
Bawer has one blatant thing wrong –
No, if Zinn’s parents had stayed in Russia and the Ukraine they not only would have lived under Stalin, but there also would have been a better than even chance they would have been murdered by Hitler and his Ukrainian allies – the same Ukrainians Bozo Joe Biden and his KAPO stooge Blinken chomp at the bit to give them our money.
Zinn himself was a Blinken-Jew. One who bends over backwards to suck up to Jew-haters but is so willing to turn on their own. In Zinn’s case he had a hangup about bombing Nazis in German-occupied Bayonne on the French Atlantic coast in the spring of 1945 but he sure knew how to drool and spew when Israeli tanks eradicated Palestinian terrorists exactly 58 years later.
Prick would have been a lampshade if those he refused to bomb had won that war. But he could never figure that out in a million years.
I am big history buff. Back in the 80’s I was shopping the local bookstore history selection and ran across “Peoples History of the United States”, by Howard Zinn. It looked interesting, so I picked it up. I knew nothing about Zinn, and opened the book with no preconceived notions.
I began reading and immediately saw this guy had a major bias. Still, I was willing to continue and give him a fair hearing as I do like to give consider different perspectives. That ended when I got to sections of history that I had a fair amount of knowledge about. I found Zinn to be -at best- misleading; cherry picking bits of history to use what served his narrative, embellishing and overemphasizing them. He speculated about motives which he could not know. He completely disregarded anything which did not further his narrative.
After about a third to a half way through I tossed it aside. It was worthless. It was so distorted and misleading as to be just worthless in any sincere study of history.
I have respect for the study of history. I never believed in whitewashing American history but neither do I believe the opposite. I understand that historians have their personal biases, and I am willing to give them a hearing, but I expect at least a modicum of impartiality and intellectual honesty that I found sorely lacking in Zinn.
As a historian Zinn is a fraud. What he excels at is propaganda; left wing propaganda. This endears him to the left.