Death Of A Contemporary Benedict Arnold (And Hypocrite): Howard Zinn — 1922-2010
Death Of A Contemporary Benedict Arnold (And Hypocrite): Howard Zinn — 1922-2010
By
Ken Eliasberg
One month ago, on January 27th to be precise, Howard Zinn, history professor emeritus from Boston University, radical left-wing political activist, and Dean of America-hating members of the Academy, left us. I realize that, under the Judeo-Christian ethic by which most of us were raised, it is not polite to speak ill of the dead. However, I have to think that there are understandable, and thus permissible, exceptions to that old bromide. For example, would it be inappropriate to denounce Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. or any of the other of the world’s monsters? Of course not! That would be pushing the envelope of political correctness — the veil of censorship under which too many of us now operate — a bit too far. Except, of course, in the case of many of our lefties, like, say Anita Dunn, Obama’s former White House Communications Director, who spoke warmly of Mao (and recall that one of the ornaments on Obama’s Christmas tree had on it a picture of Mao). Or Bill Ayers, Obama’s mentor and heir apparent to the Stalinist academic throne left vacant by Zinn’s departure, on whose office wall hang pictures of Che Guevara (Cuban butcher and left-wing idol), Mumia Abu Jamal (cop-killer and another left-wing idol), and Malcolm X (one of the architects of the black anger movement, who made the mistake of crossing the Nation of Islam).
No it is not inappropriate to speak ill of the dead where your words are rooted in the reality of their misdeeds. No one, of either domestic or foreign origin (and certainly none of the monsters noted above), has done more damage to America than Howard Zinn. Zinn grasped the wisdom of Hitler’s sage advice to more radically engage our young. He wrote the most widely used — by our radicalized left-wing academic “educational” institutions — text dealing with American History, A People’s Guide To American History. It is a book that distorts every image that most Americans have (and should have, I might add) of our country — at least most Americans who came before the Zinn period.
Zinn’s history is one in which America is portrayed as essentially an evil imperialist, seeking only power and abusing its constituents in the process. In short, America is nothing but the some total of its sins, i.e. we abused the American Indian, our “white” founding forefathers were no better than slave holders, we interned Japanese citizens during WWII, etc., etc. And, folks, we did all those things, and I was aware of them while a history major in college. But that’s not all we did. We also did more good than all of the other countries (past or present) in the world combined — not just for our citizens, but for most of the rest of the world’s citizens. As I queried when I previously dealt with this miserable piece of human excrement (and his equally despicable treasonous playmate in arms, Noam Chomsky), do you measure a man only by the sum total of his sins, overlooking or trivializing, all of the good that he has done? If so, no Saint would have passed that test. And that is exactly the way Zinn, and avowed socialist, looked at America. And, as noted, this would have been bad enough had he kept that view to himself; after all, America abides dissent, even odious dissent, no matter how ridiculously biased it might appear to be. But no, Zinn, through his lectures and the widespread dissemination of his disgusting tome, went on to color his generation and successive generations with his wildly distorted view of America. Zinn is (or was) the epitome of what’s wrong with the left, and no one has been a more effective spokesman for the left’s radical message
Here’s David Horowitz’s take on Zinn (in a piece at frontpagemag.com on 1/30/10, entitled Spitting on Howard Zinn’s Grave?):
“Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which even the socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, which it is. All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn was a wicked man and his life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.”
Or this from Roger Kimball at nationalreview.com on 2/3/10 in a piece entitled Professor of Contempt — The legacy of Howard Zinn:
“How to explain such phenomenal success? [the sales posted by Zinn’s propaganda piece] The publisher had doubtless assayed the book’s intellectual merits and proceeded accordingly. Left out of account was the presumption of its political message. The extremity and consistency of that message — that America is and always has been an evil, exploitative country — guaranteed its success among the tenured radicals to whom we have entrusted the education of our children. More to the point, this history ‘from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated’ nudged out all other contenders for the prize of becoming the preferred catechism in American — that is to say anti-American — history. A People’s History is the textbook of choice in high schools and colleges across the country. No other account of our past comes even close in influence or ubiquity. No other, more responsible, telling of the American story had a chance. How could it? Given a choice between a book that portrayed America honestly — as an extraordinary success story — and a book that portrayed the history of America as a litany of depredations and failures, which do you suppose your average graduate teachers college, your average member of the National Education Association, would choose? To ask the question is to answer it. What this means is that most American students are battened on a story of their country in which Blame America First is a cardinal principle. No element of our heritage, from the derring-do of Christopher Columbus to the valor of the U.S. military in World War II, escapes the perverting alchemy of Howard Zinn’s exercise in deflationary revision.”
Zinn has so polluted the waters of academia — at least the social science portion of it - that our kids will be swimming in intellectual toxic waste for decades to come. When history is recorded — unlike Zinn’s version of history, an accurate and objective history — it is doubtful that it will show that anyone will have left a more destructive anti-american wreckage in his or her path than Howard Zinn. The world is a worse — much worse — place for Zinn’s having been it; it is a better place for his having left it. Again, with the possible exception of Noam Chomsky, another academic traitor, no one or group has done more to damage our country.