HOWARD ZINN: A LION FALLS LEAVING A NATION OF SWINE
January 29, 2010 by Gordon Duff · 20 Comments
FEW AMERICANS KNEW OF ZINN, FEW KNOW WHAT WE HAVE LOST AND THE DOOM WE FACE
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor
Silly obituaries of Howard Zinn are hitting the papers. He was a WW2 veteran, a historian and an “activist.” He is dead. Every time I open an email from the GOP or NRA or American Legion, either filled with outright lies, misreprentations our childish inanities, I am reminded of Zinn, a man who valued truth and honor above any of our “greatest generation.” Few can dispute that Zinn was the greatest American of our time. What did Zinn do? Zinn wrote history, real history, history free of lies, influence and the “you can’t handle the truth” mentality that has turned America into a nation of educated but ignorant slaves.
As a combat veteran and historian, I could never hope to remotely follow in Zinn’s footsteps. Even onto his death at 87, he was tireless in his fight for truth, his opposition to war and his rage against those dishonoring America. His tools were his honesty, his impeccable scholarship and his genuine love of his country, a country he worked every day of his life to save against elements, elements of endless power backed by endless money that live only to spread fear, lies and to cripple each generation more than the last.
I had written an article recently criticizing the Supreme Courts recent 5/4 decision to allow corporations unlimited ability to influence elections. I have a reasonable background in Constitutional history, the document itself and most of the schools of interpretation. On a personal note, I figure that 2 or 3 of the 5 judges who voted in the majority must be insane and 2 others either bribed or their families were being held hostage by a drug cartel. I tried to explain the ramifications to American independence as best I could, but I still receive “think tank” responses from readers, Cato, Heritage etc., that backed the most insane and anti-American act of our country’s history. Zinn lived to give Americans intellectual tools and strength of character to toss aside lies like this. He is gone. We can hope his words will reach more of those around us.
Our children shouldn’t have to suffer, living in a country we bankrupted thru ignorance, an ignorance some still value above their families, their nation and their sanity. Howard Zinn was about sanity. If you believe it, and it isn’t real, you are nuts. End of story.
Our “rogue” Justices in the Supreme Court were not students of Zinn, not students of history, certainly not students of law and most likely not sane either. The scholarship used by those supporting the court “majority,” all highly flawed “3rd stringers,” showed signs of trying to tie “freedom of the press” and “Federalism” to legalized bribery and a simple case of opening the US to unlimited foreign influence. The thinking used was unsound, the facts continually misrepresented and their efforts read more like a pamphlet from Nazi Germany than a policy study. Today’s “think tanks” sell lies like selling soap. There is no reason to sell the truth, only lies have value. There is no money in the truth.
ZINN’S IDEAS
I won’t call Zinn a simple man nor will I call him decent or honest. We reserve those terms when lying about gangsters in politics and finance. “Stalin was a simple man, decent at heart, though, occasionally a sociopathic mass murderer.” “George ‘W’ Bush is a simple man, decent and honest except when he is planning illegal invasions, rigging elections, arranging illegal kidnappings and torture or drugged out of his mind on cocaine.”
Zinn put facts together and formed truth. His idea was to educate generations of Americans about the good and bad of America, the real, the honest, the true and to trust Americans, armed with the truth, to do what is right.
Why so many powerful people felt threatened by this concept is a clear sign of something diseased and rotten in our very soul. We aren’t supposed to advocate violence, civil war, revolution or murder but, when the powerful, those who control our government, our military, our news, our courts and our police are worthless lying scum, the idea of not reacting to them in accordance with the threat they pose to the survival of the United States is a dishonor also.
Thus, we read our lies, watch fools peddle our souls away on TV and say silent as long as we still eat food and sleep indoors, something fewer and fewer of us do each day.
Zinn’s path was to work tirelessly to inspire generations of educated humans capable of making decisions, knowing right from wrong, truth from lies, skills almost totally dead in America. Toward that end, he left a lifetime of work that will only endure if truth itself endures. Maybe, like with paintings, his work will be recognized by Americans other than history teachers. Will death bring his message to the masses, the message millions of students read in college as his history texts set a standard none could approach.
Those of us who are Americans, even those who talk “patriotism,” always something that scares me as much as buying a used car from a “Christian,” supposedly have one side, one client, one point of view, the welfare of the United States. How do we define that? Is it control of the world or the suppression of “foreigners,” brown people, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and putting flag, power and winning over all or is it building for ourselves something that endures, endures with an air of what we like to describe as “greatness?”
What can we create worthy of enduring? What has value? What is honor? If you are loyal to tyranny are you honorable? If you repeat lies, think the next time you forward an email, are you honest, moral and honorable or simply another liar. Is truth what defines a nation, truth more than power, truth more than patriotism. Is truth, truth and justice the real definition of honor and patriotism?
Those who sacrifice, those who give their lives, even in unjust war, can die in honor for their friends, they can also fight unjust wars with a since of honor also, honor is something most valued when carried where it is found least. This has too often been the path of the American soldier and veteran.
What of those who send others to kill, other to die for wrong, for tyranny? Is there a special place in hell for them? We know so many of their names now. Without Howard Zinn, will those names be listed with truth, will our grandchildren be told of a time when we erred, we chose fear over honor and tyranny over Americanism?
HAVE WE CROSSED THE LINE?
What is it we have done? Our Supreme Court will now allow a dictator to hire a law firm to pay millions of dollars to a Senate campaign to finance lies. Is this bribery? Do we have a history that warns us? If we do, and we do, Howard Zinn wrote it. Five members of the Supreme Court never read it, but chose to believe something else, something simply not true because of power, power over truth, power over honor, power over justice, power over the rule of law.
Elections, health care, invasions, wiretapping, taxation, corruption, all of this has its history. The lessons were learned a decade, a century, even two centuries ago, learned then erased or lied about. Why are we broke? Why are we in wars we never should have started? Why do Americans feel their government controls them and not the other way around? Read Howard Zinn.
Can America still be American if it is a tyranny, a “republic” but not a democracy, empowering wealth over justice, empowering wealth over human rights, empowering wealth over ever vestige of our real promise, Jeffersons promise. Jefferson spoke of a government, a government that derived its power from the consent of the governed, not through an “electoral college” or a “Supreme Court.” We were advised by Jefferson not to take on changes in government lightly. Never has such a warning meant as much as it has today.
Those changes have come hot and heavy. Not only has the Supreme Court usurped the power of the electorate but it has given citizenship to bank accounts, drug barons, banks, citizenship with unlimited power, power based on money, often money stolen and power often exercised in the process of stealing more or evading just punishment. Thus, in the Jeffersonian mode, the Supreme Court is a tyranny that should not stand.
Gangs can start wars, suspend justice, commit unspeakable attrocities, all within the rule of law, a law deemed law by minds of Roberto Gonzales or John Ashcroft, men any country might want, want if they needed those who fled from patriotic duty during war but sought power for the corrupt for personal financial gain. We became such a country.
The idea of being cheated by credit card companies, or submitting to foreign dictators who pay our elected officials, elected because cabals’ of political party hacks choose them for office in the dark of night is not what America was meant to be based on.
Why have we allowed this and why do so few speak up? We know nothing of our history, who our Founding Fathers were and what the tyranny was that they swore their lives and sacred honor to fight.
You have freedom of speech, so long as you are a corporation and say nothing that isn’t politically incorrect or that threatens those more wealthy and powerful than yourself. If you do that, you can expect imprisonment or worse. Real “speech” is controlled by corporations, entrenched in military adventurism or owned by foreign powers, their speech is the free speech. Anything contrary is considered “whistleblowing” or “radical extremism.” All speech is free except free speech, which is suppressed. Failure to read, failure to learn our history has cost us much.
You can vote, so long as you know it won’t be electronically “flipped” or that the candidates you choose between aren’t long under the influence of those who mean you and yours ill.
If you fight to defend your country, you may likely awaken finding yourself little more than a Hessian mercenary like those Washington defeated at the Battle of Trenton.
130 years ago, America was ruled as a dictatorship by an oligarchy of wealthy, hateful and ignorant tyrants. It is our history, one few know, but true, a fact, inexorable and undeniable.
The issue was money and influence.
We are there again. Were we warned? Maybe. Some of us were, certainly. The truth was out there, for those of honor and courage. If you suspect that your children will grow up in bondage, serving a nation our Founding Fathers would be ashamed of, failure to know real history, Howard Zinn’s history will be the cause.
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Howard Zinn will be deeply missed. Who will replace him? No one comes to my mind. Who will give voice to the voiceless in the upcoming pages of our history still to be written? Who will be honest enough to stare down the tyrants and tell the emporer that he has no clothes? Who will serve the naked truth?
simply, the winners. according to them. what’s for dinner?
Swill
Zinn was a VT reader and correspondent. It was a greately appreciated courtesy on his part.
g
Duffy your writting is like being smashed by a falling wall of bricks.however it is the eloquent way you smash us that really helps get the point across and in most cases atleast with me it helps to elevate the painful reality of which you expound and of what we are experiencing in this country.our country needs your fist in your face point blank journalism.i’m proud to be a student of truth and realism.it is god damn refreshing.i know alot of your readers won’t agree but there is some one in the senate who is trying his damnest to keep government fucntioning for the people,bernie sanders.he well never be a howard zinn but in government he’s as close as we’ll ever get.great stuff brother!
Many of those who have tasted Freedom all the days of their lives,
Know not the sweetness of Liberty.
Many of those who have lived with harsh injustices
Know the value of truth and Justice and treasure their gifts.
Man has basic needs for air, shelter, water, food and the need to be accepted.
Until We, as a people, return to our roots and remember who we are as a people of a free nation and what that nation stands for….
Until more of those who have knowledge have the honor and courage to speak truth…
The needs of man will continue to be turned into weapons against fellow mankind for the personal gain of the few.
Free generations not truly understanding and taking the freedoms their forefathers lived and died for – for granted – are held and blinded by the bonds of comfort, apathy and complacency and shall not be a free people indefinitely.
Though our voices may not be as articulate, and clumsy as they may be,
May they continue to speak to Justice, Liberty and Freedom…
And not wander from the truth.
For it is the truths held within our Constitution that will lead us back to where we came from and where we need to go.
What if we simply mail 130,000,000+/- Declarations of Independence and US Constitutions out? It’s not that expensive and it would get the message across.
Sign me up and I’ll donate money to mail 130,000,000+/- Declarations of Independence and US Constitutions to the American People! Imagine them getting it in the mail, then pausing their tvmentor programator, then reading it… 120,000,000+/- American Readers!!! Hurray!!!
“”130,000,000 Declarations of Independence and 130,000,000 US Constitutions… Read All About US”"
Amen.
Gordon,
Fine, fine piece not only on Howard but what it means to apply his work in the real world. That’s one of the things that endeared him to many millions of people–his research and writing were always meant to have relevance beyond academia. Now, if more of us would just apply it!
Here’s VFP’s salute to a longtime member and citizen of the world, Howard Zinn.
Mike Ferner
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/VFP_salutes_howard_zinn.vp.html
Mike,
thanks. Howard was a reader and supporter and critic of my syntax and spelling. more back channel.
g
drugged out of his mind on cocaine.”——– RE: Geo. Bush Is there proof of this statement? If there is an answerer to the truth, I sure would like to read it. Don’t hold back things like that. It could have been posted some time ago, but I missed it.
oddly, yes. You might want to check with, forinstance, the government of Canada as to the ability of Mr. Bush to travel there without special dispensation. I checked.
Having is criminal record, a real criminal record classified didn’t work with everyone.
Nobody has their criminal record classified unless they have a criminal record.
Check.
g
I forgot to include my favorite HZ quote!
“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of their leaders and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
http://www.mikeferner.org/what-else-can-we-do
Any time Americans get together to stand against tyranny, FBI stooges join in, sometimes making up the majority as with the Michigan militia and blow something up as we saw in Oklahoma City.
g
You’ve written many a concise quote, many strong arguments, and I actually cannot agree more with you that we have already crossed the line. I proposed upthread a solution that is doable, something to immediately help extinguish the tide of tvsedatives. The corporation’s ownership of all one-way media (brainanihlilating) mediums… They talk and talk and show and show, but in the end, they dictate norms, attitude, receptivity to knowledge inquiry, and predisposition and/of prejudice.
The American people have been subdued by corporate media, a technological BEAST. This is new to our generation, as no one has ever fought two wars that so usurped their Liberties at once without paying a price at home.
I think you are right to call out wars… Wars of Intellect… Wars of Liberty… Wars that Never Turn Violent…
Outside of those ‘wars’ I listed in the above three items, I don’t ever see any so-called ‘need’ for any kind of war.
It’s time We, the American People sat down and had a chat… Place the Constitution in front of them and have a ‘chat’. A National Endeavor to understand that Liberty is at stake!
“”130,000,000 Declarations of Independence and 130,000,000 US Constitutions… Read All About US”"
Howard Zinn had some insighful comments on terrorism:
The “largest lie,” wrote hisorian Howard Zinn who died yesterday at age 87, is that “everything the United States does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a ‘war on terrorism.’”
“This ignores the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into people’s homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture, that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less security.”
In an article published previously in “The Long Term View” magazine of the Massachusetts School of Law, Zinn said that in the Fallujah area of Iraq Knight Ridder reporters found there was no Ba’athist or Sunni conspiracy against the U.S., “only people ready to fight because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves had been humiliated by home searches and road stops.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17272
Following is an excerpt from a recent Democracy Now! program, replaying a 2005 interview about his time as an Air Force bombardier in World War II, and his bringing the lesson he learned into the present circumstances of US occupation-wars.
HOWARD ZINN: Well, we thought bombing missions were over. The war was about to come to an end. This was in April of 1945, and remember the war ended in early May 1945. This was a few weeks before the war was going to be over, and everybody knew it was going to be over, and our armies were past France into Germany, but there was a little pocket of German soldiers hanging around this little town of Royan on the Atlantic coast of France, and the Air Force decided to bomb them. Twelve hundred heavy bombers, and I was in one of them, flew over this little town of Royan and dropped napalm—first use of napalm in the European theater.
And we don’t know how many people were killed or how many people were terribly burned as a result of what we did. But I did it like most soldiers do, unthinkingly, mechanically, thinking we’re on the right side, they’re on the wrong side, and therefore we can do whatever we want, and it’s OK. And only afterward, only really after the war when I was reading about Hiroshima from John Hersey and reading the stories of the survivors of Hiroshima and what they went through, only then did I begin to think about the human effects of bombing. Only then did I begin to think about what it meant to human beings on the ground when bombs were dropped on them, because as a bombardier, I was flying at 30,000 feet, six miles high, couldn’t hear screams, couldn’t see blood. And this is modern warfare.
In modern warfare, soldiers fire, they drop bombs, and they have no notion, really, of what is happening to the human beings that they’re firing on. Everything is done at a distance. This enables terrible atrocities to take place. And I think, reflecting back on that bombing raid and thinking of that in Hiroshima and all the other raids on civilian cities and the killing of huge numbers of civilians in German and Japanese cities, the killing of 100,000 people in Tokyo in one night of fire-bombing, all of that made me realize war, even so-called good wars against fascism like World War II, wars don’t solve any fundamental problems, and they always poison everybody on both sides. They poison the minds and souls of everybody on both sides. We’re seeing that now in Iraq, where the minds of our soldiers are being poisoned by being an occupying army in a land where they are not wanted. And the results are terrible.
# # #
The following url link is to where you can read the transcript, listen, or watch the program, broadcast January 28, 2010:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/28/howard_zinn_1922_2010_a_tribute
I called Mr. Howard Zinn about two weeks ago & left a message to speak on veterans issues, I heard he passed & I knew he lived an amazing life. One week later after his passing Zinn did get back to me … actually it was J Zinn from the VA Educational Benefits in good old Buffalo offering me 50% of what was owed to me.
Talk about a real bad coincidence.