Howard Zinn: Member of the Communist Party USA

[Phoenix]

http://noisyroom.net/blog/2010/07/31/howard-zinn-outed-as-a-communist-and-a-liar/

Howard Zinn, “Outed” as a Communist and a Liar
Published in July 31st, 2010

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

Howard Zinn, the prominent “progressive” historian who died early this year, has been “outed” as both a communist and a liar.

Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media writes:

The prominent “progressive” historian Howard Zinn, whose books are force-fed to young people on many college campuses, was not only a member of the Moscow-controlled and Soviet-funded Communist Party USA (CPUSA) but lied about it, according to an FBI file released on Friday.

The file, consisting of three sections totaling 423 pages, was made available on the FBI’s website and released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from this writer.

Zinn taught in the political science department of Boston University for 24 years, from 1964 to 1988, and has been a major influence on the modern-day “progressive” movement that backed Barack Obama for president.

Although Zinn denied being a member of the CPUSA, the FBI file discloses that several reliable informants in the party identified Zinn as a member who attended party meetings as many as five times a week.

What’s more, one of the files reveals that a reliable informant provided a photograph of Zinn teaching a class on “Basic Marxism” at party headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951. A participant in the class said that Zinn taught that “the basic teaching of Marx and Lenin were sound and should be adhered to by those present…”

Zinn was included on the “Security Index” and “Communist Index” maintained by the FBI. The “Security Index” was more ominous and included individuals who could be detained in the event of a national emergency.

Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist Party USA member who mentored the young Barack Obama, was also on the “security index.”

The files confirm Zinn’s membership in the party from 1948-1953 and one says he was “believed to be a CP member as of October, 1956.” However, he denied membership in the party when interviewed by the FBI in 1953 and 1954 and claimed to be just a “liberal” or “leftist.” He did admit involvement in several CPUSA front organizations, the documents say…

In 1961, it says, Zinn “attempted to recruit students to attend 8th World Youth Festival [a communist-front gathering] and was described as pro-Castro in 1962. He publicly protested United States demand for withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.”

After WW2 service and an education on the GI Bill, Zinn taught at the all female, all black Spelman College in Atlanta.

According to one of his pupils, far left author Alice Walker, Zinn shocked an audience from a local white college by declaring: “Well, I stand to the left of Mao Zedong.” – this at the height of the communist takeover of China.

Forced to leave Spelman because of his radicalism, Zinn went to teach at Boston University from 1964 to 1988.

On April 28, 1966, Howard Zinn was a sponsor of the Herbert Aptheker Testimonial Dinner. The dinner was held on the occasion of Communist Party theoretician Herbert Aptheker’s 50th birthday, the publication of his 20th book and the 2nd anniversary of The American Institute for Marxist Studies.

It was held in the Sutton Ballroom, The New York Hilton, Avenue of the Americas, 53rd to 54th Streets, New York City. Most, if not all, of the event’s sponsors came from the Communist Party’s intellectual elite.

As at February 28, 1969, Howard Zinn was listed as a sponsor of the Communist Party front Massachusetts Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee.

By the 1980s, Zinn had apparently switched his allegiance to another Marxist group.

At the Boston Democratic Socialists of America Socialist School, Fall 1989, Howard Zinn taught the “History of Socialism.”

By the mid 1990s, Zinn was mixing with ACORN, Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party breakaway group, Committees of Correspondence.

With these people, Zinn was a founder of the radical New Party – later made famous by one of its most successful members, Barack Obama.

On September 20, 2001, 500 people gathered at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City to remember the life of Democratic Socialists of America member Richard Cloward – originator of the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy, since utilized by sections of the US left to deliberately wreck the American economy.

Speakers at the event included Cloward’s widow Frances Fox Piven, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West (later a member of Obama’s Black Advisory Council), Gus Newport – (all members of Democratic Socialists of America), New Party founder Joel Rogers, future Obama supporter and ACORN defender Miles Rapoport and Howard Zinn.

In January 2002, a group of San Francisco leftists, mainly involved with Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) or Committees of Correspondence, and including future Obama “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones, founded a national anti-Iraq War newspaper – War Times.

Endorsers of the project included Howard Zinn.

In 2004, Howard Zinn was one of 100 “prominent Americans” who signed an October 26 statement circulated by 911Truth.org calling on the US Government to investigate 9/11 as a possible “inside job.”

…we have assembled 100 notable Americans and 40 family members of those who died to sign this 9/11 Statement, which calls for immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.

This is the same petition that got Van Jones into trouble in late 2009 – strangely, Jones’ name at number 46, has been “removed by request.” Fair enough, after all he was “tricked” into signing it.

In the 2000s, Zinn was also listed as a sponsor of the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland California, alongside Committees of Correspondence members and endorsers Herbert Aptheker, Anne Braden, Angela Davis, Ann Fagan Ginger, Jack Kurzweil and Maudelle Shirek, plus Communist Party supporters David Bacon, Gerald Horne, Cassandra Lopez and Herb Shore from Democratic Socialists of America.

In 2006 Howard Zinn was an original board member of Movement for a Democratic Society – an organization established to support the newly re-founded Students for a Democratic Society.

Other MDS board members included former Weather Underground terrorist leaders Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd and Jeff Jones, former Students for a Democratic Society leaders Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson (an Obama associate in the New Party and later), Mike Klonsky, Bert Garskof, Mike James, former Obama associate Rashid Khalidi, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Barbara Ehrenreich from Democratic Socialists of America, Gerald Horne from the Communist Party USA, Charlene Mitchell, Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis from Committees of Correspondence.

In early 2008, MDS Board members Carl Davidson, Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Bararbara Ehrenreich went on to found Progressives for Obama.

Howard Zinn wrote more than 20 books, which included his 1980 best-selling and influential “A People’s History of the United States.”

Movie star Matt Damon recently worked with Zinn to turn the book into a documentary for America’s history students. Damon, who grew up next door to his idol, stated in Dec. 09 that one of his favorite books was A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, a book he first started reading in 1980 at the age of 10.

No doubt Howard Zinn is currently being appropriately rewarded for his life’s work.

Boyhood mentors can influence a young man for life. Luckily Matt Damon has time left to consider his political direction.

To do so, he will have to be more honest than was his late mentor Howard Zinn.

[TheNocturnalEgyptian]

So does this make his books any less valid?

Have you ever READ his books? In "People's History of the United States," which the article mentions, there's very little opinion. It is mostly a collection of letters and correspondance from the 16th, 17th, 18, and 19th century as they relate to American history. How would these letters by farmers, congressmen, citydwellers, constituents, etc illustrate a snapshot of the American lifestyle any less just because their compiler has allegedly been outed as a communist?


Communism wasn't even a thing when the text in question was written, hundreds of years ago. Now you're saying that the editor of those texts is a communist and we should throw out all that history? This article is written to make Howard Zinn sound just evil.


Please point to me IN HIS BOOKS where he supports or even praises communism. Please. He wrote an entire book about the politics and history behind the new deal, maybe we should start there and see what he has to say about the constitutionality of it.




Here's what Wikipedia has to say:




FBI files

Due to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the FBI released on July 30, 2010 a file with 423 pages of information on Howard Zinn's life and activities. The FBI first opened a domestic security investigation on Zinn (FBI File # 100-360217) in 1949, based on Zinn’s activities in what the agency considered to be communist front groups and informant reports that Zinn was an active member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Zinn has denied ever being a member. In the 1960s, the agency kept tabs on Zinn's efforts campaigning against the Vietnam War.[54]


And here's a list of the books he has written:


Bibliography
[edit] Author

* Artists in Times of War (2003) ISBN 1-58322-602-8.
* The Cold War & the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (Noam Chomsky (Editor) Authors: Ira Katznelson, R. C. Lewontin, David Montgomery, Laura Nader, Richard Ohmann,[64] Ray Siever, Immanuel Wallerstein, Howard Zinn (1997) ISBN 1-56584-005-4.
* Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1991) ISBN 0-06-092108-0.[65]
* Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order (1968, re-issued 2002) ISBN 0-89608-675-5.
* Emma: A Play in Two Acts About Emma Goldman, American Anarchist (2002) ISBN 0-89608-664-X.
* Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian (1993) ISBN 0-89608-676-3.
* The Future of History: Interviews With David Barsamian (1999) ISBN 1-56751-157-0.
* Hiroshima: Breaking the Silence (pamphlet, 1995) ISBN 1-884519-14-8.
* Howard Zinn On Democratic Education Donaldo Macedo, Editor (2004) ISBN 1-59451-054-7.
* Howard Zinn on History (2000) ISBN 1-58322-048-8.
* Howard Zinn on War (2000) ISBN 1-58322-049-6.
* You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (1994) ISBN 0-8070-7127-7
* Justice in Everyday Life: The Way It Really Works (Editor) (1974) ISBN 0-89608-677-1.
* Justice? Eyewitness Accounts (1977) ISBN 0-8070-4479-2.
* La Otra Historia De Los Estados Unidos (2000) ISBN 1-58322-054-2.
* LaGuardia in Congress (1959) ISBN 0-8371-6434-6, ISBN 0-393-00488-0.
* Marx in Soho: A Play on History (1999) ISBN 0-89608-593-7.
* New Deal Thought (editor) (1965) ISBN 0-87220-685-8.
* Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics (2006) Howard Zinn and David Barsamian.
* Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice (2003) ISBN 0-06-055767-2.
* The Pentagon Papers Senator Gravel Edition. Vol. Five. Critical Essays. Boston. Beacon Press, 1972. 341p. plus 72p. of Index to Vol. I-IV of the Papers, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, editors.
* A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom by David Williams, Howard Zinn (Series Editor) (2005) ISBN 1-59558-018-2.
* A People's History of the United States: 1492 – Present (1980), revised (1995)(1998)(1999)(2003) ISBN 0-06-052837-0.
* A People's History of the United States: Teaching Edition Abridged (2003 updated) ISBN 1-56584-826-8.
* A People's History of the United States: The Civil War to the Present Kathy Emery and Ellen Reeves, Howard Zinn (2003 teaching edition) ISBN 1-56584-725-3.
* A People's History of the United States: The Wall Charts by Howard Zinn and George Kirschner (1995) ISBN 1-56584-171-9.
* A People's History of American Empire (2008) by Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle. ISBN 978-0-8050-8744-4.
* The People Speak: American Voices, Some Famous, Some Little Known (2004) ISBN 0-06-057826-2.
* Playbook by Maxine Klein, Lydia Sargent and Howard Zinn (1986) ISBN 0-89608-309-8.
* The Politics of History (1970) (2nd edition 1990) ISBN 0-252-06122-5.
* Postwar America: 1945–1971 (1973) ISBN 0-89608-678-X.
* A Power Governments Cannot Suppress (2006) ISBN 978-0-87286-475-7.
* The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace Editor (2002) ISBN 0-8070-1407-9.
* SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964) ISBN 0-89608-679-8.
* The Southern Mystique (1962) ISBN 0-89608-680-1.
* Terrorism and War (2002) ISBN 1-58322-493-9 (interviews, Anthony Arnove (Ed.)).
* The Twentieth Century: A People's History (2003) ISBN 0-06-053034-0.
* Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century (Dana Frank, Robin Kelley, and Howard Zinn) (2002) ISBN 0-8070-5013-X.
* Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967) ISBN 0-89608-681-X.
* Voices of a People’s History of the United States (with Anthony Arnove, 2004) ISBN 1-58322-647-8; 2nd edition (2009) ISBN 978-1-58322-916-3.
* A Young People's History of the United States, adapted from the original text by Rebecca Stefoff; illustrated and updated through 2006, with new introduction and afterword by Howard Zinn; two volumes, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2007.
o Vol. 1: Columbus to the Spanish-American War. ISBN 978-1-58322-759-6.
o Vol. 2: Class Struggle to the War on Terror. ISBN 978-1-58322-760-2.
o One-volume edition (2009) ISBN 978-1-58322-869-2.
* The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy (1997) ISBN 1-888363-54-1; 2nd edition (2009) ISBN 978-1-58322-870-8.
* The Bomb (City Lights Publishers, 2010) ISBN 978-0-87286-509-9



Guess the guy fought in WWII also...


World War II

Zinn joined the Army Air Force during World War II where he was assigned as a bombardier in the 490th Bombardment Group, [8] bombing targets in Berlin, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.[9] The anti-war stance Zinn developed later was informed, in part, by his experiences. In April 1945, he participated in the first military use of napalm, which took place in Royan, western France.[10]



Honestly I'm not against hearing the facts but this article is surprisingly short on verifiable ones. Even if the article is 100% true, what do we do with the information? Do we say his anti-war stance is wrong because he's a communist? Do we say his book "War and Justice" is obselete because he is a communist?

[TheNocturnalEgyptian]

Anybody care for an opposing viewpoint?

Five FBI agents assigned to follow this man....and the OP supports this!

You hate facism so you support facism to eradicate it? Get real here buddy.


Why the Feds Fear Thinkers Like Howard Zinn


Posted on Aug 1, 2010
AP / Dima Gavrysh



By Chris Hedges

On Monday I will teach my final American history class of the semester to prison inmates. We have spent five weeks reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” The class is taught in a small room in the basement of the prison. I pass through a metal detector, am patted down by a guard and walk through three pairs of iron gates to get to my students. We have covered Spain’s genocide of the native inhabitants in the Caribbean and the Americas, the war for independence in the United States and the disgraceful slaughter of Native Americans. We have examined slavery, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the occupations of Cuba and the Philippines, the New Deal, two world wars and the legacy of racism, capitalist exploitation and imperialism that continue to infect American society.

We have looked at these issues, as Zinn did, through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, slaves, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and the poor. As I was reading out loud a passage by Sojourner Truth, Chief Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, I have heard students mutter “Damn” or “We been lied to.”

The power of Zinn’s scholarship—which I have watched over the past few weeks open the eyes of young, mostly African-Americans to their own history and the structures that perpetuate misery for the poor and gluttony and privilege for the elite—explains why the FBI, which released its 423-page file on Zinn on July 30, saw him as a threat.

Zinn, who died in January at the age of 87, did not advocate violence or support the overthrow of the government, something he told FBI interrogators on several occasions. He was rather an example of how genuine intellectual thought is always subversive. It always challenges prevailing assumptions as well as political and economic structures. It is based on a fierce moral autonomy and personal courage and it is uniformly branded by the power elite as “political.” Zinn was a threat not because he was a violent revolutionary or a communist but because he was fearless and told the truth.

The cold, dead pages of the FBI file stretch from 1948 to 1974. At one point five agents are assigned to follow Zinn. Agents make repeated phone calls to employers, colleagues and landlords seeking information. The FBI, although Zinn is never suspected of carrying out a crime, eventually labels Zinn a high security risk. J. Edgar Hoover, who took a personal interest in Zinn’s activities, on Jan. 10, 1964, drew up a memo to include Zinn “in Reserve Index, Section A,” a classification that permitted agents to immediately arrest and detain Zinn if there was a national emergency. Muslim activists, from Dr. Sami Al-Arian to Fahad Hashmi, can tell you that nothing has changed.


The file exposes the absurdity, waste and pettiness of our national security state. And it seems to indicate that our security agencies prefer to hire those with mediocre or stunted intelligence, dubious morality and little common sense. Take for example this gem of a letter, complete with misspellings, mailed by an informant to then FBI Director Hoover about something Zinn wrote.


“While I was visiting my dentist in Michigan City, Indiana,” the informant wrote. “This pamphlet was left in my car, and I am mailing it to you, I know is a DOVE call, and not a HOCK call. We have had a number of ethnic groups move into our area in the last few years. We are in a war! And it doesn’t look like this pamphlet will help our Government objectives.”

Or how about the meeting between an agent and someone identified as Doris Zinn. Doris Zinn, who the agent says is Zinn’s sister, is interviewed “under a suitable pretext.” She admits that her brother is “employed at the American Labor Party Headquarters in Brooklyn.” That is all the useful information that is reported. The fact that Zinn did not have a sister gives a window into the quality of the investigations and the caliber of the agents who carried them out.

FBI agents in November 1953 wrote up an account of a clumsy attempt to recruit Zinn as an informant, an attempt in which they admitted that Zinn “would not volunteer information” and that “additional interviews with ZINN would not turn him from his current attitude.” A year later, after another interrogation, an agent wrote that Zinn “concluded the interview by stating he would not under any circumstances testify or furnish information concerning the political opinions of others.”

While Zinn steadfastly refused to cooperate in the anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, principals and college administrators were busy purging classrooms of those who, like Zinn, exhibited intellectual and moral independence. The widespread dismissals of professors, elementary and high school teachers and public employees—especially social workers whose unions had advocated on behalf of their clients—were carried out quietly. The names of suspected “Reds” were handed to administrators and school officials under the FBI’s “Responsibilities Program.” It was up to the institutions, nearly all of which complied, to see that those singled out lost their jobs. There rarely were hearings. The victims did not see any purported evidence. They were usually abruptly terminated. Those on the blacklist were effectively locked out of their professions. The historian Ellen Schrecker estimates that between 10,000 and 12,000 people were blackballed through this process.

The FBI spent years following Zinn, and carefully cutting out newspaper articles about their suspect, to amass the inane and the banal. One of Zinn’s neighbors, Mrs. Matthew Grell, on Feb. 22, 1952, told agents that she considered Zinn and another neighbor, Mrs. Julius Scheiman, “to be either communists or communist sympathizers” because, the agents wrote, Grell “had observed copies of the Daily Workers in Mrs. Scheiman’s apartment and noted that Mrs. Scheiman was a good friend of Howard Zinn.”

The FBI, which describes Zinn as a former member of the Communist Party, something Zinn repeatedly denied, appears to have picked up its surveillance when Zinn, who was teaching at Spelman, a historically black women’s college, became involved in the civil rights movement. Zinn served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He took his students out of the classroom to march for civil rights. Spelman’s president was not pleased.

“I was fired for insubordination,” Zinn recalled. “Which happened to be true.”

Zinn in 1962 decried “the clear violations by local police of Constitutional rights” of blacks and noted that “the FBI has not made a single arrest on behalf of Negro citizens.” The agent who reported Zinn’s words added that Zinn’s position was “slanted and biased.” Zinn in 1970 was a featured speaker at a rally for the release of the Black Panther leader Bobby Seal held in front of the Boston police headquarters. “It is about time we had a demonstration at the police station,” Zinn is reported as telling the crowd by an informant who apparently worked with him at Boston University. “Police in every nation are a blight and the United States is no exception.”

“America has been a police state for a long time,” Zinn went on. “I believe that policemen should not have guns. I believe they should be disarmed. Policemen with guns are a danger to the community and themselves.”


Agents muse in the file about how to help their unnamed university source mount a campaign to have Zinn fired from his job as a professor of history at Boston University.

“[Redacted] indicated [Redacted] intends to call a meeting of the BU Board of Directors in an effort to have ZINN removed from BU. Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [Redacted] with public source data regarding ZINN’s numerous anti-war activities, including his trip to Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [Redacted’s] efforts for his removal.”

Zinn and the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan had traveled together to North Vietnam in January 1968 to bring home three prisoners of war. The trip was closely monitored by the FBI. Hoover sent a coded teletype to the president, the secretary of state, the director of the CIA, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Air Force and the White House situation room about the trip. And later, after Berrigan was imprisoned for destroying draft records, Zinn repeatedly championed the priest’s defense in public rallies, some of which the FBI noted were sparsely attended. The FBI monitored Zinn as he traveled to the Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut to visit Berrigan and his brother Philip.

“Mass murders occur, which is what war is,” Zinn, who was a bombardier in World War II, said in 1972, according to the file, “because people are split and don’t think … when the government does not serve the people, then it doesn’t deserve to be obeyed. … To be patriotic, you may have to be against your government.”

Zinn testified at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, who gave a copy of the Pentagon Papers to Zinn and Noam Chomsky. The two academics edited the secret documents on the Vietnam War, sections of which had appeared in The New York Times, into the four volumes that were published in 1971.

“During the Pentagon Papers jury trial, Zinn stated that the ‘war in Vietnam was a war which involved special interests, and not the defense of the United States,’ ” his FBI file reads.

By the end of the file one walks away with a profound respect for Zinn and a deep distaste for the buffoonish goons in the FBI who followed and monitored him. There is no reason, with the massive expansion of our internal security apparatus, to think that things have improved. There are today 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, The Washington Post reported in an investigation by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. These agencies employ an estimated 854,000 people, all of whom hold top-secret security clearances, the Post found. And in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together, the paper reported, they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet.

We are amassing unprecedented volumes of secret files, and carrying out extensive surveillance and harassment, as stupid and useless as those that were directed against Zinn. And a few decades from now maybe we will be able to examine the work of the latest generation of dimwitted investigators who have been unleashed upon us in secret by the tens of thousands. Did any of the agents who followed Zinn ever realize how they wasted their time? Do those following us around comprehend how manipulated they are? Do they understand that their primary purpose, as it was with Zinn, is not to prevent terrorism but discredit and destroy social movements as well as protect the elite from those who would expose them?

Zinn’s book is revered in my cramped classroom. It is revered because these men intimately know racism, manipulation, poverty, abuse and the lies peddled by the powerful. Zinn recorded their voices and the voices of their ancestors. They respect him for this. Zinn knew that if we do not listen to the stories of those without power, those who suffer discrimination and abuse, those who struggle for justice, we are left parroting the manufactured myths that serve the interests of the privileged. Zinn set out to write history, not myth. And he knew that when these myths implode it is the beginning of hope.

“If you were a Native American,” one of my students asked recently, “what would have been the difference between Columbus and Hitler?”

[Phoenix]

Howard Zinn, a Communist Jew, whose purpose in life was not to strive for the Truth, but to damage America and "White, Western Civilization" in whatever manner possible. His material reads like the history books published by the Central Publishing Office of the USSR.

If you will point out his discussion of "Irish Slaves in the Americas" in any one of his works, I will withdraw my claim against him.

[Phoenix]

“If you were a Native American,” one of my students asked recently, “what would have been the difference between Columbus and Hitler?”

Hitler never visited the Americas?

"Native American" = person born here.

[ShortJohnSilver]

Anyone here understand how the term "Kabuki Dance" applies to this situation?

The FBI spent hundreds of thousands of $$$ tracking this guy. Did they eliminate him via a convenient car accident? Did they revoke his passport or even beat the crap out of him with bars of soap hidden inside socks? Did they develop the evidence needed to imprison him? Did they even LEAK to a friendly reporter his Commie ties?

No, they "very courageously" allowed him to continue spreading his venom, collecting their paychecks and later their pensions while doing absolutely nothing.

[keehah]

Zinn’s most recent edition of “A People’s History of the United States” ends with this quote by the poet Percy Shelley, which was recited by women garment workers in New York at the start of the 20th century.

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you--
Ye are many, they are few!

Alternet: Howard Zinn: Anarchism Shouldn't Be a Dirty Word (http://www.alternet.org/news/85427/)
In this interview, Zinn explains why anarchism is often ridiculed as violent and chaotic.
May 17, 2008 |

Howard Zinn, 85, is a Professor Emeritus of political science at Boston University. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1922 to a poor immigrant family. He realized early in his youth that the promise of the "American Dream", that will come true to all hard-working and diligent people, is just that -- a promise and a dream. During World War II he joined US Air Force and served as a bombardier in the "European Theatre." This proved to be a formative experience that only strengthened his convictions that there is no such thing as a just war. It also revealed, once again, the real face of the socio-economic order, where the suffering and sacrifice of the ordinary people is always used only to higher the profits of the privileged few.

Although Zinn spent his youthful years helping his parents support the family by working in the shipyards, he started with studies at Columbia University after WWII, where he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in 1958. Later he was appointed as a chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College, an all-black women's college in Atlanta, GA, where he actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement.

From the onset of the Vietnam War he was active within the emerging anti-war movement, and in the following years only stepped up his involvement in movements aspiring towards another, better world. Zinn is the author of more than 20 books, including A People's History of the United States that is "a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories" (Library Journal).

Zinn's most recent book is entitled A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, and is a fascinating collection of essays that Zinn wrote in the last couple of years. Beloved radical historian is still lecturing across the US and around the world, and is, with active participation and support of various progressive social movements continuing his struggle for free and just society.

Ziga Vodovnik: From the 1980s onwards we are witnessing the process of economic globalization getting stronger day after day. Many on the Left are now caught between a "dilemma" -- either to work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital; or to strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization and that is equally global. What's your opinion about this?

Howard Zinn: I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. In a certain sense the movement towards globalization where capitalists are trying to leap over nation state barriers, creates a kind of opportunity for movement to ignore national barriers, and to bring people together globally, across national lines in opposition to globalization of capital, to create globalization of people, opposed to traditional notion of globalization. In other words to use globalization -- it is nothing wrong with idea of globalization -- in a way that bypasses national boundaries and of course that there is not involved corporate control of the economic decisions that are made about people all over the world.

Ziga Vodovnik: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once wrote that: "Freedom is the mother, not the daughter of order." Where do you see life after or beyond (nation) states?

Howard Zinn: Beyond the nation states? (laughter) I think what lies beyond the nation states is a world without national boundaries, but also with people organized. But not organized as nations, but people organized as groups, as collectives, without national and any kind of boundaries. Without any kind of borders, passports, visas. None of that! Of collectives of different sizes, depending on the function of the collective, having contacts with one another. You cannot have self-sufficient little collectives, because these collectives have different resources available to them. This is something anarchist theory has not worked out and maybe cannot possibly work out in advance, because it would have to work itself out in practice.

Ziga Vodovnik: Do you think that a change can be achieved through institutionalized party politics, or only through alternative means -- with disobedience, building parallel frameworks, establishing alternative media, etc.

Howard Zinn: If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the "Left" are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over -- first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.

Ziga Vodovnik: One personal question. Do you go to the polls? Do you vote?

Howard Zinn: I do. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn't matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.... [cont'd]

[Miteysquirrel]

So does this make his books any less valid?

Have you ever READ his books? In "People's History of the United States," which the article mentions, there's very little opinion. It is mostly a collection of letters and correspondance from the 16th, 17th, 18, and 19th century as they relate to American history. How would these letters by farmers, congressmen, citydwellers, constituents, etc illustrate a snapshot of the American lifestyle any less just because their compiler has allegedly been outed as a communist?

[quote]




I am reading this book right now...and it rings true to me...Im about 100 pages in, seems the more interesting the book, the slower I read.

[Uncle Salty]

At least he didn't believe in reptilian bloodlines ruling the world using a hollow moon shooting mind control energy at earth.

[The Great Ag]

I have read two of Zinn's books, History of the US and the other I forget. The books were interesting but he does have a STRONG left slant. I do not know if he is/was a member of the communist party, but I would not be surprised.

Actually, from his writings, I would think he would be more of a marxist than a communist. He totally supports the "worker" ownership of industry.

The Great Ag

[Phoenix]

he would be more of a marxist than a communist.


Uh, what's the difference?