Howard Zinn, RIP
Posted by Kevin Carson on Jan 29, 2010 in Commentary • 29 commentsSince we’ve just lost someone who probably contributed more of value to the world than all forty-odd dead presidents together, I’m turning this column over to Howard Zinn.
* Zinn on the value of electoral politics:
Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.
But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools.
*Zinn on the “national interest”:
A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught….
Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” said, 30 years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.
Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.
Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that — not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor — is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.
If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there — the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances” — do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth.
*Zinn on prefigurative politics:
…to organize ourselves in such a way that means correspond to the ends, and to organize ourselves in such a way as to create kind of human relationship that should exist in future society. That would mean to organize ourselves without centralize authority, without charismatic leader, in a way that represents in miniature the ideal of the future egalitarian society. So that even if you don’t win some victory tomorrow or next year in the meantime you have created a model. You have acted out how future society should be and you created immediate satisfaction, even if you have not achieved your ultimate goal.
*Zinn on the proper model of education:
Skepticism is one of the most important qualities that you can encourage. It arises from having students realize that what has been seen as holy is not holy, what has been revered is not necessarily to be revered. That the acts of the nation which have been romanticized and idealized, those deserve to be scrutinized and looked at critically.
I remember that a friend of mine was teaching his kids in middle school to be skeptical of what they had learned about Columbus as the great hero and liberator, expander of civilization. One of his students said to him, “Well, if I have been so misled about Columbus, I wonder now what else have I been misled about?” So that is education in skepticism.
*Zinn on popular outreach:
We… see, though it is unsettling, that we were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousnes….
This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas.
*Zinn on post-scarcity:
I think [an anarchist world] would be a world in which people would not have to work more than a few hours a day, which is possible with the technology available today. If this technology were not used in the way it is now used, for war and for wasteful activities, people could work three or four hours a day and produce enough to take care of any needs. So it would be a world in which people had more time for music and sports and literature and just living in a human way with others.
Zinn on Maoist China: “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control”
Zinn on Castro’s Cuba: “…no bloody record of suppression”
Let’s assume the comments Tim quotes were intended by Zinn to mean what it seems as if they mean.
1. Zinn’s ideas and insights have to be judged on their own merits. Being mistaken about one thing doesn’t mean being mistaken about another.
2. Zinn may have been a social anarchist, but as market-oriented a libertarian as Karl Hess said some similarly naive things about Maoist China. That doesn’t mean Hess was either a monster or an idiot. It means, I think, that he was an optimist who wanted to think well of people and who took seriously what they said their ideals were. I suspect the same was true of Zinn.
Tim Starr on War: “wars [...] have actually increased liberty.”
Uh, what’s the other contender for “closest thing” to an independent people’s government in China?
In the case of both China and Cuba, I have to wonder how each country’s record and history of human rights and totaliterian actions might be different today had the US gov’t not played an active and often covert role of intervention in each nation’s affairs? Blowback? Intentional Blowback for use as a destablizing effect?
I kick sand on you from Kevin’s direction while you’re not looking and you turn around and blame Kevin and kick sand back at him. I then declare to the world that you are a brute and aggressor when in fact I manufactured the whole event to begin with knowing reaction begets reaction begets reaction.
Taking 2 specific things said by Zinn while ignoring the entire body of work in trying to assign motive seems rather “narrow minded” IMO not to mention reducing any chances of even understanding the real point to begin with. Then again, maybe the reading of this source might get someone’s ball rolling:
“Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, becomes “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Castro’s Cuba, readers learn, “had no bloody record of suppression.”
source: http://hnn.us/articles/1493.html
Would it also be good stewardship to consider the author of the above piece and other viewpoints he might have given? http://www.sullivan-county.com/id4/flynn.htm
Could it be that of these 3, Zinn was pointing out something worthy of noting from a historical perspective? For starters, Zinn opposes nation states in all aspects and in the case of all 3 revolutionary actions noted above in their early stages before obtaining power, all 3 found themselves as purely peoples actions and they opposed nationstate govt’s backed by the fascist US gov’t in the name of international corporations and military interests. Once in power themselves, they came under the full assault of varying covert actions by the US and US interests in order to re-capture what was lost and sadly they resorted to the Statist game of authoriterianism to protect themselves. They became the very State their revolutions started out opposing. Then again, our own revolution was not unlike this either in many respects.
I don’t pretend that in a perfect environment, these 3 actions would have produced some utopian ideal that I’d agree because it might not be my cup of tea to begin with. I don’t live in their neighborhood so who the hell am I to tell them how to live.
But fear is a powerful tool and what has our gov’t done when a bunch of crazies flew airplanes into buildings, or a religious nut declared himself some kind of Jesus in Texas or a man reacted to State coercion and the state shooting his son in the back on a mountaintop in Idaho? The State got some twisted, mental image that they are about to be brought down and they circled the wagons as tight as they could. Reaction begets reaction begets ……. you know! To borrow an economic phrase if you will, Human Action?
If Zinn is justifying state bloodshed for the means of NationState determination, then I stand with you in exposing Zinn for what would be IMO real hypocrisy on his part. However, his larger body of work gives me reason at this time to give him some benefit of doubt that his intent of statement may not be finding full understanding as he intended. Nuff Said!
Kevin,
Thanks for the piece on Zinn and it would be very easy to assume you’ve seen the interview from 2008′ with Zinn on Anarchism but in the same chance you’ve not, I hope you enjoy the read.
http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/an-interview-with-howard-zinn-on-anarchism-rebels-against-tyranny/
Thanks to Little Alex and Strike the Root!
Great quotes; however, “someone who probably contributed more of value to the world than all forty-odd dead presidents together”?
Well, that’s not hard to do. Every president, dead or otherwise, has contributed negative value. The sum of those negative values is a very large negative value. Almost every non-political leader has produced greater value than that sum. It seems Zinn is not so exclusive.
Just yanking your chain.
It took Zinn two whole minutes to pull down a lever in the voting booth? Must’ve been a heavy lever.
Rothbard also said positive things about Mao, Castro, and Che back in the day. I’m a big fan of Rothbard’s leftier period, but, well, not every detail of it.
The Zinn interview that mac links to above is good, but I have to kvetch about a couple of things that Zinn says there:
“If we trace origins of anarchism in the United States, then probably Thoreau is the closest you can come to an early American anarchist.”
Well, in “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau keeps talking about the “no-government men” (presumably folks such as Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, and William Lloyd Garrison) and how he partly agrees with them and partly disagrees. Who does Zinn think these “no-government men” were if Thoreau was the first one?
“in the US you have the IWW, which is an anarcho-syndicalist organization and certainly not in keeping with individualist anarchism”
Well, too bad nobody told Dyer Lum about the incompatibility between anarcho-syndicalism and individualist anarchism.
In general, these details I’m griping about are symptoms of the relative ignorance among social anarchists about the individualist anarchists. They acknowledge them as anarchists, and use them as a foil against the dreaded ancaps, but don’t generally know much about them. For example, one sees even quite good social anarchist works describing individualist anarchists as all popularizers of Stirner (which certainly isn’t true for America — virtually none of the major thinkers here was a Stirnerite except Tucker, and even he had already developed most of his anarchist system before he read Stirner) or saying things like “DESPITE being an individualist anarchist, XYZ was in favor of cooperation and mutual aid ….”
Okay, rant over.
For now!
“Who does Zinn think these ‘no-government men’ were if Thoreau was the first one?”
I think they came from the same place as Cain’s wife.
Don Boudreaux wrote one of his “letters to the editor” criticizing Zinn for perceived “contradictions”. I’m guessing Don didn’t know Zinn was an anarchist, as I informed him:
http://cafehayek.com/2010/02/zinnconsistent.html#comment-32317180
TGGP, the reference to Rothbard was spot-on. There’s a reason there’s a pamphlet version of “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle” called “All Power to the Soviets.”
In any case, I think people should be allowed to be inconsistent. Zinn’s work needs to be understood in toto. I just had an exchange on Facebook with a self-described “arch-conservative” who ridiculed my characterization of Zinn as an anarchist, despite Zinn’s own self-description. When I asked if he could supply criteria for determining when someone was an anarchist, he huffily announced that he didn’t want to get into an argument.
The negative reactions to Zinn’s work on the part of libertarians and paleocons surprise and trouble me. Well, they don’t surprise me as much as I’d like, but you get the idea.
Who could we find who *was* completely consistent? The guy was almost ninety friggin’ years old, with decades of writing behind him. Most of us can probably think of things we’ve written five years ago that we’d qualify or repudiate.
Zinn was a perfectly consistent Stalinist. Blaming the USA for Maoism? Ridiculous. China was vastly better off under Chiang Kai-Shek (before Japan invaded) than under Mao.
What surprises me is all the sympathy for commies coming from supposed libertarians. Once again, scratch an “anarcho-capitalist,” find a com-symp. Zinn was neither an anarchist nor a capitalist, and neither are you if you defend him.
Rothbard also had good things to say about Holocaust Deniers like Harry Elmer Barnes, and said that the Holocaust was made up by Allied propagandists. Long doesn’t want to throw out the baby w/ the bathwater when it comes to Rothbard, but the baby drowned in the bathwater long ago. Rothbard went from supporting Dixiecrats to neo-Commies to neo-Fascists (paleocons). In foreign policy, he sided with every dictatorial aggressor that ever came into conflict with a democracy (or a democracy’s ally).
Tim,
So who would you name as a consistent, bathwater-less political thinker you would endorse? (And ixnay on picking yourself ….)
“In foreign policy, he sided with every dictatorial aggressor that ever came into conflict with a democracy (or a democracy’s ally).”
since i put little to no stock in democracy and allow ours, w/ its track record, to be the prima facie aggressor in any conflict i’m not sure what to make of that sentence. also what about the dictatorial aggressors that democracies have supported? surely rothbard thought he was siding w/the party being aggressed against. and on that question he had a pretty good track record. you really out to read some howard zinn or william appleman williams (or rothbard).
It’s no surprise an alleged “anarchist” like Starr who nevertheless supports the Iraq war, and who, like his buddies Sandefur and Tom Palmer, sanctimoniously and outrageously maligns those who oppose war as antisemites and bigots, would attack Zinn not only for his unlibertarian views but even for what was good, anti-state, anti-war, and revisionist about Zinn. Sandefur’s odious views are mentioned here. http://www.stephankinsella.com/2010/02/02/sandefur-on-zinn-r-i-p-good-riddance-to-the-worst-of-garbage/
The complete sentence that Starr quotes from appears to be on page 427 (in the 2003 version) of A People’s History of the United States:
“In January 1949, Communist Chinese forces moved into Peking, the civil war was over, and China was in the hands of a revolutionary movement, the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.”
Unlike a blanket praise of “Maoist China” as Starr is implying Zinn made, this sentence merely states that Mao’s victory created a Chinese government more independent than other governments that China had. It does not say anything about Maoism being good for the Chinese people. That is as close to praise for Mao as I’ve seen from Zinn, but I’m a late-comer to his works so I’d be interested in what else he has said regarding this passage and Maoism.
Tim: “Zinn was a perfectly consistent Stalinist. Blaming the USA for Maoism? Ridiculous.”
Can you provide a citation for these assertions? I’ll note that blame does not require exclusivity. The actions of the United States government can encourage bad decisions on the part of other people, and in this case though ultimate blame is with those who made the final decision, the US would share a part of the responsibility.
“China was vastly better off under Chiang Kai-Shek (before Japan invaded) than under Mao.”
Where is there a direct quote from Zinn that says otherwise?
Long: I don’t expect or demand a complete absence of bathwater. As far as major libertarian thinkers go, I think Mises or Hayek were better in econ than Rothbard, Rand in ethics, & politics, and I’ve yet to find anyone to even mostly-endorse in foreign policy. David Friedman’s approach to anarcho-capitalism is superior to Rothbard’s.
Tummey: Rothbard got it quite consistently wrong when it came to taking sides in foreign policy. In the German invasion of Poland, he sided w/ Hitler. Russian invasion of Finland, he sided w/ Stalin. In the North Korean invasion of South Korea, he sided w/ Kim Il Sung. In the Six Day War, he sided w/ Assad & Nasser. In the Falklands War, he sided w/ the Argentine generals.
Kinsella: Thanks for the Sandefur tip, I’ll check it out.
Worden: I don’t buy these sorts of euphemistic expressions of approval by Chomsky & Zinn for democidal totalitarian regimes. If they’d called the Nazis the first “people’s government” of an “independent Germany,” they’d rightly have gone down in infamy. They should do the same for their support for Maoism, which killed even more people than Nazism (even including all the battle dead from WWII).
OK, let’s give Zinn’s entire paragraph on the Chinese Civil War a good Fisking:
“In China, a revolution was already under way when World War II ended, led by a Communist movement with enormous mass support…”
With enormous support from Stalin, that is, and whose “mass support” within China was so weak that Chiang was on the verge of wiping it out until the US stopped him (thus indicating a grain of truth in the claim that China’s government was under too much foreign control).
“A Red Army, which had fought against the Japanese…
Chiang Kai-shek fought the Japanese, too.
“…now fought to oust the corrupt dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek, which was suppored by the United States.”
Mao was even more corrupt & dictatorial than Chiang, and completely dependent on Stalin until right before the end of the Chinese Civil War.
“The United States, by 1949, had given $2 billion in aid to Chiang Kai Shek’s forces…”
How much did Mao get from Stalin? Including US Lend-Lease trucks diverted by Stalin to Mao, and weapons captured from the Japanese when the Kwangtung Army surrendered to the Soviets? No mention.
“…but, according to the State Department’s own White Paper on China, Chiang Kai-shek’s government had lost the confidence of its own troops and its own people.”
That would be the same State Department that was riddled w/ Soviet moles like Robert Service, but Zinn doesn’t bother to mention that. And that loss of confidence was largely caused by Marshall’s recommendations that Mao form a coalition government w/ the commies on the advice of those Soviet moles, and the US cutting off Chiang’s silver supply as the backing for China’s currency.
Have any of you even read “Mao: The Unknown Story”? Or John T. Flynn’s “The Roosevelt Myth”?
Tim Starr: China was vastly better off under Chiang Kai-Shek (before Japan invaded) than under Mao.
Tim, you ignorant fuck.
The “before Japan invaded” is an interesting little clause there. I don’t know whether this is supposed to refer to Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria (in which case we’re only talking about three years total, from Chiang’s capture of Beijing in 1928 to 1931), or the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. In either case, I’m not sure whether mentioning the Japanese invasion here is meant to make it seem as though Chiang and the KMT weren’t responsible for any of the mass murder in China while fighting the Japanese (which is absurd; they personally killed millions of people), or if it’s meant to suggest that the mass killing carried out by the KMT’s forces should be blamed on the Japanese invasion rather than on Chiang’s regime (which, if so, is as ridiculous as blaming the Allied military advance for the Holocaust, or blaming U.S. foreign policy for Castro’s repression).
In any case, let’s take a look at what life was like in “vastly better off” China under Generalissimo Chiang and the KMT:
Of course he might point out that, while Chiang and his thugs killed 10 million, the Chinese communists and their thugs have killed even more — somewhere around 40-60 million. But if Tim Starr’s notion of “vastly better off” is being starved and tortured and murdered by a regime that killed 10 million in the course of 20 years with effective control over half of China, rather than being starved and tortured murdered by a regime that killed 40-60 million in the course of 60 years of effective control over all of China, then I have to wonder what sort of real difference this is supposed to make for the millions of people dead at Chiang’s hands. In any case, this ridiculous nostalgia for the fourth greatest mass murderer in the history of the world is deeply regrettable.
As for whether Zinn’s stupid comments about the Communist victory in China are some kind of decisive reason for rejecting Zinn’s work out of hand, of course they are not. They are evidence that he was wrong about the Chinese communists. They are not evidence that his work is worthless. Individual claims can be assessed on their merits, and the notion that Zinn’s work as a whole ought to be treated as worthless, or that everything Zinn said ought to be rejected, if he was wrong about one thing — even really wrong about one thing that really mattered — is of course idiotic.
Geek: Your primary fallacy is taking the statement “X was better than Y” to imply approval or “nostalgia” for X. Yes, I’d say that 50 million less mass-murdered Chinese people makes Chiang preferable to Mao, but that hardly constitutes nostalgia for Chiang, nor approval of all his methods of fighting his enemies. Nevertheless the fact remains that most of the evil done by Chiang was done in wartime to fight the Japanese or the Communist aggressors, while most of the evil done by Mao was done in peacetime. This strongly suggests that Chiang wouldn’t have been as bad if not for the Japanese and Communist aggression he had to deal with.
Zinn’s double standard by which he whitewashes the evil of the Maoists while blackening the Nationalists is by no means an isolated incident. This sort of thing permeates his work. For instance, his account of the Iroquois (I’m part Mohawk) makes no mention of their tradition of aggressive war against their neighbors to make up for population losses due to death (”mourning war”), nor their tradition of torturing and enslaving their captives.
Fortunately, Reason has just published a vastly superior piece on Zinn’s Useful Idiocy.
Tim, it doesn’t matter what Chiang might have done under different circumstances. The fact is, his regime is responsible for millions of murders. You mentioned Hitler before. Most of the Nazi murders took place during wartime. But it would be idiotic to say that historians who focus on Nazi crimes are necessarily sympathetic toward East Germany or the Soviet Union.
There are certainly flaws in Zinn’s work. However, you have yet to show that Zinn’s asides on China in a history of the United States make him a Useful Idiot of state communism. Considering that he labels himself an anarchist, he might think it’s ironic that the closest thing to a people’s government still resulted in mass murder. One theme of A People’s History of the United States is people in charge tricking others into obedience.
Worden: It’s well-understood that Hitler’s democide was the primary goal of his regime, not just incidental to the war he started. Even if it was just incidental to his war, the fact that he started it would make all its incidentals his responsibility. That’s quite different from having someone else start a war against you, and resorting to drastic measures to fight back. That’s what Chiang did. Virtually all of Chiang’s democide was either targeted at his enemies (i.e., killing Commies), or was done to mobilize the resources he needed to fight his enemies (i.e., conscription).
Zinn’s flaws are essential to his work, not accidental. His double standard is consistent throughout, as the Reason author proved by literally opening one of his books to a page at random and finding howlingly bad factual inaccuracies. History is supposed to be based upon an accounting of the facts. Zinn held up the USA to an absolute standard for condemnation, but exempted all other regimes from any such condemnation. E.g., he called the USA the most effective means of social control ever invented, but never said any such thing about the founding of Maoist China?!?
I seriously doubt y’all would be criticizing me so much if I’d stated my view that Poland was better off under Soviet domination after WWII than it was under Nazi domination during WWII. Would RadGeek be accusing me of nostalgia for Stalinism? I seriously doubt it. You guys have just unconsciously internalized the Commie double standard thanks to brainwashing by the likes of Zinn.
You put words into Zinn’s mouth when you speculate that he may have found it ironic that the closest thing to a People’s Government China ever had turned out to be the most democidal regime in all of modern human history. Such projection is wishful thinking on your part, as Zinn never said anything remotely close to that. He wasn’t an anarchist, he was a crypto-Stalinist (and not so crypto to anyone who knows anything about Stalinism).
Tim,
Go back and check out the most recent comments on the Reason article. One commenter in particular does a thorough job of showing how Moynihan’s piece relies heavily on a selective reading of Zinn’s work. Pretty ironic considering the article essentially accuses Zinn of intellectual dishonesty.
Joe: Mitchell Freedman’s history is quite simply wrong, as I’ve just shown in my latest reply to him.
Tim,
I don’t know enough about the history you and Freedman are debating to say for sure who’s right or wrong. I was referring to Freedman’s first comment, in which he counters Moynihan’s “evidence” that Zinn was an unabashed fan-boy of any and all communist mass murderers. That’s the kind of ridiculous hyperbole that’s better suited to right-wing shout radio than an allegedly libertarian magazine. So, Zinn had some kind words for Castro and failed to condemn the Khmer Rouge. Does that negate his (valid) criticisms of U.S. imperial excesses? I don’t think so.
Zinn’s criticisms of the US are acontextual and his selective quotations frequently misleading. For instance, he quotes a soldier from the Philippine War describing a village that his unit swept through as no longer containing any people afterwards. The quote also describes the burning of the village, and that there were civilian casualties from their gunfire. The quote thus makes it look like the US soldiers shot everyone they could in the village except those who could flee. In fact, US policy in the Philippine War was to escort the civilian population from villages which could not be defended to ones that could, along with their household possessions and livestock. The huts and food that was left behind was then destroyed. Combine that with a firefight between US soldiers and insurgents in that village, and what probably happened was that some civilians got caught in the crossfire, the insurgents were either killed, captured, or forced to flee, then the remaining civilians relocated where they’d be safe and anything they left behind that would be useful to the rebels destroyed. There’s plenty of room for criticism of the US in that (e.g., I regard the Philippine War as one of the least justifiable US wars), but Zinn makes it look like a campaign of wholesale genocide, when in fact great care was taken to spare and protect civilians in that war.