TheMillerCircle.org

The death of Howard Zinn two weeks ago stirred a controversy that ruptured into a fault line running through academics, historians and intellectuals about history and scholarship, in a way that perhaps only Zinn could truly appreciate.  Controversial as a historian, Zinn’s death evoked a skirmish that revealed something more fundamental about our country than it did about Howard Zinn and his work. It all started when Allison Keyes of NPR, on the radio show “All Things Considered,” recruited a small group to comment on Zinn’s life and work and serve as a broadcast  obituary.  Many news sources have obituaries pre-written for famous people before they die, but apparently NPR either doesn’t practice that behavior or at least hadn’t done so for Howard Zinn, though perhaps that’s the difference between radio and newsprint.  Noam Chomsky spoke briefly. He was an obvious choice, a good friend of Zinn’s and was very knowledgeable about his work. Former Civil Rights leader Julian Bond was a second choice and was also  appropriate given Zinn’s activist role in a career of issues, including civil rights and the Vietnam war. However, the flip side of the short NPR segment consisted of comments by David Horowitz, the former liberal turned conservative noise maker, race-baiter and vocational Muslim-hater, who has nothing of substance to his resume, except he comes with a loud voice box. It was not even clear that he had read Zinn’s work or if he got his information by listening to Faux News. Horowitz tried to summarize Zinn’s work by stating “There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect,” and “A People’s History of the United States is a travesty.”  Zinn’s colleagues reacted quickly to Horowitz’s comments, not because he said anything new or unexpected, but questions were raised about duplicitous behavior on the part of NPR.  Colleagues of Zinn’s questioned why Horowitz had been invited to comment at all. One blogger stated “When I heard that historian and activist Howard Zinn died on Wednesday, I wondered how (or even if) NPR would cover his death. They have quite a track record of glorifying some of the vilest characters of the right (e.g. torture apologist and dictator loving Jeanne Kirkpatrick, economist Milton Friedman, and Jerry Falwell) when their lives come to an end, so I wondered how an avowedly leftist person such as Zinn would fare.” NPR lived up to expectations.

The day after the NPR airing appeared,  FAIR posted an alert that expressed outrage at the segment and emphasized how, when William Buckley died in 2008, NPR aired no less than six segments, all of which featured glowing tributes to him, despite the fact that he accomplished little of intellectual significance. So, the argument goes, if NPR arranged things so that Buckley received only positive eulogies from his friends and admirers, why should Zinn be given the bipolar treatment? The FAIR article evoked many responses that were quickly posted and led to a general expression of outrage by his friends, colleagues, liberals and progressives: in other words, most of the good people left in the country were pissed.
Now perhaps it was the light weight intellectual timbre of Buckley that didn’t prompt NPR to “balance” the eulogies with at least one mud-slinger who could offer some balance to Buckley’s glossy veneer finish, as Horowitz attempted for  Zinn (apparently encouraged by Keyes).  In Buckley’s case, one could easily mount a juggernaut of offensive slurs about his sordid, right-wing history (I have commented previously on some of Buckley’s background, especially as it relates to turning the right-wing from its anti-war conservativism/libertarianism at the close of  WW II,  to the party of bombs-away, dominated by the neocons of today. That would have made for a much richer and more accurate account of Buckley’s life, even without the slurs.  Buckley also worked for the FBI as a student spy at Yale and later for the CIA, at which time his boss was the mysterious Howard Hunt). While Buckley is forgettable, Zinn is not: he will live on as a cultural icon, elevating for all time, our awareness of the history of those who suffered the genocidal actions of the discoverers and developers of the new world. The list of those who perished because they were obstacles in the creation of the American empire reaches into the many millions.

There are many conservative historians who, unlike Horowitz,  have legitimate academic pedigrees, and do not regard Howard Zinn as a serious historian. Arthur Schlesinger Jr commented that Zinn was a “polemicist, not a historian,”  and the British historian Paul Johnson recently described Zinn as a poor historian during his 3 hour C-Span series which aired on 2/7/2010. The fault line between these two views of history, the pro and anti-Zinn views, happens to be whether you are concerned with the history of the winners or that of those who perished and, in some cases, ceased to exist along the way. One is a purely pragmatic, presumably objective form of history (which it is not)  and the other tries to inject a moral and behavioral tone or the lack thereof into the motives of those we still celebrate, such as  Christopher Columbus. As a historian, Johnson is concerned with the behavior of America as a great empire, the world’s only superpower. He is an American Enterprise fellow who would identify with Henry Kissinger’s remarks, when he responded to a question about why we invaded Iraq, by saying “Afghanistan wasn’t big enough.” In other words, the empire demands a high price for those that transgress against it and the empire needs to be properly fed in such a way that the world will see the heavy toll that must be extracted whenever a violation of our global  hegemony takes place.  Iraq committed no act of aggression against America, but she paid a heavy price, one we extracted from the country and its citizens for the “transgressions” against us that were never committed (historian Johnson remains in favor of our invasion of Iraq–it’s what great empires do). But, as a result of that war, the “empire” was badly depleted of resources, sent spinning into deep debt and has yet to learn the true cost of the war, which may ultimately be in the several  $ trillion level.

Of equal importance is whether the “empire” gained anything by our invasion of Iraq. While we plotted different strategies on the military side during our long occupation,  we kept one eye on Iraqi oil, with perhaps the second largest oil reserves in the world. Yet, while bogged down with the military side of our invasion, the Chinese quietly came in and now look as though they might get a good share of the oil contracts, together with mining arrangements that make the neocon strategy seem completely senseless if not downright stupid. The deplorable cost in lives and our destruction of a functional, literate society cannot be viewed as a good outcome, even by the measure of a hegemonic empire,  so we deny the true numbers of Iraqi deaths and place doubts on those that attempt to do accurate assessment of the damage and death toll of our wars (Bush called the Lancet data “flawed”).  Some on the right have said that there are no innocents in Iraq!  If our invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam are the sensible things that world powers do, what constitutes a failed state and is it possible that we are already there or asymptotically approaching that point? It is high time we ask the question that William Pfaff recently posed:  “Has it been a terrible, and by now all but irreversible, error for the United States to have built a system of a thousand or more military bases and stations girdling the world? Does it provoke war, rather than providing security?” What’s your best guess?

To my knowledge, the criticisms that are leveled against Howard Zinn’s interpretation of history, by emphasizing what happened to the other side, those whom our ancestors trampled on, and the policies which keep those same attitudes in play today, don’t challenge Zinn’s facts or his basic scholarship. He certainly qualifies as a polemicist because he does oppose the traditional history of the American empire, but through his book, with sales of more than a million, has he established a view that one can take without the charge of polemicy? But anyone who reminds us of those we eliminated on the way to the creation of our “empire” are, by some accounts, studying the wrong side of history.

Those who scorn Howard Zinn’s  “A People’s History of the United States” are Social Darwinists who are content with the view that societies succeed or fail through the same mechanisms that govern individual species, in which the strong survive and the weak fade from view. But that view is firmly ignorant of the more recent concept of Sociobiology advanced by E.O. Wilson in which the success and survival future of the individual is acquired through their supportive role which helps to guarantee the survival of the larger social unit, the clan or in the clan of today, modern civilization. Which society will be ultimately better equipped to face the threats that are increasingly apparent in the form of global climate change? Successful reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide will require the cooperation of virtually all countries. If America exported its high carbon footprint to the rest of the world, the planet would face almost certain doom from carbon dioxide intoxication that could reach irreversible atmospheric concentrations and permanently change the globe to a planet that could not support the 9 billion human inhabitants expected as our steady state population. Perhaps our military is already preparing for this possibility. Will the United States face the global threats of decreased oil as a member of a cooperative global effort or will we use our vast military resources to insure our energy future? Isn’t that what we have been trying to do in the Middle East, without much to show for it? Howard Zinn would have suggested that an expression of concern and support for those with whom we must share planetary space is the better, moral strategy and would generate a new history for America that Americans won’t have to dodge, as they do for our history of the last two hundred fifty years. Howard Zinn’s history of the American People is now being taught in many public and private schools throughout the country. Perhaps the straight line pathway to a demilitarized America, one better prepared to deal with our planetary future, goes through the Howard Zinns and not through the Henry Kissingers of our future.

RFM