Part 3 of our Marxist tour guide Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
-The biggest characteristic of the section of the book covering the period spanning from the late-1970's to present is the repeated and (of course) unsourced use of questionable statistics. I'm not going to go into too many of those since by the time I got to this section I had spent about two weeks on this book and wasn't about to spend hours researching each claim. So these (along with what I've presented so far) are by no means the only inaccuracies of the book. Some weren't interesting enough for me to include here and I'm sure others slipped past me unnoticed. Other parts don't fall into the category of "inaccuracy" but seem to me to be distorted by ideology.
-On page 573 he attacks the U.S. for its opposition to various "revolutionary movements" in the Caribbean. I think "Soviet and Cuban backed terrorist movements" might have been a more accurate term.
-On page 578 he claims that "Unemployment grew in the Reagan years". This is the exact opposite of the truth, unless when he says "grew" he means "dropped". When Reagan was inaugurated in January of '81 the unemployment rate was 7.5%. When Reagan left office in January of '89 the unemployment rate was 5.4%. Read it and weep.
-On page 585, Zinn praises the accomplishments of "a popular Sandinista movement" in Nicaragua and tells us how good they were for that country. He claims that the opposition Contras "seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua". I guess he's hoping none of us remember what happened when free elections were finally held in 1990. He also makes no mention of Soviet or Cuban military assistance to the Sandinistas. Apparently he feels the foreign interference was only on the part of the United States.
-He gives Reagan no credit for the end of the Cold War. On page 592, he tries to give the credit to Kruschev due to his "liberal reforms" enacted in the late 50's/early 60's. I guess this is kind of a relative argument but sandwiched between Stalin and Brezhnev pretty much anyone would look like a liberal reformer, even "the Butcher of the Ukraine".
-On page 638, we get one of very few mentions of Soviet Communism. He states that the "false socialism of the Soviet system had failed". Remember, the first rule of Socialism is that Socialism that exists in reality is "false Socialism". Conversely, Socialism that exists in one's imagination is "real Socialism".
-On page 646, Zinn implies that the FBI started the Waco fire that killed the Branch Davidians. He's smart enough not to state "the FBI started the fire". Instead he implies it, saying: "the FBI attacked with rifle fire, tanks, and gas resulting in a fire...". This clearly insinuates that the fire was not started by the cultists inside the compound. He then quickly transitions into a gruesome description of some of the bodies. Anyone who makes it this far into the book should realize that it is not your intellect that is being appealed to. It is the reader's emotional response that matters to the author. It is imperative to his "social aims" that you view America (and more importantly capitalism) as a force for nothing but evil in the world and the biggest threat to mankind.
-On the very next page he talks of the need to release people from jail, and states "violent crime continued to increase" during the 90's. Again this is the exact opposite of the truth. The 1990's saw a historic drop in virtually every category of crime. Explanations as to why this happened vary, but to claim that it didn't happen is nothing more than a politically motivated fantasy.
- U.S. military intervention in Somalia was wrong. The U.S. not intervening in Rwanda was wrong .(pp. 654,655) He's trying to have it both ways. You can't cry "imperialism" in one case and call for the same thing in the other (unless it could help your political agenda I suppose).
-In keeping with the "left-wing despot love-fest" he states on page 657 that Cuba "had no bloody record of suppression". I'm sure a lot of folks in Miami would beg to differ. As would these human rights groups.
-Can anyone explain to me why the far-left is so in love with people who murder police officers? As I should have seen coming, on page 668 Zinn talks about cop-killer (and hero to fringe leftist morons everywhere) Mumia Abu Jamal. Zinn states: "Jamal was a respected black journalist who had been tried and sentenced under circumstances that suggested his race and his radicalism, as well as his persistent criticism of the Philadelphia police, were the reason he now sat on death row." Actually, the reason he now sits on death row is because he is more guilty than OJ and Mike Tyson combined. Like most Jamal supporters, Zinn shows no interest in the facts of the case. I will briefly describe them. Far from being "a respected black journalist", Jamal had been fired from a local radio station for poor attendance and was driving a taxi at the time of the murder. On the night of the murder, officer Daniel Faulkner was trying to arrest Jamal's brother when Jamal saw the scuffle and ran over and shot officer Faulkner in the back from about 12 inches away. Before officer Faulkner fell, he shot Jamal in the chest (also from about a foot away). Jamal then shot Faulkner 3 more times while he (Faulkner) was lying on the ground, before finishing him off with a 5th shot which struck officer Faulkner between the eyes, killing him instantly. Jamal then staggered over to a sidewalk a few feet away and sat down. When more officers arrived less than 90 seconds later, they found Faulkner dead, Jamal sitting on the sidewalk wearing and empty shoulder holster, and Jamal's brother yelling "I ain't got nothin' to do with this". Laying on the sidewalk next to Jamal was the murder weapon, a .38 special revolver legally registered to Mumia Abu Jamal and containing 5 empty shells in the cylinder. 4 eyewitnesses also testified that Jamal had killed Faulkner. So yeah, sounds like he totally got railroaded to me. He later became a left-wing celebrity due in large part to radio interviews conducted from prison. If you've never listened to one, he talks in this mellow, deep voice about the injustice of the white man's legal system and his sympathy for all the oppressed people of the world. So this gets played on college radio stations where black militants, delusional leftists, and spoiled little white girls here it (who by this point would no doubt be willing to have the guy's baby) decide they need to do everything they can to keep him from getting the lethal injection he so richly deserves.
Now that the history is out of the way we come to Zinn's vision for the future. This chapter is titled The Coming Revolt of the Guards. He lays out a vision of a Socialist utopia where we all rise up and "seize the reigns of power" (exactly what the hell that means and how it is accomplished are for someone else to figure out). By this point he wants his readers to feel so guilty about their nation's history that they're willing to embrace anything, even an ideology as destructive as Marxism. He never gives a good reason to embrace the only ideological system (political, religious, economic, etc.) in human history that can claim responsibility for 100,000,000 deaths in one century. The reason for this is that there isn't one. He merely spits out Socialist cliches so fast and furious that it seems as though they're being fired from a machine gun. A telling passage about the delusional nature of his goals is this one. "Work of some kind would be needed by everyone, including people now kept out of the workforce-children, old people, "handicapped" people. ... Everyone could share the routine but necessary jobs for a few hours a day, and leave most of the free time for enjoyment, creativity, labors of love, and yet produce enough for an equal and ample distribution of goods. Certain things would be abundant enough to be taken out of the money system and be available-free-to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, and transportation." The word that comes to mind is "fantasy". This kind of seems to rehash the old Communist canard that it hasn't worked because "it hasn't been tried by the right people". That's because the "right people" are a figment of your imagination. It always has started with grand visions and ended with famine, shortage, and brutal repression. This is lost on today's "Libertarian-Socialists" (a term that makes about as much sense as "carnivorous vegetarian"). But then, you see, people like Howard Zinn are luxury-Socialists who live in nice houses, have cushy jobs, and make big dollars speaking about the need to redistribute (presumably other people's) wealth. Practical Socialists, on the other hand, do the redistributing themselves and wind up in jail. These are the more consistent ones in my view. Not the ones who live in the fantasy world of Acadamia. If you'd like to see what this ideology does to people check out these pictures of a gathering in a large, (sort of) American city, and remember each face in these pictures is one family's tragedy.
I am now in search of a new "worst book". I'm not sure where I'll find something worse, maybe a Noam Chomsky book, or some 9/11 "truth" garbage.
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5 comments:
Great of course, Loved the photos Bush responsible for JFK? Saw a book at Barnes today called something like "the ten books that screwed up the world" in the philosophy section.
At some point in the 80s or 90s they changed how they counted unemployment to include soldiers as employed (before they were not on the rubric). Do you know what year that was?
That was January of '83. From what I've read it was (depending on the political bent of the writer) either to reflect the change to an all-volunteer military or a cynical attempt to bring the unemployment rate back under 10%. The net effect was a drop of around .1%(The annual number for 83 was 9.5%, rather than the 9.6% it would have been otherwise.) This was discontinued in 1994 due to difficulties involved because of the way different services classified their troops differently.
You criticize Zinn for using unsourced statistics, yet don't seem too careful about checking your own facts. For instance, you speak of "when free elections were finally allowed in 1990" in Sandinista Nicaragua. You seem to forget that free elections (as assessed by everyone on Earth but the US government) had already been held there in 1984, and were won handily by the Sandinistas. The different results in 1990 may be attributed to the effects of six more years of escalated Contra terrorism, which Reagan explicitly promised would continue until the Nicaraguan people "say uncle."
Ok. I'll go along with your premise and accept that the elections in 84 where the Sandinistas took 67% were completely on the up and up. If he had just talked about what lawless thugs the Contras were (which is true)I wouldn't have included it in this list. Or if he had said the Contras had little support or that they were less popular than the Sandinistas, I wouldn't have bothered to include it. But he says they "seemed to have NO popular support", which would seem to be a dubious claim, regardless of which dog one was backing in this particular fight. Oh, and thanks for commenting.
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