Worst Book: Part 2

Part 2: "You say you want a revolution?"


-On page 421 he states that "more than 100,000 people died in the fire-bombing of Dresden". The actual number is between 25,000 and 35,000. I guess that wasn't startling enough, hence the need to multiply it by 4. In my research I came to the conclusion that most people pushing a figure of 100,000 or higher were doing so to push a leftist agenda. And that anyone claiming over 200,000 is a Fucking Nazi.

-The World War II chapter was probably the worst in the book.

-His section on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is particularly bad. (pp 422-424) He paints a picture of a Japan that has been trying for months to surrender, and were already about to do so when the A-bombs were dropped. He also scoffs at the notion of how many lives an invasion would cost (as he gets ripped apart for here). I realize there is debate on this, but I haven't said anything truly inflammatory since I started this blog, so I'd like to take the opportunity to do so right now..... If ever there was a society that earned the right to have 2 nuclear weapons used against it it was Imperial Japan. Japan used chemical and biological weapons against China, killing somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 with biological agents, also evidenced by over 700,000 shells containing various chemical munitions they left behind in China that are still killing people. Hiroshima prefecture was the home of a poison gas factory (this gas was used to kill around 80,000 Chinese), and they were doing things that would almost make even the Nazis cringe. (for more info, google the phrases "unit 731", "unit 516","rape of Nanjing","Bataan death march","Japanese treatment of POW's", "comfort women", "Okunoshima", "battle of the Philippines", "Japanese forced labor", etc.) Also, given the most recent example the Allies had, the battle of Berlin in which the combined casualties on both sides exceeded 200,000, they had every reason to believe that an invasion of Japan would be just as brutal. Zinn claims that the only condition for the Japanese with regard to surrender was the continued rule of the emperor, omitting the other 3. 1) No occupation 2) No handing over of war criminals 3) They would be in charge of their own demobilization. Needless to say these were unacceptable. The Pottsdam declaration also contained a warning and terms of surrender, but it was rejected by the Japanese. Another thing that always stuck out to me in this debate is that generally if someone's already going to surrender...they probably would surrender after the first bomb was dropped. The fact that there even had to be a second bomb leads me to believe that they may have been willing to fight it out until total societal collapse was inevitable. If they had surrendered within a few months, how many Chinese, Koreans, etc would have died in that time frame? Does this make the bombings morally justified? Maybe not. But in my opinion it made them absolutely necessary. I understand and to some degree sympathise with those who disagree with me on this issue, but when facts are distorted or omitted from the argument that tends to fall flat with me. To frame this issue as innocent civilians dying in massive numbers vs. no innocent civilians dying is also inaccurate; the only question here was whether they were dying in Japan or in China, Indochina, Korea, etc.

-Also, on page 424 he states "the bombing of Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped". He seems to think it was because the U.S. wanted to use Nagasaki as a guinea pig for the "fat man" bomb design (even though this design was very similar to the one tested in New Mexico). Actually Nagasaki was not the intended target when Bock'scar left the ground that day. The target was Kokura, but due to cloud cover they diverted to Nagasaki. Perhaps he means that the idea of a second bomb was scheduled well in advance but without citing any documentary evidence he doesn't back up this claim at all. As to why it was dropped, I think maybe it was because they didn't surrender after the first one was dropped. So again, we can debate Hiroshima but they had no one but themselves to blame for Nagasaki.

-His views on the Korean War plumb new depths in terms of delusion. He presents it as if the Chinese were just minding their own business until forced to enter the war. (p.428) One would be well served to remember who invaded who.

-On page 439 he tells us what a great guy his friend Fidel Castro is (was?). He set up "a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants". No mention of firing squads or secret prisons. At this point it becomes obvious that he doesn't think it's enough just to bash the U.S. (which again is fine with me, he has the right to say any stupid thing he wants) but he has to glorify our enemies simply because they are our enemies, no matter how horrendous their crimes. More on Cuba still to come.

-His love for Ho Chi Minh seems to be unconditional. On page 469 he tells us about the Vietnamese declaration of independence (written by Ho) states that "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator....(you know the rest)" And I have no doubt that Zinn actually believes Ho Chi Minh believed in those things. The true hallmark of a "useful idiot".

-On the same page he states that the U.S. made "a maximum military effort" against a "nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country". Maximum military effort? Not even close. I would also point out that at the time Vietnam had a population of around 75 million, making it one of the 20 largest nations on earth. Here we see the first appearance of a pattern of using the word "revolutionary" to refer to Communist dictators. In Zinn's view a group of revolutionaries who implement a Constitutional government are dictators, but Soviet-backed dictators are "revolutionaries"

-Still on the same page he says " it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won." At this point I laughed so hard I almost dropped the book. The only human beings who "won" were the ones who escaped the living hell that country was when the "revolutionaries" took over. This chapter had a lot of promise. You'd think that a person writing an anti-American book would have a lot of good material to work with when it comes to Vietnam, but his unvarnished cheer leading and apparent glee over that regime's victory (rivaled only by fellow moonbat and left-wing totalitarian apologist Noam Chomsky) makes it hard to take him very seriously. The phrases "reeducation camps" and "boat people" appear no where in the text. The North Vietnamese are portrayed as true believers in freedom, justice and equality who never committed any atrocities. This makes it very hard for me to view the author as a guy who just wants peace.

-He spends about half the chapter (the "revolutionaries"=good half, not the U.S.=bad half) telling us how much better the Communists made life for people in the North, so I was kind of surprised when we reach the end of the war and he doesn't tell us how wonderfully things turned out once the "imperialists" were driven out. No mention of how happy people were, or the reconciliation and era of plenty that ensued. One can only dream about living in such a Socialist paradise I suppose.

-On page 551 he tells how an American cargo ship was captured in 1975 "in Cambodia, where a revolutionary regime had just taken power" He then describes how friendly they were to the crew. He doesn't say anything else (literally, not one word) about these "revolutionaries". He doesn't tell us how they were a group of nice people called the Khmer Rouge, or that they were led by a wonderful man named Pol Pot. They were true underdogs, unable to afford things like bulldozers or lots of bullets. Still they persevered. They made people dig their own graves and used iron bars to "club their brains out like baby seals". They overcame these disadvantages and managed to cause the deaths of somewhere between 1,200,000 and 1,700,000 people in just 4 years! That is an amazing accomplishment even by communist standards considering the short time frame and the fact that there were only 7.5 million people in the country to begin with.


-On page 554, he states as a fact that "[the CIA] had introduced African swine fever into Cuba in 1971, bringing disease and then slaughter to 500,000 pigs." I assume he means literal pigs, not capitalists. I had to search for hours to find any reliable source on this, one way or the other. After viewing about 500 Marxist, pro-Castro, and "CIA created AIDS" type websites (and the CIA "family jewels"). I finally found that this claim had been pretty much debunked in a study by Raymond Zilinskas. It was published in a paper called "Cuban Allegations of Biological Warfare by the United States: Assessing the Evidence" in Critical Reviews in Microbiology, 25:3 (1999) pp.173-227. So the question is who do I believe? 500 wack-job websites or one peer reviewed scientific journal? That's a pretty easy choice. The only thing I found to back up the claim was the word of Castro (always reliable) and an interview from the San Francisco Chronicle in the late seventies with an anonymous person who claimed to have worked for the CIA and delivered a vial of this stuff to some Cuban dissidents. I've got news for you. This nation's mental hospitals are full of people claiming they work for the CIA. To pass off this claim as though it were an established fact in an alleged history book seems to me, at best, negligent.


-The last point I will include in this section is this: on page 570 he rips Jimmy Carter because he "opposed federal funding to poor people who needed abortions". Needed? or wanted? This one wouldn't have bothered me in a book that wasn't being used in high schools across the country. But again, this at least pretends to be a history book. (Although the pretext becomes flimsier and flimsier the further the book moves along, by the time we reach the modern era it's painfully obvious that this is a run of the mill Marxist tract. And not a very good one at that.)


That's all for part 2. The next section will run from 1980 through our Socialist Wonderland future.
And believe me, it's equally inaccurate, but with more nuttiness thrown in.
In the mean time check out this parody of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky doing audio commentary for the first Lord of the Rings movie.