The same old new ideas

PREEMINENT leftist historian Howard Zinn clearly relishes his role as the designated skunk at otherwise intellectually polite and delicately perfumed debates over the American past. That’s what he repeatedly tells us in his new collection of essays, “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”

In one, he boasts that, when invited by the Smithsonian Institution to help celebrate the “Good War,” he chose instead to question not only his role as a World War II bombardier but also the entire Allied war policy. In another, he tells of accepting a place at a round-table discussion of the Boston Massacre only after promising to focus on other, more overlooked American bloodlettings, from Attica to My Lai. And in yet a third essay, Zinn admits that when he was asked by a Jewish group to speak on the Holocaust, he redirected the discussion to the hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who perished in wars supported by the Reagan administration.

Zinn’s posture as the self-appointed scourge of American jingoism will come as no surprise to the two generations of college students who have devoured his denunciatory “A People’s History of the United States.” First published in 1980 and with more than a million copies in circulation, “A People’s History” has been a consistent bestseller, a textbook staple and what Zinn himself has called a “counterforce” to the “mountain of history books ... so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people’s movements.”

The ethos of confrontation percolates throughout this new collection of Zinn’s work. Maybe too much. To the degree that the book works at all to explain our recent past, it works only -- and narrowly -- as a partisan counterpoint to more conventional histories. Zinn’s essays should be read in conjunction with more nuanced, intellectually complex and even opposing accounts. On their own, they’re both a moving testament to his rather romantic, undeniably compassionate humanism and an expose of his egregious blind spots.

Some of the fault may lie with the collection’s editors, who have failed to compile the 35 essays -- most of them previously published in the Progressive magazine -- in a coherent or logical order. Readers are yanked from Iraq to the World Trade Organization protests of 1999, to Hiroshima, back to Iraq, to Vietnam, to Mississippi in 1964, to Eugene V. Debs and on to last year’s immigration debates.

There’s some vigorous, vintage Zinn in here. In “Unsung Heroes,” he strongly recommends that serious students of U.S. history should read beyond the usual iconography of Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and JFK. Why not devote just as much study to, say, John Woolman, who was protesting slavery even before the American Revolution? Or to Cherokee Chief John Ross, who resisted displacement of his people? Or to the feisty Emma Goldman? All worthy recommendations, all on a par with Zinn’s warnings that we have been slow to recognize the ingrained institutional injustices that led not only to the convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti and the jailing of Debs but also to hasty rubber-stamping of the Patriot Act.

But the closer we get to today, the less convincing he is. When it comes to the threat of armed Islamic fundamentalism, for example, there’s an incongruous and certainly unwitting overlap between Zinn’s views and those of a president he despises. Like George W. Bush, Zinn equates the invasion of Afghanistan with that of Iraq. Like the president, he alludes to both almost interchangeably. Bush does so to justify a failing war in Iraq; Zinn does so to argue that there should be no war on terror at all, because we are the ones principally responsible for the current global mess.

Citing Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala as venues of modern U.S. interventionism, Zinn explains 9/11 and other Islamic fundamentalist attacks as essentially retaliatory -- predictable consequences of U.S. arrogance: “We need to think about the resentment all over the world felt by the people who have been the victims of American military action,” he writes. “Nothing justifies killing innocent people. But we would do well to see what might inspire such violence. And it will not be over until we stop concentrating on punishment and retaliation and think calmly and intelligently about how to address its causes.”

This simplistic notion fails on two counts. Though Chileans and Vietnamese have undoubtedly suffered as a result of U.S. decisions, there’s no instance of these or other foreign-policy victims ever mounting payback terrorist operations aimed at killing thousands of U.S. civilians. Second, in Zinn’s view only the U.S. government has any real agency in the world. He offers not a single sentence to plumb the motivations of Al Qaeda or similar groups, other than their supposed indignation over our errant policies. That the middle-class, college-educated Saudi Arabian 9/11 hijackers might also be motivated by a Judeophobic, suicide-cultish interpretation of the Koran somehow doesn’t compute.

Zinn’s recipe for dealing with Al Qaeda is to have treated 9/11 as “horrific criminal acts” requiring not a military response but only intensive police work using “every device of intelligence and investigation.” This will strike many astute readers as a rhetorical cop-out, carefully constructed to avoid even the possibility that military force against a fanatic and murderous enemy might be justified.

We need “new ways of thinking,” Zinn writes. Indeed. But Zinn’s way of thinking about our current circumstances are unsatisfying, if not just plain obsolete. He offers no substantial explanation of how we wound up in a face-off with rising Islam and even less of an idea of how we are to get out of it. The antiwar schema of the Vietnam era transposed onto the world of 2007 makes for a poor fit.

Zinn’s insistent reminders that the United States has been much more of a sinner than the mainstream accounts indicate should be required reading for students of history. But his suggestion that we’re not only the devil in this world, but also perhaps the only devil, is better suited to classes in metaphysics or mythology. *

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From A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

INCREASED militarization ... has not given us security. Land mines and a “missile defense shield” will not give us security. We need to stop sending weapons to countries that oppress other people or their own people. We need to decide against war, no matter what reasons are conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate -- always a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified hundreds of times.