:::sigh::: I guess I should grit my teeth and go back and actually read the whole Zinn tome. It's just anything that starts out labeled "the People's ..." gets the hackles up because I know it's going to be an exercise in allowing every non-Western, non-capitalist collective full glowing legitimacy and the US as the most evil movement in the history of mankind.

Your quote from his "history" doesn't disappoint in this regard.

As if the Indians at the time of Columbus' arrival were engaged in a loving, peaceful, healthy, nationwide kumbya collective.

DAMN those Founding Fathers, talking about 'inherent rights' ...nothing irks a closet totalitarian more than a successful experiment in individual rights and responsibility.

To turn Zinn on his head:

It's very hard for leftists to let go of the idea that we're an especially bad nation. It's comforting to know that, even though we do right things from time to time, these are just individual aberrations. I think it takes a great deal of political consciousness to extend the reason or result of a particular policy or a particular war to a general positive appraisal of America and its history. It strikes too close to something leftists seem to need to hold onto.

Surely you're joking - Zinn's book is a standard high school text????? Say it isn't so.....

Howard Zinn is a historian in the same sense that David Irving (Hitler admirer, Holocaust denier) is a historian. That Zinn's book is being used as a textbook in public schools shows once again the need for local and parental control of public schools, and for private schools, for vouchers, and to abolish the teachers' unions (public employee unions in general), and (I have increasingly come to agree with Professor Camille Paglia) to abolish tenure.

Excellent post. You said everything I was thinking about Zinn's false "history" and ideology. That comment I wrote was only a little addendum. Indeed, in any milieu where Zinn's views are accepted, patriotism is the highest form of dissent.

Darleen:

Excellent once again.

Thanks for the comments!

As to Zinn's book being "a standard text in many U.S. high schools," that's what it says here:

http://www.answers.com/topic/howard-zinn

I wish I could say it isn't so, but it's confirmed elsewhere and I have no reason to doubt it.

Maybe they're exaggerating to pump Zinn's book. I hope so!

As a past bookseller, I can confirm that Zinn is on many reading lists. Whether it is used as a textbook (i.e. paid for by the public) is a question I cannot answer.

Back when I was in high school (1970-1973), Howard Zinn was very far to the Left of anything we were being taught. I found his book Disobedience and Democracy in a library and liked it, as it seemed to be quite libertarian, opposed to the emphasis on law and order and authority which was the prevailing thought in much of our milieu. I was at that time becoming as anarchist and anti-authoritarian as I had previously been socialist and anti-capitalist. Zinn's book was a reply to Justice Abe Fortas's book on civil disobedience.

While Justice Fortas did seem somewhat a law-and-order conservative when compared to Zinn (who was actually advocating violent revolution), he was in fact a quite liberal Justice who consistently upheld the First Amendment against censorship of "obscenity". Many conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly disliked him for that. He was in line to be Chief Justice, but he was forced to resign over some trumped-up financial scandal and we got the truly authoritarian and pro-censorship Warren Earl Burger instead.

I must add that Justice Fortas's position on both issues was identical to that of Ayn Rand, who also opposed censorship of "obscenity", and who had also opposed the mass civil (or uncivil) disobedience of the New Left (which was nothing less than mob rule). She argued that, as long as the country is still basically free, civil disobedience is proper only to bring a test case before the courts.

The question of when it is proper to openly disobey certain laws or governments is indeed a difficult one to which I have no easy answer (certainly not the kind of easy answer I would have given in my high school days). The Declaration of Independence itself recognizes that rebellion against a government should not be for "light and transient causes", so ordinarily civil obedience is the norm as one seeks to change laws through Constitutionally established processes. E.g., Rand paid her income taxes while at the same time arguing for their repeal.

As a conservative once wrote, the solution is difficult. The "constrained vision"....?

I wrote:
"Back when I was in high school (1970-1973), Howard Zinn was very far to the Left of anything we were being taught. I found his book Disobedience and Democracy in a library and liked it, as it seemed to be quite libertarian, opposed to the emphasis on law and order and authority which was the prevailing thought in much of our milieu. I was at that time becoming as anarchist and anti-authoritarian as I had previously been socialist and anti-capitalist."

Once again, that takes me back to the good old days. Reminds me of the following dialogue between my father and my grandfather (my mother's father, as my father's father had passed away before I was born) as they were coming back from the store:

My Grandfather: "The police sure are reactionary, aren't they, Sam?"

My father: "Yup. Law and order, authority."

The style of that!

None of the men (I know, I know, Transcendental Science....) teaching political science, history, or economics in our junior high school or in our high school would have ever dreamed of using a book such as Zinn's. In 7th grade, our teachers in those departments, both male and female, were stringently anti-Communist. In 8th and 9th grade and then in high school, while my female teachers were more liberal (e.g. Ms. Bounds admired Thoreau), the male teachers tended to be quite conservative, on the side of law and order, authority.

Mr. Teal, Mr. Bearse, Mr. Drill, Mr. Newkirk, were all endomorphic men. They embodied Authority. I liked all of them. My favorite was Mr. Drill, who was anything but boring. He was also stringently anti-Communist. He had a style very much like that of Archie Bunker in many ways. The liberal kids ridiculed him but I liked him.

Even a more ectomorphic teacher, Mr. Schimp, leaned rather to the conservative side, at least in contrast with his more liberal and libertarian students. He was anti-Communist, though not as stringently, but he liked to emphasize the less libertarian aspects of American democracy, and he stressed some of the good things about fascism.

In this, his approach rather resembles that of Carl Cohen who, in his excellent Four Systems, gave the case extremely well for Communism, for Socialism, for Individualism, and for Fascism.

Mr. Schimp gave me an award at the end of that final year for my performance in his political science class, though I must confess that I, as I am today, would be much harsher toward the me of that day. As Dawn would say, I needed much more discipline. More style.

Once again, the style of your posts, and of the titles of your posts!

"As Dawn would say, I needed much more discipline. More style."

Is Dawn a young muscular fascist youth? Norma? Wanda would say so.

"I found his [Zinn's] book Disobedience and Democracy in a library and liked it"

Funny, though, I can't remember which library. Our high school library? Our Monmouth city library? The big college library? Hmmm.... Anyway, three good libraries they were.... How many hours, days, weeks, months, years, I spent in them....

I heard again of Howard Zinn sometime in the mid-1980s, when I read of a conflict at Boston University between Zinn and some other professors there vs. the new President, John Silber, who was breaking a strike there. He was an old-style New Deal Democrat but he opposed the New Left and he believed in law and order, authority, and was represented as a fascist. He had an interesting style. I don't know whether or not he is related to the very interesting blogger Arthur Silber, but they seem to be ideologically diametrically opposite in every way I can think of. Hmmm.... Their styles....

Great stuff, Steven! It should all go into the book....