The College Fix

Much has been made of the late Howard Zinn recently. If you’ve missed the frenzy surrounding the controversial historian and K-12 textbook author, just click here, here or here.

But while Zinn has garnered a lot of ink as of late, one thing that’s been partly missing from the hoopla is specific examples of Zinn’s rhetoric … until now.

Thank you, George Neumayr, for compiling a list of Zinn’s zingers.

From Intercollegiate Review:

Zinn’s “facts” are just a Marxist brew of anti-American, anti-Western opinions that left-wing academics like to ladle down the throats of impressionable students. What’s shocking is not that governors like Mitch Daniels tried to get his work out of public classrooms but that it was there in the first place. Here’s a sampling from his “respected” scholarship over the years:

• “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private profit.”

• “Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”

• “How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”

• “It seemed that the United States was reacting to the horrors perpetrated by the terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan.”

• “Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”

• “I refuse to celebrate ‘the greatest generation’ because in so doing we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are miseducating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism, when it should be remembered only as the tragic accompaniment of horrendous policies driven by power and profit. The current infatuation with World War II prepares us—innocently on the part of some, deliberately on the part of others—for more war, more military adventures, more attempts to emulate the military heroes of the past.”

• “The Constitution. . . illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law–all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.”

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