Debunking Howard Zinn

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We have just gone through another Columbus Day (2020) where Americans have been shamed about the Great Navigator: still more cities have renamed Columbus Day “Indigenous Peoples' Day” Somehow, magically for those of us who graduated school in a different era, it seems that Columbus has been definitively declared a racist, rapist, murderer who is not worthy of recognition for his role in an event that literally changed the course of history.

How that happened is the subject of this book and an important lesson for anyone who wants to live in a non-Orwellian world where history is not retconned to suit the power of the moment.

How it happened is Howard Zinn. This book cogently anatomizes how the Marxist partisan Howard Zinn made an end run around scholarship and into education and popular culture. It is weird beyond belief that actor Matt Damon's family knew Howard Zinn such that Damon was able to give such a propaganda boost to Zinn's respectibility in “Good Will Hunting.” It just goes to show how small the elite circles are, even in America, and how it is the connections we don't suspect that are most effective.

Author Mary Grabar demonstrates the dodgy sources and selective editing of sources that Zinn engaged in to poison the well against Columbus. I've demonstrated similar problems in other partisan books of alleged scholarship, so this is an all too common phenomenon.

We are in the age of Orwell, where there has been an ideological take-over of the conduits of acculturation. For people who have an old-fashioned desire to know truth and see that truth be known, the creation of “pseudo-history” is offensive, particularly when it comes with malicious slander of great men. Grabar points out:

“But literally the explorer's first concern—the hope that he expressed in the initial comment about the natives in his log—was for the Indians' freedom and their eternal salvation: “I want the natives to develop a friendly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.” Even Koning had quoted this passage—though only to make the discoverer of America out to be a shameless hypocrite. He immediately undercut what Columbus actually said by warning his readers about what he supposedly “said and did later.”41 According to Koning:

Even in that religious and bigoted age, Columbus stood out as a very fierce Catholic. When he discussed his westward voyage, he always dwelt on its religious aspects. . . . He must himself have believed that his Enterprise was Christian, if only to ensure God's help; and the priests who came west later were, with one or two glorious exceptions, as quick as he was in forgetting those pious intentions. (In a similar way, modern corporations used to capture oil fields and mines in underdeveloped nations while telling us and themselves that their main interest in these enterprises was to protect those unhappy countries from communism.)42

Zinn just entirely omits the passage in which Columbus expresses his respect and concern for the Indians.”

Likewise:

“Columbus and his two brothers had little control on Hispaniola, in part because the Spaniards despised them for being Genoese.92 Nonetheless, Columbus did prevent many abuses and crimes against the Indians. He instructed his men to treat the natives with kindness93—a fact that both Zinn and Koning somehow fail to mention. And on the return trip from Columbus's second voyage to the New World when the men were desperate for food, some of them proposed eating the captive Indians “starting with the Caribs, who were man-eaters themselves; thus it wouldn't be a sin to pay them in their own coin! Others proposed that all the natives be thrown overboard so that they would consume no more rations. Columbus, in one of his humanitarian moods, argued that after all Caribs were people and should be treated as such.”

Omitting the other side is one tool of the Black Art of Propaganda. Missing from Zinn's work is anything that distracts the reader from a simple black and white reading of history. History is complicated, and much more interesting because it is complicated. Unfortunately, most people like simplicity, and, like Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting,” they like feeling smart in their Dunning-Krueger condition. Thus, there is nothing in Zinn's work that suggests that the native Americans were real people who looked to Columbus and the Spaniards as tools for their internecine wars or give them agency in their dealings with the Spaniards.

Zinn enjoyed the protection of fellow partisans. Zinn plagiarized extensively from another leftist, but this partisan showed good party discipline by not blowing the whistle:

“Countryman told Zinn that he had “no intention of going public” on his charge because that “would be petty and uncomradely.”49 Koning apparently never complained either. As a fellow leftist, he was 100 percent on board with Zinn's project to destroy the reputation of Columbus in order to turn future generations of young Americans against Western civilization, capitalism, and America.”

Zinn's hatred of the West extended to misrepresenting all of American history. The reader can certainly expect America to be excoriated for slavery and the Cold War to be blamed exclusively on America, but Zinn goes to great lengths to condemn America for World War II.

History is interesting because it is complicated. Grabar provides an example of such an interesting complexity in the internment of the Japanese. She writes:

“One now oft-forgotten part of this history is related by political science professor Ken Masugi, whose parents were interned first at Tule Lake (until it became “a segregation center to house ethnic Japanese who proved troublemakers in other camps”) and then at the Minidoka Center in Idaho. According to Masugi, “Any honest study of the relocation or WWII will discuss the Niihau episode.” This event occurred on the afternoon of December 7, 1941, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when a Japanese fighter-bomber landed on the remote Hawaiian island of Niihau. A native Hawaiian, Hawila Kaleohano, approached the pilot and grabbed his gun and papers. He then brought back two American-born inhabitants of Japanese heritage to act as interpreters. These two, a farmer and his wife—after they learned about the earlier attack on Pearl Harbor—decided to help the pilot and claim “the island for the Emperor.” Once the Hawaiians learned about their plot, a battle ensued, ending with the deaths of both the Japanese farmer and the pilot at the hands of the Hawaiians. The incident was included in the Roberts Commission Report released on January 24, 1942; understandably, it inspired alarm. Masugi comments, “Here was a simple farmer, neither agent nor nationalist, joining the cause of Japan in its moment of glory. . . .”43

I'd never heard this, but it does offer a nuance to the internment. The internment may have been wrong and/or bad policy, but it was not entirely irrational in light of the actual experience of the people making the decision at the time. We hope we will make a better decision if we are ever faced with the same situation again, but if we don't know the facts of the situation, we can't learn. If in the future, we have a similar situation, then, perhaps, we will need to weigh partisan actions by isolated individuals differently, but we won't do it if we have been led to believe that our ancestors were irredeemable racists making racist decisions whereas we are obviously beyond racism.

Zinn's project is fundamentally dishonest. His book is justified on the grounds that it looks at history from the perspective of those overlooked by historians. But that is a lie. Zinn was telling a Marxist history that was more than willing to overlook the perspective of those who are non-persons to Marxists:

“Like others around the globe, the Vietnamese suffered greatly at the hands of the Communists. The South Vietnamese armed forces had “lost 275,000 killed in action.” Nearly twice as many Vietnamese civilians—465,000 men, women, and children—had lost their lives, “many of them assassinated by Viet Cong terrorists or felled by the enemy's indiscriminate shelling and rocketing of cities,” wrote Sorley. A million became boat people; many died at sea in their desperate flight from Communist oppression. “Perhaps 65,000 others were executed by their liberators. As many as 250,000 more perished in brutal reeducation camps. Two million, driven from their homeland, formed a new Vietnamese diaspora.”132

In a book that claims to celebrate the overlooked masses and the downtrodden, there is no mention of the Vietnamese refugees who were streaming to the United States when Zinn was writing his book in the late 1970s. But the only “people” Zinn was interested in were—as always—Communists, and people who can help the Communists win....”

This is an important book. We are going to be confronted by historical nonsense. If we ignore it as nonsense, we will be doing a disservice to objective truth because, unfortunately, there are many who don't know better.

Read this book. Educate yourself.

Resist.