Excellent Howard Zinn Interview - 4/27/05

[reprehensor]

"To Be Neutral, To Be Passive In A Situation Is To Collaborate With Whatever Is Going On"

Democracy Now!
Wednesday, April 27th, 2005

AMY GOODMAN: He is an historian and author of one of the most popular books on American history, A People's History of the United States. But before we go to him, we're turning to an excerpt of a new film that chronicles his life. It's titled, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, which is also the title of his autobiography. The film is produced by First Run Features. It's narrated by Howard Zinn’s next door neighbor, actor Matt Damon.

HOWARD ZINN: We grow up in a controlled society. And so we thought, if one person kills another person, that is murder. But if the government kills 100,000 persons, that is patriotism. And they’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we’re disturbing the war.

MATT DAMON: I start from the supposition that the world is topsy turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail, and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power, and the wrong people are out of power. I start from the supposition that we don't have to say too much about this, because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside-down.

HOWARD ZINN: History is important. If you don't know history, it's as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.

HOWARD ZINN: It's exactly when you're in the midst of a war or about to go into a war that you need your freedom of speech. Lives are at stake. If you are put in fear of speaking out, then democracy has been severely crippled.

more@link

[nightfire]

1. A review of a recent Zinn collection, for 'background'

Economic and Political Weekly
http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2005&leaf=02&filename=8332&filetype=html

Rule by Force
by Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn is a distinguished debunker of American textbook myths, a radical historian who interrogates 'received versions' and illuminatingly digs into the gritty popular layers of life where history is really made. Zinn unearths inconvenient evidence and forgotten episodes, always taking a hard look at the elitist travesty too many scholars have made of the past. Fearless critics rarely are honoured in their own lands and so, like kindred spirit Noam Chomsky, he is far better known abroad. (During the Vietnam war, though, Zinn, Chomsky and a handful of others became steady moral compasses for a new generation of activists and scholars.) What one cracks up against when challenging dominant views are unquestioned, or inadequately questioned, bedrock assumptions. One doesn't undertake this daunting work lightly inasmuch as it always rouses fierce and devious defenders of the status quo. "Even liberals," as Zinn glumly observes, "are conservative by global standards."

Zinn?s masterwork is A People's History of the United States, written, to paraphrase a subtitle from E F Schumacher, "as if ordinary people mattered," It was a dramatic eye-opener for multitudes of innocent readers. The usual schoolbooks in the US, as anywhere else, portray national history as a smug progression of inevitable social advances and human triumphs - a streamlined and airbrushed portrayal which looks startlingly different when viewed and experienced from below. Unlike many academic tomes that, when confronting stark class and racial oppression, skittishly retreat into a morass of nuances where everything allegedly is more complicated than mere lust for power and gold, Zinn sticks to what is bloodily obvious. Rule By Force assembles 21 essays on the theme of warfare, flushing out hidden aspects. Zinn flew as a B-17 bombardier over Europe during the second world war, aloft in the first napalm bomb raid drenching a French city in German hands only three weeks before the war ended - an incendiary moment whose sordid significance he stumbled on much later in archival research.

AND

Aggressive expansion "was a constant of national ideology." Zinn pinpoints the "messianic fervour" in liberalism and argues, without much fear of contradiction, that "power and privilege tend to be as rapacious as the degree of resistance by the victims permit." He quotes the 16th century scholar Erasmus: "Once war is declared, then all the affairs of the states are at the mercy of the appetites of a few" - as in post-9/11 America today. America-bashing is beside the point. The problem is "not that the US was more evil than other nations; only that she was just as evil (although she sometimes had more finesse)". Likewise, at the personal level, "innocent and well-meaning people - of whom I considered myself one - are capable of the most brutal acts and the most self-righteous excuses."

AND

"We should remember that the social utility of free speech is in giving us the informational base from which we can then make social choices. To refrain from making choices is to say that beyond the issue of free speech we have no substantive values which we will express in action. If we do not discriminate in the actions we support or oppose, we cannot rectify the terrible injustices in the present world." Elites always try to con us but the great enemy is a "habit of obedience" and "the universal teaching of all cultures, not to get out of line, not even to think about that which one has not been assigned to think about." The trick is staying sceptical - "a description is never neutral or innocent." Sharp critics can discern "clues to the rightness of the ends we pursue by examining the means we use to achieve those ends." Ethical decisions depend on "the relationships in which we place the facts we know." So the perspective we bring to the common body of evidence we see is crucial. It determines what we see and what we choose not to see.

[reprehensor]

2. Nice, thanks for the link. n/t

[bemildred]

3. Yeah. Don't let them shut you up. Speech is power. Ideas have power.

That's why they are feared.

[teryang]

4. Inspiring

Thanks for the post.

<And you know, if you define patriotism as obedience to the government, then you are, I think, following a kind of totalitarian principle, because that's the principle of a totalitarian state, that you do what the government tells you to do. And democracy means that the government is an instrument of the people. This is the Declaration of Independence. Governments are artificial entities set up in order to preserve the rights, equal right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness of people. When the government violates those rights, it is the duty of people to defy that government. That is patriotism. >