Historian Zinn: naysayer backed by truth

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

By Howard Zinn. 270 pages. City Lights Books. $16.95 paperback

The real American heroes are not victorious generals nor politicians who are proclaimed as statesmen after they are dead. The real heroes are the dissenters, naysayers, rebels and truth-tellers.

People like Paine, Thoreau, Debs, Mencken, King--and Howard Zinn.

Zinn is a rebel with a cause: the truth.

Perhaps the finest historian in America today, Zinn told many hidden truths in his classic “A People’s History of the United States,” first published in 1980 and updated twice.

He is still at it. He is still telling truths that most Americans don’t know or don’t want to know.

Zinn’s latest truth-telling book is a collection of essays on race, class, justice, history and people who speak truth to power. The book is badly titled, not reflective of the contents. It also projects an optimism that is unwarranted.

But those are minor flaws. Its truths are searing. Like:

• “We must face our long, grim history of ethnic cleansing, slavery, racism, imperial conquest and acts of unwarranted intervention and aggression around the world.”

• “ Let us cease being a military superpower and start becoming a humanitarian power…Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights.”

• “The history of bombing--and no one has bombed more than this nation--is a history of endless atrocities, all calmly explained by deceptive language like collateral damage.”

• “From the founding of the nation the government has generally legislated on behalf of the wealthy, has done the bidding of corporations in dealing with working people and has taken the nation to war in the interests of economic expansion.”

• “The courts have never been on the side of justice. Those words engraved in the marble of the Supreme Court, ‘Equal Justice Under Law,’ have always been a sham. Justice is not meted out equally to the poor and the rich, the native-born and foreign-born, the orthodox and the radical, the white and the person of color.”

• “True patriotism lies in supporting the values the country is supposed to cherish: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.”

• “Even the slightest suggestion that we are a nation divided by class brings angry reactions. However, reality repeatedly exposes the myth of a classless society.”

Zinn deplores the planting of U.S. bases throughout the globe, controlling resources in the interest of corporate profit and engaging in “foreign adventures to divert attention from domestic problems.”

To see the breakup of the Soviet Union as a sign of the failure of socialism is to mistake the monstrous tyranny created by Stalin for an egalitarian and democratic society possible under socialism, Zinn writes.

He notes how presidents lied or deceived to get America into wars and make unwarranted bombings and assaults: Polk with Mexico in 1846, McKinley with Cuba in 1898, Wilson with World War I, Truman with Hiroshima, Nixon about Cambodia, Johnson about Vietnam, Reagan about Grenada, Bush I with Panama, Clinton on Sudan and Bush II in Iraq.

Zinn excoriates Bush II for two wars, “death and dismemberment of tens of thousands of human beings in this country, Afghanistan and Iraq and for his violations of the Constitution.” He blasts the Bush mantra of privatization and deregulation, “with calamitous results for ordinary people.”

He faults the Democrats for playing the corporate game, for refusing to endorse national health insurance and for failure to back “a truly progressive income tax to diminish the huge gap between rich and poor.” Sadly, the Democrats also support the military establishment, the death penalty and “the cruel use of sanctions against the people of Cuba.”

America itself supports the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and insists on “controlling the oil of the Middle East.” Zinn quotes Naomi Klein in her book, “Twilight of Empire,” describing the government as devoted “to the capitalist ethic of greed.”

It is an ugly picture that Zinn paints. And, like Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” an all-too-true portrayal of corruption and degeneracy.

During the Vietnam War, Bobby Kennedy proclaimed “our right to the moral leadership of this planet.” And during the Iraq War, Sen. John McCain pontificated that America was using its “power for moral purpose.” The statements are grotesqueries.

People reading this book know how absurd and hubristic those statements are. Readers can only conclude that America is a hateful country, an evil empire with a despicable history.