which I have had occasion to do recently, specifically Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice. I first read the book several years ago, and have been making time each evening for at least a few pages - because even a few pages provokes my thinking.
Let me illustrate, from an essay titled "The Use and Abuse of History." He is writing about two Presidents very knowledgeable about history, Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, the former a professional historian, the latter a Pulitzer Prize winner. Allow me to offer two paragraphs from Zinn to demonstrate how his words can provoke:
Going back a bit in history, it was our most educated president, Woodrow Wilson - a historian, a Ph. D., and a former president of Princeton - who bombarded the Mexican coast, killing hundreds of innocent people, because the Mexican government refused to salute the American flag. It was Harvard-educated John Kennedy, author of two books on history, who presided over the American invasion of Cuba and the lies that accompanied it.
What did Kennedy or Wilson learn from all that history they absorbed in the best universities of America? What did the American people learn in their high-school history texts that caused them to submerge their own common sense and listen to these leaders? Surely how "smart" a person is on history tests like the one devised by the Times, or how "educated" someone is, tells you nothing about whether that person is decent or indecent, violent or peaceful, and whether that person will resist evil or become a consultant to warmakers. It does not tell you who will become a Pastor Niemoller (a German who resisted the Nazis) or an Albert Speer (who worked for them), a Lieutenant Calley (who killed children at My Lai) or a Warrant Officer Thompson (who tried to save them)."
Please keep reading.
I have been responsible for teaching history to young people. Even as now my main course is government rather than history, I am still teaching history.
But history should be far more than memorizing lists of Kings of England, Emperors of Rome, or Presidents of the United States - things incumbent upon me in various courses in high school and college. History is more than the actions of "great men" just as war is far more than a list of notable battles - and I remember all the battles from World War II I had to learn in school because we had teachers for whom that war was their adolescence or their young adulthood.
We have "official history" and we have a more complete telling of what happened. Of course, as Churchill supposedly said, history is written by the victors - which is perhaps why he put so much effort into his history of the Second World War in which he was a major participant as British Prime Minister. Still, there has been use to the work of those such as Joy Hakim and her efforts to make American students more aware of the impact of the lesser known and ordinary folks, through her series "A History of US," published by Oxford. Similarly, much of the material used in Ken Burns documentary of the Civil War came from the words of people not normally considered when we study our great internecine conflict.
What is included in the history we teach, and how it is taught, very much shapes understanding of the present, and that is quite deliberate. It is why there are such battles over state or national standards in history, why the content of textbooks matters so much, why some attempt to restrict the use of any unapproved material: teaching of history to a nation's young people is a major way we indoctrinate them.
Except too often we do so by omission, by false emphasis, by outright dishonesty.
Do we honestly teach our children that the nation which has broken the greatest number of treaties is our own? You doubt that? Remember all those treaties signed with "Indian tribes?" We signed them as if they were sovereign nations, then when we had reason - perhaps greed over newly discovered gold - we had no hesitation in abrogating them.
We talk about the imperial ambitions of other nations, and that is an accurate summation, especially noted in the mad rush by European powers to divide up Africa, then after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire to carve up its remains in a way that gave the British and French leverage over the ambitions and aspirations of the people s in the region. But what of our own imperial ambitions? We can clearly trace those back to Jefferson's machinations, perhaps early to Washington's forays into the Ohio River Valley. They are clearly evident in our provoking war with Mexico, which enable us to seize a third of their territory. We intervened in the Spanish Empire ostensibly on behalf of groups seeking to throw off Spanish dominion in Cuba and the Philippines, but then proceeded to rule over them as booty of war, as areas for American imperial domination.
It is true that thanks to the valiant efforts of some in the 60s and since, we have a more complete picture of our domestic history with respect to both Native Americans and Blacks. We still have a Northern European bias and outside of the Southwest and California to ignore the fact the Spanish were in what is now the United States well before the British.
I recognize that our children can not in school learn ALL of our history - hell, I am 65 going on 66 and there are still important parts of the history that is part of this nation that I am encountering for the first time, and i read widely. But teaching them dishonest history does neither them nor our nation honor or good.
Why do our students not learn about labor history? Why have not they learned of the Gilded Age, of the abuses of the railroads and the banks, of the meatpacking companies and the steel mills and coal mines? We seem shocked when there is another mining disaster, but having not paid attention to the history it becomes too easy to roll back the regulation and oversight that previous generations put in place to protect minors. We seem shocked at the accumulation of wealth without responsibility, but we have forgotten that when this has happened in the past we put in controls that have now been erased - restricting monopolies, separating consumer banking from investment banking, and most of all, preventing too rapid accumulation of too much wealth into too few hands by effective taxes on corporations, meaningful inheritance taxes, and progressive income taxes. Those did not prevent this nation from having a booming economy, any more than protecting the right of workers to unionize did.
Then there are the true horrors of our history. Do we honestly examine our own brutality? Sand Creek. Wounded Knee. Ludlow. Haymarket. The Bonus March. Fort Pillow. Mountain Meadows. Just a few of our domestic atrocities. Perhaps a few people know about My Lai. How many have even heard of No Gun Ri?
What about the lies the Army told when the Korematsu case was being decided?
Do we still remember how many Americans were lynched? Or railroaded? Or simply denied fair trials because prosecutors were too eager for advancement and withheld exculpatory evidence?
What about the continued coverups, not merely of political wrongdoing, but of criminal wrongdoing in the criminal justice system, when prosecutors argue against the use of DNA or reopening cases that might prove people were wrongly convicted, or - and it certainly has happened - wrongly executed?
What if much of our political discourse is based on lies?
We have been through that recently, at a tremendous cost - our tragic in so many ways involvement in the now officially "concluded" military operations in Iraq was clearly based on false statements to the Congress, the American people, and the world. Yet if we knew our history, honestly . . . . after all, even John McCain, who was flying off a carrier at the time, says there was no 2nd attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, yet it was that "2nd attack" that was used as justification for the Resolution that passed the Congress whose longest lasting effect in this country can be seen in the more than 58,000 names carved into black gabbro stone from India, those names etched not merely into stone but into the soul of this nation.
I began with Zinn, and I want to end with Zinn, from the final chapter of the book, "The Ultimate Power," about nuclear weapons.
First a paragraph quoting a man whose last name I share, but to whom my only connection is a similar passionate love of music:
The composer Leonard Bernstein a few years ago spoke to a graduating class at Johns Hopkins University; "Only think: if all our imaginative resources currently employed in inventing new power games and bigger and better weaponry were re-oriented toward disarmament, what miracles we could achieve, what new truths, what undiscovered realms of beauty!"
The fall of the Iron Curtain, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War - that is now more than 2 decades past, yet our military expenditures continue to escalate, we continue to deploy large numbers of Americans overseas, we continue to build ever more exotic weaponry, we continue to kill too many innocent people as part of the collateral damage that inevitably accompanies the exercise of lethal force in the name of national security.
Zinn's final words in this book, with which I will end, save for my own in this case exceedingly appropriate usual final salutation, are very apt for our own time, when we have seen at least the start of something, first in Tunisia, and now in our own nation, of people common together to change the wrong direction of nations. Here are the final two paragraphs of the book:
One of the scientists who worked on the atomic bom, who later was a scientific adviser to President Eisenhower, chemist George Kistiakowsky, devoted the last years of his life, as he was dying of cancer, to speaking out against the madness of the arms race in every public forum he could find. Toward the very end, he wrote, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: "I tell you as my parting words. Forget the channels. There simply is not enough time left before the world explodes. Concentrate instead on organizing, with so many others of like mind, a mass movement for peace such as there has not been before."
He understood that it was not the bomb he had worked on, but the people he come to work with, on behalf of peace, that were the ultimate power."
Peace.