It was an honor to hear the man speak. He's over 80 now, and still a spark trying to set the next great social movement going. Highlights in the extended entry.
1) People in power try to keep the rest of us powerless by denying us history. Because if you don't know history, it's like you were born yesterday, and you'll believe anything.
If you knew history, you'd know that presidents lie about the causes and justifications for wars all the time (Polk and Mexico, McKinley and the Philippines, the string of liars that presided over Vietnam).
2) The big lie behind all the little lies politicians tell is this: there exists a national interest. In fact there has never been a national interest. There exist only lots of small, sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating "class" interests. The national interest is a unifying myth, begun by the Founding Fathers, who were the first to hijack the idea and advance their own interest as that of the entire nation.
We must be analysts of language and dissect it, treat it very carefully. If we will do that, the big and the small lies will fall away.
3) War corrupts everybody who engages in it, even if it is fought for the best purposes (which is only a hypothetical case, because wars are never really fought for the best purposes, even "the good war," WWII, where Zinn was an Air Force bombardier).
4) Wars are increasingly about the random killing of civilians. In WWI, 10 soldiers died for every civilian casualty. In WWII it was 1:1. By Vietnam it was 1 soldier for every 3 civilians killed, and it remains there for now (although if the British medical journal The Lancet is right, it might be nearer to 1 soldier for every 100 civilians in Iraq).
5) Zinn calls himself an "optimistic historian." He calls for the US to examine its status as the world's only military superpower and to reject that role. The $400 billion/year military budget could instead make us a humanitarian superpower.
But it will take a great new social movement, on par with the civil rights, women's rights and labor movements of the 20th century. Happily, this kind of movement is still possible. Zinn sees the people and the resources in place. He says that all of these grand social movements look impossible in the beginning, but they gather momentum quickly as people commit to act together, every day.
Thank God for Howard Zinn. His clear-eyed hope for what America can be, and his historical proofs for how we can get there are a powerful tonic to the despair I've felt since the election.