Tag Archives: Howard Zinn

News

MUST-READ: FBI records show Howard Zinn was a communist

5 Comments

From Accuracy in Media. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The prominent “progressive” historian Howard Zinn, whose books are force-fed to young people on many college campuses, was not only a member of the Moscow-controlled and Soviet-funded Communist Party USA (CPUSA) but lied about it, according to an FBI file released on Friday.

The file, consisting of three sections totaling 423 pages, was made available on the FBI’s website and released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from this writer.

Zinn taught in the political science department of Boston University for 24 years, from 1964 to 1988, and has been a major influence on the modern-day “progressive” movement that backed Barack Obama for president.

Although Zinn denied being a member of the CPUSA, the FBI file discloses that several reliable informants in the party identified Zinn as a member who attended party meetings as many as five times a week.

[…]The FBI file also includes information on Zinn’s pro-Castro activism and support for radical groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Progressive Labor Party (PLP), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and Black Panther Party. Much of the latter was in connection with Zinn’s support for a communist military victory in Vietnam. His dealings with the Communist regime in Hanoi included a visit to the communist capital.

Read the whole thing. This guy is the author of the most widely-used textbook on American history in the United States. And he’s a communist. This is what your children were learning in history classes.

Don’t believe me, listen to a debate

In case you would like to know how well Howard Zinn’s communist ideas hold up under rational scrutiny, you can spend some time listening to Dennis Prager debating him on the Dennis Prager radio show.

This clip has links to the rest of the 4-clip series.

The playlist is here.

And thanks to the amazing ECM for finding this amazing story.

Videos

Dennis Prager debates Howard Zinn on American exceptionalism

4 Comments

First, a little bit about Howard Zinn from Roger Kimball, writing in National Review.

Excerpt:

Zinn’s biography tells us that he was the author of “more than 20 books.” But only one matters: A People’s History of the United States. Published in 1980 with appropriately modest expectations — it had, I read somewhere, an initial print run of only 5,000 copies — the book went on to sell some 2 million and is still going strong. Its Amazon sales rank as of February 1, 2010, was 7. Seven.

[…]A People’s History is the textbook of choice in high schools and colleges across the country. No other account of our past comes even close in influence or ubiquity. No other, more responsible, telling of the American story had a chance. How could it? Given a choice between a book that portrayed America honestly — as an extraordinary success story — and a book that portrayed the history of America as a litany of depredations and failures, which do you suppose your average graduate of a teachers college, your average member of the National Education Association, would choose? To ask the question is to answer it. What this means is that most American students are battened on a story of their country in which Blame America First is a cardinal principle. No element of our heritage, from the derring-do of Christopher Columbus to the valor of the U.S. military in World War II, escapes the perverting alchemy of Howard Zinn’s exercise in deflationary revision.

How does Zinn defend his anti-American views against Jewish scholar Dennis Prager?

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

I remember hearing this live and wondering what has gone wrong with American education that a buffoon like this could write a textbook that would be the most popular history textbook used in American public schools. We need to have school choice and to avoid paying for any school other than the one we send our children to. It makes no sense to purchase education differently than the way we purchase anything else. On Amazon.com, you get what you want or your money back. Why is education different?

If you can’t see the videos and just want to read some of the debate, you can look here and here.