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Howard Zinn & Hamas?
It is bizarre to watch young, very privileged Americans get wildly enthusiastic about Hamas even while holding ideological and moral values entirely antithetical to Islam in general and Hamas in particular. Perhaps we should have foreseen that Howard Zinn, the son of Jewish immigrants who left behind the anti-semitism prevalent in central Europe, would ultimately become a gift to Islamic terrorism.
How many millions of American kids and lightweight teachers had their patriotism undercut and their perspective warped by A People’s History of the United States (1980)? When the socialist/communist movement largely collapsed after the USSR fell, and the likelihood of class warfare had been erased by greater per capita wealth in free market economies, the Gramscian shift to the culture wars approach did not require a different textbook—the moral indictment of the USA was still in those pages.
Many of our malformed youths firmly believe that the entirety of Western civilization is exploitation. The United States has no moral right to exist both for the displacement of native peoples and for the importation of a non-white slave population [add other sins as needed]. Naturally, these youths see Israel (Democratic Western values, successful free market economy, elected governments, etc.) as part of the Western excrescence. They easily shoehorn Arab populations displaced in large measure by Arab-initiated wars into the victim narrative of the Cherokee or Lakota. Anti-semitism is gasoline on the already-ignited drama.
Back when Che Guevara was still cool, some similarly admired the slime weasel, Yassir Arafat. All revolutionary figures and movements deserved a dorm room poster in those days. But the level of self-deception, historical illiteracy, and moral tone-deafness necessary to uncritically cheer Hamas after October 7 is way beyond youthful naivete or misplaced idealism.
Some serious damage has been done to these kids.
Published in General
The youths need to understand all societies are exploitative.
The Inca, Aztec, Iroquois, Cherokee, Comanche, etc. exploited the societies they interacted with and were in turn exploited right back, when possible, by other native populations.
They practiced slavery, human sacrifice and cannibalism. English Western Civilization, when it came to North America, had already eliminated two of those practices, and the US eliminated the third before most other countries.
If the elimination of slavery is a benchmark, their criticism is misplaced, and they should protest the education system responsible for their ignorance, not only in this, but much else.
And it’s not entirely clear to me how this can be undone.
Zinn, and the rest of the left, has made enormous progress. They went after the kids. Winning their hearts and minds at their most impressionable. Generation after generation. And over time, absurd tyrannical ideas start to seem normal. I don’t see how such ingrained indoctrination can be reversed, without a cataclysmic conflict to wake them up. Nobody wants that. But it’s happened before.
Never again, some said. Right.
I worked in a bookstore for several summers about 10 years ago. It was in a chichi very liberal resort and most of my year round resident friends worked, so I did. And I loved working in that bookstore, just as I did in grad school. The employee discount never offset the additional books I bought but access to the advance reader copies helped. Author signings were usually fun. A lot of celebrities came in and I loved closing because I walked to the car past the ice cream shop and got a peach and toasted pecan cone on the way home.
But: here I admit in public that I took Zinn off the shelf when I was doing stocking and occasionally turned it spine in or otherwise misplacing it. Yup. I also told some prospective buyers that it was very bad history annd poorly written and suggested other titles. Usually it was a high schooler coming because it was on the booklist. I made up for losing some of those sales by promoting other high margin coffee table stuff. Or – the newest releases in hardback. I confess and I’m not repentant. He did a lot of damage enabled with his fellow traveler teachers who requested it as part of the curriculum.
It’s like watching Joe Biden smiling at a kid.
I first encountered A People’s History in the ship’s library while on patrol on a fast attack nuclear submarine. I was quite surprised that such a subversive work was carried on the boat and felt it was corrosive to good military discipline.
I hadn’t realized there were Nazi deer until now.
I agree to the uncertainty. I do think it is not inevitable and permanent. But I also see how damaging (and long enduring) it has been or is to tell every child that they and their culture/family/environment are hideous and worthless. That they should be some other color/culture/living situation. That works when kids are quite little, but (the secure and motivated) kids know fairness. And they know when another kid cheated. And they also know that the cheaters aren’t making anything – just making stuff up. Kids stop playing with the kids who cheat. You can make a child invite them to a party but you cannot make them play with them. It does get ugly. And I don’t want a child who never really learned anything ending up as an attending in an ER when I’ve broken an elbow because I’m clumsy and fell hard.
But I’m interested to see how the girls refusing to compete with a boy shot putter plays out. I expect more of that and do hope for wholesale walkouts. In my former girlhood if a kid didn’t play fair we took the game elsewhere that they couldn’t horn in. I would withdraw a girl child from a competition where a boy would compete who would threaten her safety or distort reality.
Full disclosure – I’m not indifferent. Our 7 year old granddaughter just beat an all boy slate (of 5 children) in her age/weight bracket in a BJJ tournament. Right now she’s taller and stronger than the same weight boys. (She also wrestles and swims.) It won’t last long – boys grow. She’s pretty happy tho. It was the Hello Kitty singlet that made the difference. I don’t want her to have to compete in stupid fights against a boy who has his own problems that winning a match won’t help.
I went to middle school and high school in Arizona and found the government classes to be overly rah-rah.
They apparently fixed that and I am considerably less happy than young me would have thought.
As a general proposition, smug self-confidence is a more useful and attractive trait than degraded self-loathing.
As a kicker, self-loathing can be traded in for other-hating when it becomes too painful.
Presentism is the young scholar’s disease and we’ve let it sweep through our education system bottom-to-top. We are a stupid people and getting stupider.
Old Bathos is one of the best writers on racial and cultural double standards. I wish to quote him to himself,
I admit to not having read Howard Zinn. But I have a good guess as to what he wrote. White capitalist Christians have always been evil and the history of America is nothing but white capitalist Christians being evil.
That Charles Drew and Louis Armstrong would never haven been known and never have been able to give the world their gifts if they had been born in West Africa is not mentioned. That Native-American empires were often more barbarous to other Native-Americans and their slaves than white-Americans was also not mentioned. (Whites often did not lack barbarism either to be fair but I just want everyone to be judged equally.)
I agree that the human history of bigotry and exploitation should be robustly critiqued and roundly rejected but my impression is that Zinn compares America to some perfect flawless people that never existed.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
If only bigotry and exploitation were limited to whites. Or Christians or Americans or Asian-Americans excelling in STEM fields wouldn’t everything be easier?
The problem is not with whites or colonialism nor even the historically racist Democratic party. The problem is that humans got alot of evil in them and history is largely a story of evil overcrowding good.
And the biggest problem is that we are born with evil in our heart.
Presumably, some number of Charles Drews and Louis Armstrongs have been born in West Africa and other places, and were never heard from.
Funny you mention that. I am at a bar right now and thinking about how my Dad was a pretty good guy. He used to say, “How many Einsteins have been born but they spent their lives farming wheat and hauling water from the river?”
There are a great number of people of all colors smarter than myself. Old Bathos and Dr. Bastiat are much smarter than me but they like me had access to literacy and large libraries.
How much better would the world be if the smartest could be removed from their farms to advance humanity.
Charles Drew and Louis Armstrong and Thomas Sowell had to endure stupid and nasty racism but despite that I am very glad that they were born in America.
Despite America’s history of racism blacks can thrive.
There’s only one way to undo the fall in another – bring them pain and loss. The example you show underlines that. When the fall is bad enough and encompasses enough people, you have to burn Dresden and rape Berlin to fix it.
I happened upon a pro-Palestinian (Hamas) march last week. I was unsurprised to see a transgender flag in the midst of the usual paraphernalia. A few months ago, in Dublin, there was a counter-protest to an anti transgender public meeting. There were plenty of USSR flags amongst the pro-trans group.
Marxism is everywhere.
Nobody seems to understand that Marxism eats Marxists, too.
They all think they’ll be the privileged ones when the revolution comes.
I disagree that to somehow funnel our “smartest” into some role other than what their own efforts can yield would advance humanity one iota; it would probably be disastrous.
And blacks can thrive here because it’s America. Our “history of racism” is less virulent and better resolved than that of any other nation on earth. Why is it that so many American blacks evidence such anger and entitlement? Because it’s safe here and they’re doing well, that’s why. That’s how victimhood works.
It’s the encouragement and tolerance of that “Despite” that feeds the victim industrial complex and puts so many at America’s throat.
Like Muslims, they are obligate cannibals.
Socialism and Corporate Fascism have one thing in common. They both admire the State. Fascism and Communism are both socialist movements.
Inside every Progressive and Corporate Fascist there is a totalitarian screaming to get out.
I’d say they’re getting out of their carapaces about now.
Silence! I keel you!
Saw a while back that Stevie Wonder was mouthing off about moving to Ghana so he could feel safe. Not only would he be another black cat who would never have crossed our path had he been born in Africa, the BIG question is, “Who’s gunning for Stevie Wonder?”
Being educated and being smart are two different things.
I wonder how well blind people do in Ghana?
Lots of educated fools out there. Although in the case of Howard Zinn I’ll hold out for “malevolent”.
Just to make things more complex and complicated, I have met people who were geniuses in some areas but morons in others. Case in point: On the one hand brilliant literary insights, on the other hand cannot comprehend that women’s jeans are unlike men’s jeans not because the clothing industry is sexist but because women buyers have different fashion
prioritiesrequirements.Nor that women are free to buy “men’s” jeans and always have been.
Oooh, you said “free”! To the gulag with you!
And there are the credentialed millions.
I failed to mention that the genius in question complained that this was not a satisfactory solution because men’s jeans don’t fit women very well. But being a Good Marxist, he blamed the clothing industry rather than the millions of women who Betrayed the Female Proletariat by continuing to buy stylish but less functional jeans.