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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.
Discussion (45)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's like watching Joe Biden smiling at a kid.
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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.
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