Posted on 12/14/2009 3:45:48 PM PST by Michael van der Galien
This is my latest post for NewsReal. I thought I'd post it here, because I'm pretty sure you guys will enjoy it.
You would think that someone who writes a book called A People’s History of the United States would at the very least believe there is such an entity as the “United States,” wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be mistaken in historian and radical leftist Howard Zinn’s case. In his most famous work, he writes:
The pretense is that there really is such a thing as “the United States,” subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a “national interest” represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
When I first read that paragraph, I thought I misinterpreted the word “pretense.” I was stunned. “Could Zinn really have created an alternative reality, even stranger than that of (blockbuster movie) The Matrix?” I wondered. “No, that’s probably not what he meant. Let’s continue.”
And so I did. Here’s what I stumbled upon next:
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been…
For those who didn’t quite get the point, Zinn later repeats it in slightly different words:
Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest.
Perhaps that’s why Hollywood loves Zinn so much: he’s so far left that...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsrealblog.com ...
Interesting perspective (Zinn’s, that is).
Of course, one could apply the same analysis to his political concepts (the “people;” the “classes’ in the Maxist sense; and so on) and conclude that these are even MORE abstract, with less claim to reality than Nation, State, Government, Administration. These are at least documented (the Declaration of Independance, the Articles of Confederation, The Constitution, the Law and the laws and statutes, and so on.
VietVet
My mother in law ( who was a major league liberal) got me this book a few years back as a Christmas present because she knew I was a history buff.
I read only a few pages of this book, and thought “WTF?” I then paged through it and read up on various events, coming to the conclusion the whole book was leftist revisionist claptrap...and they use this book as a history textbook in public schools!
I threw it in the trash. I don’t think my mother in law was being malicious when she gave it to me, she probably saw the damned thing on a dollar rack or something.
Bill and Ted was Keanu’s best work
Any school that permits this Marxist indoctrination should allow for time to read the names of the 100,000,000 people killed under Communism in the 20th Century.
troll
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