March 9, 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 4 of the Nihilism series is the first of four examples of rewriting history to allegedly reflect a minority viewpoint. This revision is titled A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and was first published in 1980. It is the most penetrating and popular such revision selling over 2.6 million copies in North America and additionally has been translated into 20 languages. The book is used today by teachers across the country; many high schools have and are building their curricula around it; and in many circles it has become the dominant narrative per author Ben Shapiro.
To aid you in making a good or bad judgment on the claims, I have included counterviews to Zinn’s history interpretations taken from Mary Grabar’s book Debunking Howard Zinn (2019).
My Takeaways:
Continuing with the cover letter theme of this series -- listing key beliefs and value challenges to tradition -- the following are such challenges in the excerpts from this segment. They are exclusively beliefs. You be the judge on the truth of each.
1. Slavery and the Civil War
2. World War II
3. The Essence of American History
Question: Borrowing from Zinn, let me make a statement by asking a question.
Do you think revisionist historical beliefs, like those listed above, has had any influence on people trashing historic statues, renaming of schools, or attempts to rename cities and city streets?
Next
Segment 5 will be the second revisionist history example. It is the 1619 project that The Washington Post deemed, “the nation’s most significant moment of racial reckoning since the 1960s.”
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 4 of the Nihilism series is the first of four examples of rewriting history to allegedly reflect a minority viewpoint. This revision is titled A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and was first published in 1980. It is the most penetrating and popular such revision selling over 2.6 million copies in North America and additionally has been translated into 20 languages. The book is used today by teachers across the country; many high schools have and are building their curricula around it; and in many circles it has become the dominant narrative per author Ben Shapiro.
To aid you in making a good or bad judgment on the claims, I have included counterviews to Zinn’s history interpretations taken from Mary Grabar’s book Debunking Howard Zinn (2019).
My Takeaways:
Continuing with the cover letter theme of this series -- listing key beliefs and value challenges to tradition -- the following are such challenges in the excerpts from this segment. They are exclusively beliefs. You be the judge on the truth of each.
1. Slavery and the Civil War
- America’s slavery was the cruelest form of slavery in the history of the world.
- Capitalism was at the root of America’s slavery.
- Americans reduced slavery to less than human status for black slaves which was driven by racial hatred – the racism America invented.
- The Civil War was not fought over slavery but resulted over a clash between the Northern and Southern elites on the merits of economic expansion throughout the country.
- The Civil War resulted in a tragic missed opportunity. If it had been fought to overthrow the capitalist system that undergirded the cruel system of American slavery, it might have ended racism.
- Abraham Lincoln was a mere political operative rather than an emancipator.
2. World War II
- Hitler’s Germany and the Holocaust was no worse than the United States in their treatment of blacks and her Allies with their imperialism.
- Imperial Japan was a victim of American aggression.
- Franklin Roosevelt’s administration was responsible for the death of 6 million Jews by not allowing them to emigrate to the U.S.
- African Americans and the working class were united against the war because it was only being perpetrated to promote racism.
- Racial hatred of the Japanese was why Americans were mobilized for the war.
- The chief benefactor of the war was the wealthy elite.
- The purpose of the war was to maintain the evil capitalist system.
- The Japanese internment camps during the war possessed prison like conditions and were a direct duplication of Fascism being similar to the Nazi concentration camps.
3. The Essence of American History
- America’s history is one of hierarchal dominance by one powerful group – white men – over all other groups.
- America is not a nation, but only a country with a series of competing interest groups.
- America’s long-standing heroes (including the founding fathers) were actually all villains.
- Christopher Columbus was a brutal warlord victimizing peaceful natives.
- All the founding fathers did was replace one tyranny with another.
Question: Borrowing from Zinn, let me make a statement by asking a question.
Do you think revisionist historical beliefs, like those listed above, has had any influence on people trashing historic statues, renaming of schools, or attempts to rename cities and city streets?
Next
Segment 5 will be the second revisionist history example. It is the 1619 project that The Washington Post deemed, “the nation’s most significant moment of racial reckoning since the 1960s.”
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM: GOOD OR BAD? – SEGMENT 4
THE PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: From: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (1980).
Howard Zinn fundamentally changed the way millions of people think about history with A People’s History of the United States. As of 2016, the book had sold more than 2.6 million copies in North America and been translated into more than twenty languages. But it is really due to the many teachers heroically trying to encourage critical thinking among their many students that this book continues to find new readers. A People’s History is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of – and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.
SLAVERY WITHOUT SUBMISSION, EMANCIPATION WITHOUT FREEDOM: African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalist agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave. It was Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves, not John Brown. In 1859, John Brown was hanged, with federal complicity, for attempting to do by small-scale violence what Lincoln would do by large-scale violence years later – end slavery. With slavery abolished by order of the government its end could be orchestrated so as to set limits to emancipation. Liberation from the top would go only so far as the interests of the dominant groups permitted. It would end slavery only under conditions controlled by whites, and only when required by the political and economic needs of the business elite of the North. The clash was not over slavery as a moral institution – most northerners did not care enough about slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the sacrifice of war. It was not a clash of peoples but of elites. The northern elites wanted economic expansion – free land, free labor, a free market, a high protective tariff for manufactures, a bank of the United States. The slave interests opposed all that, they say Lincoln and the Republicans as making continuation of the pleasant and prosperous way of life impossible in the future. It was only as the war grew more bitter, the casualties mounted, and the criticism of the abolitionists threatened to unravel the tattered coalition behind Lincoln that he began to act against slavery. Racism in the North was as entrenched as slavery in the South, and it would take the war to shake both.
Source: A People’s History of the U.S. by Howard Zinn.
COUNTERVIEW: From: Debunking Howard Zinn by Mary Graber. In light of America’s uniquely horrible racism, Zinn wonders, “Is it possible for whites and blacks to live together without hatred?” As usual, capitalism is the culprit. Zinn plays fast and loose with numbers and sources in his effort to prove that capitalism is at the root of racism. “African slavery is hardly to be praised,” Zinn concedes. But it lacked “the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.” Thus, the Civil War was a tragic missed opportunity. If only it had been fought to overthrow the capitalistic system that undergirded the particularly cruel American form of slavery, it might have ended racism. But sadly, the Civil War, as Zinn present it, was fought “to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources.” So why did such an evil, capitalist system fight a bloody war to end slavery? There was something beyond the profit motive that ended slavery in the West. In fact, the campaign to abolish slavery was a Western thing, and a relatively new thing at the time. The Civil War not only led to the emancipation of American slaves but inspired leaders in slaveholding nations of Cuba and Brazil to take steps to end slavery and avoid a similar outcome. The Civil War also had an impact in Europe, where it brought “the issue of slavery sharply before European opinion.” It coincided with a renewed and determined British effort, by both diplomatic and naval action, to induce Muslim rulers in Turkey, Arabia, and elsewhere to ban and indeed suppress the slave trade. A People’s History does not provide such historical and global context. Instead, Zinn’s reader gets the impression that American capitalism produced the cruelest slavery in the world – and that Americans invented racism. Zinn blames “the new World” for the development of racial hatred, which he pretends did not exist before the discovery of America. “All the conditions for black and white in 17th century America were … powerfully directed toward antagonism and mistreatment.” These “conditions” have everything to do with capitalism and class, Zinn tells us. Some of the worst suffering came when Arab slave traders transported slaves, as Thomas Sowell notes in Ethnic America: A History. The massive commercial sale of negro slaves began after the conquest of northern Africa by the Arabs in the 8th century. “The Arabs were notable as the most cruel of all slave masters.” In 1849, sixteen hundred black slaves died of thirst as they were driven from Bornu to southern Libya. Zinn obscures the practice of slavery in other parts of the world besides America – in the past and in the present – and focuses on American slavery, falsely presenting American slavery as the most cruel and America as the most racist. Lincoln’s original hope to eliminate slavey gradually by beginning to outlaw it in the territories while keeping the nation together is not good enough for Zinn. He prefers John Brown’s vigilante terrorism. As Zinn tells the story, Southern states seceded from the Union after Lincoln’s election not because to slavery, but out of “a long series of policy clashed between South and North.” “The clash was not over slavery as a moral institution – most northerners did not care enough about slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the sacrifice of war. It was not a clash of people but of elites.” Zinn ignores a little fact: that Lincoln had been elected on an anti-slavery ticket. The “decisionmakers” were the voters. The fact is Zinn will do anything to make America look bad; he simply cannot allow his reader to give the first Republican elected president credit for freeing the slaves.
Source: Debunking Howard Zinn by Mary Grabar (2019).
WORLD WAR II – A PEOPLE’S WAR? From: A People’s History of the U.S. by Howard Zinn. It was a war against an enemy of unspeakable evil. Hitler’s Germany was extending totalitarianism, racism, militarism, and over aggressive warfare beyond what an already cynical world had experienced. And yet, did the governments conducting this war – England and the United States and the Soviet Union – represent something significantly different? Would the behavior of the U.S. during the war – in military action abroad, in treatment of minorities at home – be in keeping with a “peoples war?” And would postwar America, in its policies at home and overseas exemplify the values for which the war was supposed to have been fought? Germany was a dictatorship persecuting its Jewish minority, imprisoning dissidents, whatever their religion, while proclaiming the supremacy of the Nordic “race.” However, blacks, looking at Anti-Semitism in Germany, might not see their situation in the U.S. as much different. The plight of Jews was not a chief concern of Roosevelt. While Jews were being put in camps and the process of annihilation was beginning that would end in the horrifying extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, Roosevelt failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives.
Was the war being fought to establish Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over “inferior” races? The U.S. armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. The war against Fascism took no special steps to change the subordinate role of women. In one of its policies, the U.S. came close to direct duplication of Fascism. This was in its treatment of the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Franklin Roosevelt calmly signed Executive Order 9066, in February 1942, giving the army the power without warrants or indictments or hearings, to arrest every Japanese American on the West Coast – 110,000 men, women, and children – to take them from their homes, transport them to camps far into the interior, and keep them there under prison conditions. WW II was a war waged by a government whose chief beneficiary was a wealthy elite. The alliance between big business and the government went back to the very first proposals of Alexander Hamilton to Congress after the Revolutionary War. By World War II that partnership had developed and intensified. Their seemed to be widespread indifference, even hostility, on the part of the Negro community to the war. On August 6, 1945, came the lone American plane in the sky over Hiroshima, dropping the first atomic bomb, leaving perhaps 100,000 Japanese dead, and tens of thousands more slowly dying from radiation poisoning. Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. On July 13 (three weeks before the first bomb) Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace.” If only the Americans has not insisted on unconditional surrender – if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place – the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war. Why did the U.S. not take that small step to save both American and Japanese lives? Was it because too much money and effort had been invested in the atomic bomb not to drop it? It was an old lesson learned by governments: war solves problems of control. That is what happened. When, right after the war, the American public, war-weary, seemed to favor demobilization and disarmament, the Truman administration worked to create an atmosphere of crisis and cold war. A climate of fear – a hysteria about Communism. This combination of policies would permit more aggressive actions abroad, more repressive actions at home.
Source: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
COUNTERVIEW: From: Debunking Howard Zinn by Mary Graber. Howard Zinn has made dishonest use of the discovery of America, slavery, and the Civil War to indict America and promote communist revolution. But his treatment of World War II hits a new low. Zinn insinuates that the “enemy of unspeakable evil,” “Hitler’s Germany” was no worse that the United States and her allies. Imperial Japan, too, was a victim of American aggression. We weren’t really fighting against racist totalitarianism, but rather to maintain the evil capitalist system. World War II was a “war waged by a government whose chief beneficiary was a wealthy elite.” The Allies victory, Zinn suggests, would not really “be a blow to imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the world.” Zinn’s point is that America was no better than Nazi Germany. Not only was the Roosevelt administration responsible for the deaths of Jews who were not allowed to emigrate to the U.S., but the U.S. was enforcing “Nordic supremacy.” And Zinn has another victim class whose sufferings advance his America the Fascist thesis: women were oppressed, too! And it only gets worse. While the treatment of blacks and women was bad, the U.S. came “close to direct duplication of Fascism living on the West Coast.”
Not all Americans were in favor of the internment of the Japanese. But it would probably be safe to say that most Americans were angered and frightened by the Pearl Harbor attack. One can get a sense of just how much the nation was on edge by perusing the newspapers or by reading in 1942 about “a Japanese sub surfacing off the coast of Oregon” which was taken as a sign of “an imminent invasion of San Francisco, San Diego, or the Los Angeles area.” “Bunkers were thrown up in Santa Barbara; skyscrapers in Los Angeles sported antiaircraft guns on their roofs; and lights on all high-rise buildings were extinguished or covered at night to make it more difficult for imperial bombers to hit their targets. Zinn obscenely compares internment camps for the Japanese to Nazi concentration camps, claiming that the “prison conditions” represent an almost “direct duplication of Fascism.” While arguably a violation of civil rights, the American relocation bears absolutely no resemblance to the Holocaust. At their camp, Japanese Americans “published their own newspapers,” tended gardens, and established schools, glee clubs, and “baseball teams for their children.” Interestingly, “quite a few” Japanese Americans were waiting with anticipation for having a safe place, writes Brian Hayshi. For them, the camps might provide “refuge from the anti-Japanese violence they saw around them” like the “drive-by shooting, knife stabbings and murder of a handful of California Japanese by Filipinos and others.”
Zinn grossly exaggerates the degree to which African Americans opposed WW II. Zinn claims that African Americans had only one aim in WW II—"for victory over racism.” As usual Zinn omitted statistics that cut against his polemic. Of the total 10,122,367 American males (ages 18 – 37) eligible to serve, 2,427,495, or 24% were black. The total number of conscientious objectors was 42,973. If the number of black conscientious objectors were proportional to their number in the population, there would have been roughly 10,000. But the total was only 400. Blacks were also far less likely than whites to be draft evaders; they were “only 4.4% of the Justice Department cases.” In Zinn’s world, African Americans and the working class were united against the war because it was only being perpetuated to promote racism, which, in turn, supports capitalism. Not only was America’s cause in WW II tainted by our racism at home, but the war effort was actually fueled by racism; only racial hatred of the Japanese can explain why “the vast bulk of the American population was mobilized” for war. This racism explains the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The statistics do not support that claim. In Zinn’s account, the Japanese aggressors are the victims – just like the Nazis. Zinn drags out the old canard that Japan was on the verge of surrender before the atomic bombs. In fact, the insistence on “unconditional surrender” was intended to prevent remilitarization of a nation that had sought “world conquest,” as the Potsdam Proclamation of July 26, 1945 stated. Zinn ignores the fact that the Potsdam Proclamation, which demanded unconditional surrender also promised “eventual establishment of a ‘peacefully inclined and responsible Japanese government’ in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” The Japanese rejected this offer on July 28. And in fact, when the Japanese did surrender, Hirohito was allowed to “remain on his throne as nominal Emperor.” The remarkable success of Zinn’s anti-American history in persuading large swathes of the American people to despise their own country is evidence of the remarkable success of his rhetoric. Zinn was also instrumental in the sea change that had transformed Christopher Columbus from the discoverer of America into the genocidal villain whose murder and enslavement of the Indians is the original sin that makes America a crime.
Source: Debunking H. Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America by Mary Graber
HOWARD ZINN: From: How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro. The most popular of the class-based revisionists was clearly Howard Zinn. According to Zinn, who spent nearly his entire adult life in flirtation with open communism, history itself is merely a class struggle that was undeniably true. And says Zinn, “in such a world of conflict, in a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” Who are the executioners? The long-standing heroes of American history, who are actually villains. To that end, Columbus became a brutal warlord victimizing peaceful natives; the founding father tyrants simply replacing one tyranny with another; Abraham Lincoln as mere political operator rather than emancipator and the Civil War a battle by the American government “not to end slavery, but to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources;” the men and women who waged WW II, representatives of a racist tyranny and ultimate human rights violator, winning victory on behalf of “militarism, racism, and imperialism”; anticommunists, representatives of imperialism and militarization and suppression of dissent at home; and communists, heroes, particularly the Viet Cong.
In a book of nearly 700 pages, Zinn somehow manages to avoid anything worthwhile or decent about the greatest country in the history of mankind. Yet precisely because Zinn’s history is so overtly anti-American, it has achieved the status of canon among those who prefer to view themselves as “speaking truth to power.” Professors across the country assign Zinn’s People’s History of the United States in their classrooms; increasingly, high schools use curricula built around Zinn’s writings. In many circles it has become the dominant narrative.
The rewriting of American history wasn’t merely revised through the prism of class dynamics; it was quickly revised though the prisms of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Critical theory sought to reexamine American history as a story of hierarchical dominance by one powerful group – white men – over all other groups.
Source: How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro (2020)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: From: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (1980).
Howard Zinn fundamentally changed the way millions of people think about history with A People’s History of the United States. As of 2016, the book had sold more than 2.6 million copies in North America and been translated into more than twenty languages. But it is really due to the many teachers heroically trying to encourage critical thinking among their many students that this book continues to find new readers. A People’s History is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of – and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.
SLAVERY WITHOUT SUBMISSION, EMANCIPATION WITHOUT FREEDOM: African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalist agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave. It was Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves, not John Brown. In 1859, John Brown was hanged, with federal complicity, for attempting to do by small-scale violence what Lincoln would do by large-scale violence years later – end slavery. With slavery abolished by order of the government its end could be orchestrated so as to set limits to emancipation. Liberation from the top would go only so far as the interests of the dominant groups permitted. It would end slavery only under conditions controlled by whites, and only when required by the political and economic needs of the business elite of the North. The clash was not over slavery as a moral institution – most northerners did not care enough about slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the sacrifice of war. It was not a clash of peoples but of elites. The northern elites wanted economic expansion – free land, free labor, a free market, a high protective tariff for manufactures, a bank of the United States. The slave interests opposed all that, they say Lincoln and the Republicans as making continuation of the pleasant and prosperous way of life impossible in the future. It was only as the war grew more bitter, the casualties mounted, and the criticism of the abolitionists threatened to unravel the tattered coalition behind Lincoln that he began to act against slavery. Racism in the North was as entrenched as slavery in the South, and it would take the war to shake both.
Source: A People’s History of the U.S. by Howard Zinn.
COUNTERVIEW: From: Debunking Howard Zinn by Mary Graber. In light of America’s uniquely horrible racism, Zinn wonders, “Is it possible for whites and blacks to live together without hatred?” As usual, capitalism is the culprit. Zinn plays fast and loose with numbers and sources in his effort to prove that capitalism is at the root of racism. “African slavery is hardly to be praised,” Zinn concedes. But it lacked “the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.” Thus, the Civil War was a tragic missed opportunity. If only it had been fought to overthrow the capitalistic system that undergirded the particularly cruel American form of slavery, it might have ended racism. But sadly, the Civil War, as Zinn present it, was fought “to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources.” So why did such an evil, capitalist system fight a bloody war to end slavery? There was something beyond the profit motive that ended slavery in the West. In fact, the campaign to abolish slavery was a Western thing, and a relatively new thing at the time. The Civil War not only led to the emancipation of American slaves but inspired leaders in slaveholding nations of Cuba and Brazil to take steps to end slavery and avoid a similar outcome. The Civil War also had an impact in Europe, where it brought “the issue of slavery sharply before European opinion.” It coincided with a renewed and determined British effort, by both diplomatic and naval action, to induce Muslim rulers in Turkey, Arabia, and elsewhere to ban and indeed suppress the slave trade. A People’s History does not provide such historical and global context. Instead, Zinn’s reader gets the impression that American capitalism produced the cruelest slavery in the world – and that Americans invented racism. Zinn blames “the new World” for the development of racial hatred, which he pretends did not exist before the discovery of America. “All the conditions for black and white in 17th century America were … powerfully directed toward antagonism and mistreatment.” These “conditions” have everything to do with capitalism and class, Zinn tells us. Some of the worst suffering came when Arab slave traders transported slaves, as Thomas Sowell notes in Ethnic America: A History. The massive commercial sale of negro slaves began after the conquest of northern Africa by the Arabs in the 8th century. “The Arabs were notable as the most cruel of all slave masters.” In 1849, sixteen hundred black slaves died of thirst as they were driven from Bornu to southern Libya. Zinn obscures the practice of slavery in other parts of the world besides America – in the past and in the present – and focuses on American slavery, falsely presenting American slavery as the most cruel and America as the most racist. Lincoln’s original hope to eliminate slavey gradually by beginning to outlaw it in the territories while keeping the nation together is not good enough for Zinn. He prefers John Brown’s vigilante terrorism. As Zinn tells the story, Southern states seceded from the Union after Lincoln’s election not because to slavery, but out of “a long series of policy clashed between South and North.” “The clash was not over slavery as a moral institution – most northerners did not care enough about slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the sacrifice of war. It was not a clash of people but of elites.” Zinn ignores a little fact: that Lincoln had been elected on an anti-slavery ticket. The “decisionmakers” were the voters. The fact is Zinn will do anything to make America look bad; he simply cannot allow his reader to give the first Republican elected president credit for freeing the slaves.
Source: Debunking Howard Zinn by Mary Grabar (2019).
WORLD WAR II – A PEOPLE’S WAR? From: A People’s History of the U.S. by Howard Zinn. It was a war against an enemy of unspeakable evil. Hitler’s Germany was extending totalitarianism, racism, militarism, and over aggressive warfare beyond what an already cynical world had experienced. And yet, did the governments conducting this war – England and the United States and the Soviet Union – represent something significantly different? Would the behavior of the U.S. during the war – in military action abroad, in treatment of minorities at home – be in keeping with a “peoples war?” And would postwar America, in its policies at home and overseas exemplify the values for which the war was supposed to have been fought? Germany was a dictatorship persecuting its Jewish minority, imprisoning dissidents, whatever their religion, while proclaiming the supremacy of the Nordic “race.” However, blacks, looking at Anti-Semitism in Germany, might not see their situation in the U.S. as much different. The plight of Jews was not a chief concern of Roosevelt. While Jews were being put in camps and the process of annihilation was beginning that would end in the horrifying extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, Roosevelt failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives.
Was the war being fought to establish Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over “inferior” races? The U.S. armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. The war against Fascism took no special steps to change the subordinate role of women. In one of its policies, the U.S. came close to direct duplication of Fascism. This was in its treatment of the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Franklin Roosevelt calmly signed Executive Order 9066, in February 1942, giving the army the power without warrants or indictments or hearings, to arrest every Japanese American on the West Coast – 110,000 men, women, and children – to take them from their homes, transport them to camps far into the interior, and keep them there under prison conditions. WW II was a war waged by a government whose chief beneficiary was a wealthy elite. The alliance between big business and the government went back to the very first proposals of Alexander Hamilton to Congress after the Revolutionary War. By World War II that partnership had developed and intensified. Their seemed to be widespread indifference, even hostility, on the part of the Negro community to the war. On August 6, 1945, came the lone American plane in the sky over Hiroshima, dropping the first atomic bomb, leaving perhaps 100,000 Japanese dead, and tens of thousands more slowly dying from radiation poisoning. Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. On July 13 (three weeks before the first bomb) Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace.” If only the Americans has not insisted on unconditional surrender – if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place – the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war. Why did the U.S. not take that small step to save both American and Japanese lives? Was it because too much money and effort had been invested in the atomic bomb not to drop it? It was an old lesson learned by governments: war solves problems of control. That is what happened. When, right after the war, the American public, war-weary, seemed to favor demobilization and disarmament, the Truman administration worked to create an atmosphere of crisis and cold war. A climate of fear – a hysteria about Communism. This combination of policies would permit more aggressive actions abroad, more repressive actions at home.
Source: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
COUNTERVIEW: From: Debunking Howard Zinn by Mary Graber. Howard Zinn has made dishonest use of the discovery of America, slavery, and the Civil War to indict America and promote communist revolution. But his treatment of World War II hits a new low. Zinn insinuates that the “enemy of unspeakable evil,” “Hitler’s Germany” was no worse that the United States and her allies. Imperial Japan, too, was a victim of American aggression. We weren’t really fighting against racist totalitarianism, but rather to maintain the evil capitalist system. World War II was a “war waged by a government whose chief beneficiary was a wealthy elite.” The Allies victory, Zinn suggests, would not really “be a blow to imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the world.” Zinn’s point is that America was no better than Nazi Germany. Not only was the Roosevelt administration responsible for the deaths of Jews who were not allowed to emigrate to the U.S., but the U.S. was enforcing “Nordic supremacy.” And Zinn has another victim class whose sufferings advance his America the Fascist thesis: women were oppressed, too! And it only gets worse. While the treatment of blacks and women was bad, the U.S. came “close to direct duplication of Fascism living on the West Coast.”
Not all Americans were in favor of the internment of the Japanese. But it would probably be safe to say that most Americans were angered and frightened by the Pearl Harbor attack. One can get a sense of just how much the nation was on edge by perusing the newspapers or by reading in 1942 about “a Japanese sub surfacing off the coast of Oregon” which was taken as a sign of “an imminent invasion of San Francisco, San Diego, or the Los Angeles area.” “Bunkers were thrown up in Santa Barbara; skyscrapers in Los Angeles sported antiaircraft guns on their roofs; and lights on all high-rise buildings were extinguished or covered at night to make it more difficult for imperial bombers to hit their targets. Zinn obscenely compares internment camps for the Japanese to Nazi concentration camps, claiming that the “prison conditions” represent an almost “direct duplication of Fascism.” While arguably a violation of civil rights, the American relocation bears absolutely no resemblance to the Holocaust. At their camp, Japanese Americans “published their own newspapers,” tended gardens, and established schools, glee clubs, and “baseball teams for their children.” Interestingly, “quite a few” Japanese Americans were waiting with anticipation for having a safe place, writes Brian Hayshi. For them, the camps might provide “refuge from the anti-Japanese violence they saw around them” like the “drive-by shooting, knife stabbings and murder of a handful of California Japanese by Filipinos and others.”
Zinn grossly exaggerates the degree to which African Americans opposed WW II. Zinn claims that African Americans had only one aim in WW II—"for victory over racism.” As usual Zinn omitted statistics that cut against his polemic. Of the total 10,122,367 American males (ages 18 – 37) eligible to serve, 2,427,495, or 24% were black. The total number of conscientious objectors was 42,973. If the number of black conscientious objectors were proportional to their number in the population, there would have been roughly 10,000. But the total was only 400. Blacks were also far less likely than whites to be draft evaders; they were “only 4.4% of the Justice Department cases.” In Zinn’s world, African Americans and the working class were united against the war because it was only being perpetuated to promote racism, which, in turn, supports capitalism. Not only was America’s cause in WW II tainted by our racism at home, but the war effort was actually fueled by racism; only racial hatred of the Japanese can explain why “the vast bulk of the American population was mobilized” for war. This racism explains the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The statistics do not support that claim. In Zinn’s account, the Japanese aggressors are the victims – just like the Nazis. Zinn drags out the old canard that Japan was on the verge of surrender before the atomic bombs. In fact, the insistence on “unconditional surrender” was intended to prevent remilitarization of a nation that had sought “world conquest,” as the Potsdam Proclamation of July 26, 1945 stated. Zinn ignores the fact that the Potsdam Proclamation, which demanded unconditional surrender also promised “eventual establishment of a ‘peacefully inclined and responsible Japanese government’ in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” The Japanese rejected this offer on July 28. And in fact, when the Japanese did surrender, Hirohito was allowed to “remain on his throne as nominal Emperor.” The remarkable success of Zinn’s anti-American history in persuading large swathes of the American people to despise their own country is evidence of the remarkable success of his rhetoric. Zinn was also instrumental in the sea change that had transformed Christopher Columbus from the discoverer of America into the genocidal villain whose murder and enslavement of the Indians is the original sin that makes America a crime.
Source: Debunking H. Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America by Mary Graber
HOWARD ZINN: From: How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro. The most popular of the class-based revisionists was clearly Howard Zinn. According to Zinn, who spent nearly his entire adult life in flirtation with open communism, history itself is merely a class struggle that was undeniably true. And says Zinn, “in such a world of conflict, in a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” Who are the executioners? The long-standing heroes of American history, who are actually villains. To that end, Columbus became a brutal warlord victimizing peaceful natives; the founding father tyrants simply replacing one tyranny with another; Abraham Lincoln as mere political operator rather than emancipator and the Civil War a battle by the American government “not to end slavery, but to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources;” the men and women who waged WW II, representatives of a racist tyranny and ultimate human rights violator, winning victory on behalf of “militarism, racism, and imperialism”; anticommunists, representatives of imperialism and militarization and suppression of dissent at home; and communists, heroes, particularly the Viet Cong.
In a book of nearly 700 pages, Zinn somehow manages to avoid anything worthwhile or decent about the greatest country in the history of mankind. Yet precisely because Zinn’s history is so overtly anti-American, it has achieved the status of canon among those who prefer to view themselves as “speaking truth to power.” Professors across the country assign Zinn’s People’s History of the United States in their classrooms; increasingly, high schools use curricula built around Zinn’s writings. In many circles it has become the dominant narrative.
The rewriting of American history wasn’t merely revised through the prism of class dynamics; it was quickly revised though the prisms of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Critical theory sought to reexamine American history as a story of hierarchical dominance by one powerful group – white men – over all other groups.
Source: How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro (2020)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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