by Bruce Bawer
He may be dead, but his followers are legion.
His parents were peasants from Russia and the Ukraine. Had they stayed in that part of the world, any children they had would’ve grown up under Stalin – and, if they’d dared to say anything critical of Uncle Joe in public, they wouldn’t have made it to adulthood. In fact, both mom and dad emigrated to America, where their son, like so many other offspring of destitute immigrants, succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. He became rich and famous, in fact. And how did he become rich and famous? By celebrating Communism and savaging America.
That Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was a card-carrying Communist, a daily fixture at Party meetings in New York, an inveterate Soviet apologist, a member of a range of Kremlin front groups, a cheerleader for Mao’s “people’s government,” a supporter of Castro and Ho Chi Minh, a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and an associate of such groups as ACORN, the Democratic Socialists of America, and International ANSWER, is routinely dropped down the memory hole by the countless teachers and professors who enthusiastically use his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States as a classroom text. Those instructors don’t tell their students that they’re being taught to think like Marxists; rather, they tell them that they’re finally learning the real truth about America, not patriotic propaganda.
For example, Zinn maintains that America was founded as – and has always been – a totalitarian state. Yes, Americans today are richer and freer than pretty much everybody else who’s ever lived on this planet; but Zinn’s readers are presented with a picture of an America whose economic inequality and political oppression are virtually without parallel. American heroism? American accomplishment? American ingenuity? Your kids won’t learn about these things from Zinn’s jeremiad. In his hands, even the most admirable chapters of American history become evidence of the depths of American perfidy.
Today, Zinn’s diatribe is used at schools and colleges all over America, at virtually every level, and in a wide range of disciplines. For decades, despite severe criticism by responsible and objective historians, it’s been by far the most influential of all American history textbooks. As Mary Grabar, born in Communist Yugoslavia, demonstrated in her powerful 2019 exposé Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation Against America, it’s proven to be a magnificent tool for left-wing teachers who see it as their role not to educate but to indoctrinate, and has consequently played a huge role in turning young Americans against their own country and transforming them into devout socialists.
But for many of Zinn’s acolytes, his book itself wasn’t enough. In 2008, two non-profits, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, both of which emphasize their devotion to “social justice,” founded the Zinn Education Project (ZEP), which describes itself as “a leading resource for teachers and teacher educators” and as “introduc[ing] students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula.” Rejecting conventional history lessons, with their “trivial pursuit of names and dates,” it provides them “with the analytical tools to make sense of and improve [the] world today.” In other words, it exchanges facts for ideology, training students to spew Marxist rhetoric – without ever actually explaining that that’s what it’s doing.
ZEP’s website “offers free, downloadable lessons and articles” that are based on Zinn’s “approach to history” and that “emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history.” ZEP also offers “workshops in collaboration with school districts, teacher unions, and at teacher conferences” and runs “campaigns” with names like “Teach Climate Justice,” “Teaching for Black Lives,” and “Abolish Columbus Day.” It also promotes Critical Race Theory.
All in all, the project’s influence is staggering: over 150,000 teachers and others are registered users of its materials. Its website features testimonials from dozens of them. ZEP, says one teacher, “invigorates students’ desire to learn and disrupt the status quo.” Another teacher praised one of his students for having recognized “that Columbus is like Trump, and the Tainos are like the Mexican people.” Still another teacher celebrated ZEP resources for “allow[ing] me to infuse social justice throughout everything I do.”
Then there’s singer Regina Belle, who fondly recalls her history teacher who “ thr[ew] our history books in the garbage” – replacing them, apparently, with Zinn. Then there’s the instructor who says he became a historian because of Zinn. “The book is always within arms reach,” he says. “But it’s not just the book that’s important, but the idea that history must be an active pursuit that strives for justice.” Who’s saying this? One Andy Forner, who teaches at – where else? – the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Like Zinn, ZEP is brilliant at omitting uncomfortable truths. The site is awash in material on slavery, but I scoured it in vain for any mention of the fact that the slaves transported to America from Africa had been purchased from fellow blacks. The site is also a trove of progressive cliches: before Columbus arrived, for example, the New World was, don’t you know, a peaceful paradise. If your kid’s school uses ZEP’s materials, he’ll learn that the Black Panthers were a cadre of beautiful souls who sought “social justice…through a combination of revolutionary theory, education, and community program” and were not unlike today’s activists who honor “the unarmed Black men and women regularly murdered by police.”
Look up the Soviet Union on ZEP’s website and you’ll find articles that ignore the horrors of Communism, treat Emma Goldberg as a hero, depict the Rosenbergs as victims, and demonize Senator Joe McCarthy while overlooking the evils of Stalin – all the while depicting America’s Cold War-era anti-Communism as a cynical, colonialist, and hysterical “Red Scare” that was driven in large part by crass economic motives.
It’s chilling to try to imagine the contents of the minds of people who think that by using Zinn’s book and ZEP’s website to teach history they’re – and here I quote again from their own testimonials – “teaching truth,” “teach[ing] history fairly and accurately,” helping “students connect to ideas of justice,” challenging the “generational beliefs” of students “that are often tough to crack,” providing their students with “tangible ways to fight back against the sanitized versions of history given to them,” and being given the tools “to infuse social justice throughout everything I do.”
And it’s even more chilling to imagine the impact of all this pedagogical malpractice on these people’s students, who, even as they’re being propagandized, are being deluded into believing that they’re undergoing a course in liberation from propaganda – and who, even as they’re being taught how to perform what’s laughably known as “Marxist analysis,” are being convinced that they’re learning how to engage in independent critical thinking. I do hope that at least some of the parents who show up at school-board meetings to protest Critical Race Theory and transgender ideology find a free moment to inquire as to whether their children are being fed a vision of America shaped by the execrable Howard Zinn and his now multitudinous minions.
Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-howard-zinn-industry/
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