What should be required reading for every American, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of The United States stands as a disturbing masterpiece of revisionist History.
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
On the premise that History is better understood not from the perspective of leaders or authority but from the masses of people themselves Zinn makes us all aware of the vast shortcomings, and downright lies, that most of us have been subjected to all our lives. The History books have promulgated the handy deceptions about Columbus, for example, the Founding Fathers and the Frontiersmen as all heroic and selfless when the stories of the people they subjected tell of something very different. Zinn tells these stories and sets the record straight, finally.
Indignities were often done in the name of progress. The first Indians Columbus encountered were forced to mine gold for the Spaniards looking to turn a profit.
“The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead. By 1550, there were five hundred.”
Zinn admits to being biased, but he also acknowledges that no History is unbiased and a different perspective is necessary.
“That makes it a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction – so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people’s movements – that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission. All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act.”
It is acknowledged that History has always been full of oppression and subjugation of the weaker classes by the ruling elite and that hasn’t changed in the New World. English repression of the colonies was replaced with Colonial repression, tyranny for tyranny. And the subjugation has gotten even worse. With very few individuals controlling most of the wealth and rampant “free speech” in the form of vote buying there is a disparity of control. The military continues to grow, in peacetime and in war, and has an inordinate grip on both political parties. The size of the annual Defense budget is astounding and disgusting when viewed with the knowledge that just a small slice of it could pay for internal programs like adequate nutrition and education.
Zinn points out in chapters added since its first publication in 1980, that neither party is immune because the ruling elites continue to stay in power, on both sides, and they continue to amass more and more wealth and influence at the expense of the masses of people.
He covers everything that would be in a traditional U.S. History textbook with empathy for the vanquished and the perspective that, in progress, the ends do not justify the means. From the first landing to the colonial period, the Indian wars, the Revolution, slavery, Civil War, the World Wars, Vietnam, globalization, South American policy, and up to the war on terrorism Zinn captures the perspective of those who are martyred and analyzes the incredible human costs of triumph.
But, in the end, Zinn is optimistic and confidant in our eternal struggle. The stories of opposition he tells have always been with us, whittling away, and shall continue. In the addendum he states:
“There is very little in the government that I admire – certainly not in the present, and certainly not in recent years – but there is much that I admire in the United States, and what I admire is spirit of independence and thought, which has allowed so many Americans to protest against policies they disagreed with.”
Read it now.
G.T. Greenwood, Dec. 2010
