This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1333441
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1333441
Trump doesn’t know who cleans his White House residence or makes his cheeseburgers. How in the hell would he know who Howard Zinn is?
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Welcome to your children’s future. You won’t even know who they are when the GOP is done with them.
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Zinn was not a historian. He saw American history through an ideological lens. Matt Damon can get off his ass.
At 21, during World War II, he joined the Army Air Force and served as a B-17 bombardier, for which he was decorated, attaining the rank of second lieutenant.
Which means he was never promoted. All USAAF bombardiers were commissioned officers starting in 1941, and second lieutenant is as low as you can be as an officer.
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Every historian sees through an ideological lens. If you’d read the man, you’d know he made that very point, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
If you want to believe what you’ve been indoctrinated with and refuse to consider new information that wasn’t presented to you in American schools, you’re choosing ignorance.
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So this new curriculum will be based on “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story by Wilfred M. McClay, a University of Oklahoma historian.
Sure…why not take the lead of a white guy from the state that gave us the Massacre of Black Wall Street and the theft of lands from Native Americans. What could be wrong?
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I remember when Zinn was at BU during the 70’s. His clashes with Silber made the local press regularly. Those two guys were like oil and water. Later Silber ran for Governor of MA and flamed out spectacularly in a local television interview. Too bad that sort of thing is no longer sufficient to doom a fringe candidate.
I never read any of Zinn’s books, but maybe I will now, just to counter the propaganda campaign.
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Sorry but I have read him and what other say about him.
I actually told my 11 year old that I was going to buy him a copy of the People’s History this weekend. No shit.
The election has been the kernel around which we’ve been having many discussion about Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Capitalism, the reasons these systems come about and their strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to innoculate the young with proper definitions of these terms as early as possible in a world filled with agit prop and Pepe the Frog.
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We are returning to the age in which public schooling is an indoctrination in right-thinking, rather than an education.
If the USA is such a perfectly-established in freedom place, why did we fight a Civil War? Why are we now on our third civil rights movement? Why have women only had the right to vote for 100 years? Why did we fight the Indian Wars of the last half of the 19th Century?
What is wrong with these people??? I love my country, not despite its flaws but for its flaws and the ongoing efforts of the last 250 years or so to repair them.
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Silber was so execrable that many Democrats ran to vote for Bill Weld.
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Maybe we should start a Hive reading group. I haven’t read A People’s History yet, but it’s been on my list for a while.
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Yup. He was very smart but a real dick, and chose to make an effort to prove the former without obscuring the latter.
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The people who push “patriotic history” have always been a mystery to me. Because so many of them seem to be devout Christians and churchgoers, they acknowledge that individually, we are 330 million mortal, fallible beings, sinners. However, when we are considered collectively, as a nation, we somehow become perfect and beyond all criticism and reproach. I wish I knew how this worked. If a nation is the sum total of its mortal, fallible citizens, how can it be without faults?
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A complete misunderstanding of the Law of Large Numbers, I guess.
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I like that idea, but we would have to at least agree on what to read.
meant to reply to @stradivarius50t3
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Obviously Trump is a fool but Zinn’s book has a lot of factual problems. I remember reading his discussion of Ludlow and thinking, why make up stuff when the reality of it is so damning. It’s just sloppy. His footnotes are a mess. It is now forty years old and the age shows. So Trump’s writers picked a good target.
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I was wondering if you were talking to yourself 
I think the object of the all the hatred (A People’s History) would be the place to start, myself.
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“Real 'murkins”
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