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| Howard Zinn Dies | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jan 29 2010, 07:05 AM (889 Views) | |
| Larry | Jan 30 2010, 12:26 AM Post #26 |
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Mmmmmmm, pie!
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At one point he was a freaking communist. What part of Marxism do you think he didn't embrace? |
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Of the Pokatwat Tribe | |
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| lb1 | Jan 30 2010, 03:40 AM Post #27 |
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Fulla-Carp
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Your pissing in the wind Larry, you are either addressing lb |
| My position is simple: you jumped to an unwarranted conclusion and slung mud on an issue where none was deserved. Quirt 03/08/09 | |
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| kathyk | Jan 30 2010, 05:58 AM Post #28 |
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Pisa-Carp
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Actually, I can't find anything substantiating that he was a communist. Can you? But, even if he was, so were many pacifist, intellectual supporters of the labor movement, of his time. They formed the foundation of the civil rights movement. It was a very different movement back then before it took on a new meaning with the rise of Stalinism. A nice little essay of what he stood for: In Memory of Howard Zinn -An American and a Jew A close friend called me today and notified me of Howard Zinn's death. After a half hour of the requisite investigatory quest through the digital abyss, the news seemed to coalesce in my mind with the myriad headlines of the day. The modern information onslaught indeed seems malleable to me, over time becoming little more than a monstrosity of factoids. How the whole has become less than the sum of its parts. Over tea and thought, however, my knowledge of the good professor's passing became quite real, substantive, and sobering. After all, Zinn remains among my biggest inspirations. As a student of history, he shattered the myth of objectivity with a forceful blow, displaying in a massive tome the hollow nature of facts; it is instead our perspectives, our manipulations, and our conclusions that smack of bias and are deeply flawed. While we all know the adage that ‘history books are written by the winners,' Zinn overwhelmed us with the sheer tragedy of this mantra, and exposed the ugly underbelly of our collective memory. As an American, he upheld the virtues of the Declaration of Independence, even if he admonished its author. He fought more tirelessly and earnestly than any populist politician for the dream of an all-inclusive society that ignored the boundaries of race, class and gender. His desire to learn the stories of how the other half lives was a true frontiersmanship that rivaled the boundless ambitions of Lewis and Clark. His commitment to dissent, whether in the domestic arenas of the Civil Rights and working class struggles, or the international imbroglios of Vietnam and Iraq, was an exercise of the first amendment in its purest form. And as a Jew, he revitalized the calling of the prophets. To be sure, he was far from a religious man. Yet I have always viewed Howard Zinn as one of the great Jewish thinkers. As it is, are Jews not products of their time, the very prisms by which to judge a society's character? The great Jewish figures - Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Maimonides, Herzl - are infused with the ethos of their people. The Judaic narrative, with its ardent focus on this world, with its victories and shortcomings, its qualities and blemishes, has altogether molded the Jewish contributions to philosophy, science, medicine, politics, and art. So it is with Howard Zinn. He may have been a 20th century secularist, but he embodied the spirit of Amos, Micah, and Isaiah with his fierce calls for social justice. True to the root of the word Israel, he struggled, refusing rest as the inequities of humankind haunted him. And true to the greatest of the Jewish works, the Torah, he invoked the message of Leviticus, thereafter repeated by the sages Hillel and Akiva: to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. http://www.jewcy.com/post/memory_howard_zinn_american_and_jew |
| Blogging in Palestine: http://kksjournal.com/ | |
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| kathyk | Jan 30 2010, 05:59 AM Post #29 |
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Pisa-Carp
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And a bio: Howard Zinn, the son of Jewish immigrants, was born in Brooklyn in 1922. After leaving school he worked in the local shipyards. In 1939 he attended a meeting organised by the American Communist Party. "Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people. I couldn't believe that. And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant... It was a very shocking lesson for me." A strong opponent of fascism Zinn joined the United States Air Force in 1943. During the Second World War Zinn flew missions throughout Europe. In April 1945, he was involved in the bombing of German soldiers based in Royan. "Twelve hundred heavy bombers, and I was in one of them, flew over this little town of Royan and dropped napalm - first use of napalm in the European theater. And we don’t know how many people were killed or how many people were terribly burned as a result of what we did." His war experiences turned him into a pacifist. After the war Zinn studied history and graduated from Columbia University with a PhD. In 1956, he became the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, an all-black women's school in Atlanta. Zinn made no attempt to hide his political views. One of his students, Alice Walker, remembers how in his first lecture he stated: “Well, I stand to the left of Mao Zedong.” As she pointed out: "It was such a moment, because the people couldn’t imagine anyone in Atlanta saying something like that, when at that time the Chinese and the Chinese Revolution just meant that, you know, people were on the planet who were just going straight ahead, a folk revolution. So he was saying he was to the left of that." While teaching at the college he joined the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and during the 1960s was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His political activities resulted in him losing his job at Spelman College. In 1963, Spelman fired him for "insubordination." Alice Walker argued: "He was thrown out because he loved us, and he showed that love by just being with us. He loved his students. He didn’t see why we should be second-class citizens. He didn’t see why we shouldn’t be able to eat where we wanted to and sleep where we wanted to and be with the people we wanted to be with. And so, he was with us. He didn’t stay back, you know, in his tower there at the school. And so, he was a subversive in that situation." According to the Los Angeles Times: "During the civil rights movement, Zinn encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. Zinn also published several articles, including a then-rare attack on the Kennedy administration for being too slow to protect blacks." In 1964 Zinn became Professor of History at Boston University. Soon afterwards he published his first book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964). Zinn was also one of the leaders of the Anti-Vietnam War protests during the presidencies of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon. In 1967 he published Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. The following year he travelled to North Vietnam with Father Daniel Berrigan. A People's History of the United States was published in 1980 with a first printing of 5,000. However, over the next twenty years it achieved sales of over a million copies. Traditional historians criticised the book but as Zinn pointed out: "There's no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete. My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times." Noam Chomsky has argued that the book had a tremendous impact on the public: "I can't think of anyone who had such a powerful and benign influence... His historical work changed the way millions of people saw the past." Other books by Zinn include: The Politics of History (1990), Declarations of Independence (1990), Zinn Reader (1997), Howard Zinn on History (2001), Zinn on War (2001), Terrorism and War (2002), Emma, a biography of Emma Goldman (2002), Disobedience and Democracy (2002), his autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2002), A Power Governments Cannot Suppress (2006), A Young People's History of the United States (2007) and The Unraveling of the Bush Presidency (2007). http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAzinn.htm |
| Blogging in Palestine: http://kksjournal.com/ | |
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| ivorythumper | Jan 30 2010, 10:59 AM Post #30 |
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
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I guess even atheists have their own hagiography. |
| The dogma lives loudly within me. | |
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| kathyk | Jan 30 2010, 03:33 PM Post #31 |
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Pisa-Carp
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I had to look that up. I would never have guessed the meaning from the root. Anyway, why wouldn't they? Atheistis can be some of the most doctrinaire people around. If they can't worship something divine, they more than anyone need heroes to worship. |
| Blogging in Palestine: http://kksjournal.com/ | |
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| ivorythumper | Jan 30 2010, 03:35 PM Post #32 |
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
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Oh you're right about that -- that's why its called idolatry. |
| The dogma lives loudly within me. | |
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| John D'Oh | Jan 30 2010, 05:24 PM Post #33 |
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MAMIL
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I have a little statue of Karl Marx in the half-shell in my back yard. |
| What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket? | |
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| kathyk | Jan 30 2010, 06:03 PM Post #34 |
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Pisa-Carp
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OMG, that needs a picture. I couldn't find Marx, but she looks like she might be a communist, I think.
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| Blogging in Palestine: http://kksjournal.com/ | |
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| Renauda | Jan 30 2010, 06:41 PM Post #35 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Goodness gracious, I have an alabaster bust of Beethoven and an antique bronze bust of Tchaikovsky. What does that make me? |
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| Mikhailoh | Jan 30 2010, 06:47 PM Post #36 |
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
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Well composed. |
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Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball | |
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| Larry | Jan 30 2010, 07:28 PM Post #37 |
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Mmmmmmm, pie!
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Kathy, it is nitwits like you that are f*cking up this country. The man was a Marxist. He stood AGAINST everything that made this country what it is, and hell, so do you. People like you make me sick. |
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Of the Pokatwat Tribe | |
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| Renauda | Jan 30 2010, 08:11 PM Post #38 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Actually the Tchaikovsky bust was well smuggled out of Russia in the early Yelstin era. Cost me a botttle of Finnish vodka and $10.00 US. I should post a picture of it here. |
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| George K | Jul 31 2010, 07:35 PM Post #39 |
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Finally
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Here you go, from the FBI, files released on a Saturday night: http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/zinn_howard.htm
It may well have been, but Zinn joined the Communist Party of the USA after 1939 - after the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, and after Stalin was firmly in power, beginning his atrocities. He was a member after the occupation of Eastern Europe. He was a member in 1948. There's way too much in the FOIA dump to quote here, but if you're interested, take a look here for an eye-opening revelation: http://theothermccain.com/2010/07/31/fbi-files-reveal-historian-howard-zinn-lied-to-hide-cpusa-membership/ ![]() Here are all the documents: http://foia.fbi.gov/zinn_howard/1142983_000s1.pdf Edited by George K, Jul 31 2010, 07:43 PM.
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A guide to GKSR: Click "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08 Nothing is as effective as homeopathy. I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles. - Klaus, 4/29/18 | |
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| John D'Oh | Jul 31 2010, 08:41 PM Post #40 |
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MAMIL
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There was 7 months well spent, GK! (Wasn't it bad enough that they dug up Bobby Fischer?) |
| What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket? | |
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5:02 PM Jul 10