His take on history arms youth with the courage to “transform the world.” It’s no wonder the right aims to erase it.
(Robert Shetterly)
Nothing says more about the fear of history on the part of right-wing elites than the fact that Donald Trump used a presidential address—delivered in the summer that saw tens of millions of Americans take to the streets to protest the police murder of George Floyd—to attack Howard Zinn.
Despite the fact that the protests against structural violence and racism had been largely peaceful, with masses of demonstrators asserting their right to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances, Trump used his September 2020 address at the National Archives Museum to go after the radical historian who told the real story of America.
“[The] left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long,” our endlessly divisive and mendacious president griped. “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.”
Trump’s attack on Zinn, however, revealed something that the president and his minions share with the historian they so decried: a fundamental belief that history written from the point of view of social movements holds the potential to empower the powerless. That’s why Zinn worked his entire life to popularize a fresh take on American history. And that’s why his critics aim to erase it. They have always feared, and they fear especially in this 250th year of “the American experiment,” something Zinn wrote about decades ago: “Our country is full of heroic people who are not Presidents or military leaders or Wall Street wizards, but who are doing something to keep alive the spirit of resistance to injustice and war. To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the unnoticed heroes of the present.”
Trump and his trembling allies oppose an honest telling of the American story because their algorithms and their propagandists aim to foster alienation and gloom—conditions that are essential to making a populace feel defeated. And that strategy won’t work if the vast majority of Americans recognize that they have a shared history of racial, social, and economic oppression by oligarchs, both old and new.
This explains why Trump’s regime is trying to ban books like Zinn’s best-selling classic A People’s History of the United States —even though it’s unlikely that Trump ever read the book, or bothered to learn anything about Zinn’s own life story before the historian’s death in 2010. One would be forgiven for wondering, especially given Trump’s stated belief that Frederick Douglass is “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more” and not an abolitionist who died in 1895.
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But while Trump may not know US history or understand basic civics, his instincts for demonization and division are unparalleled. This explains why, in the summer of 2020, as the Covid pandemic was killing thousands of people a day, the president had Zinn on the brain. His starting point was the mass demonstrations against police violence and in memory of George Floyd, the 46-year-old Black man who was murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. Trump wasn’t trying to end this type of brutality, calm racial tensions, or explain why such extreme discontent had spread across the country. Instead, he dismissed the protests as the illegitimate actions of young people who, he imagined, had been brainwashed by Zinn—employing the kind of conspiratorial, which-lie-do-you-correct-first speech that his base eats up with a spoon.
His outlandish claim that Zinn’s highly regarded and widely taught history books are mere “propaganda tracts” gave a stamp of approval and open encouragement to the broader, well-funded astroturfed moves by school boards and city councils to ban books that have inspired kids to ask questions and avoid blind obedience.
The irony here is that Trump’s cabal has decried the Zinns of the world for refusing to acknowledge the “progress America has made.” Yet it is Trump and his team who are currently unraveling everything progressive that has been accomplished since the 1890s, a time of communicable disease, child labor, economic crisis, racial terrorism, and profiteering oligarchs. Factor in that women were banned from the ballot box, and this bizarre longing for an awful past also seems like a vision board for an even worse future.
The right must keep burying Zinn, but not because A People’s History of the United States is an evil tome written with the devil’s pen. It’s because generations of students have found Zinn’s approach to history inviting and even exhilarating. In learning that their ancestors weren’t passive spectators to the American project, they become an active part of the…
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