No surprise that the FBI was meddling in the life of Howard Zinn, historian, activist, and outspoken critic of US domestic and foreign policy. Raw Story has published some excerpts (including links to the PDF copies) as it combs through the 243 page document. The FBI maintained an interest in Zinn from the late 1940s to the 1970s, and put some effort into getting him fired from Boston University:
In a document from the Boston FBI office (see PDF file here), an FBI "source," whose name was redacted from the publicly released documents, was quoted as being outraged over Zinn's comment at a protest that the US had become a "police state" and that prosecutions of Black Panther Party members were creating "political prisoners."
According to the source, Zinn stated that (I'm now quoting from the original documents (pages 69-70 of the PDF):
"Police in every nation are a blight and the United States is no exception."
The file continues:
Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [name redacted] with public source data regarding Zinn's numerous anti-war activities, including his trip to Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [redacted] efforts for his removal.
The document quoted was dated 4/17/70, after Zinn received tenure at BU (on this process, see You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, pp. 183-185). As we know in retrospect, Mr. Redactedfailed. Yet another good reason to keep tenure...no matter what Mark C. Taylor says (that's actually a link to one of Taylor's critics, and a sharp one at that).
Not a bad week here at the Notes Taken, as Devin had a chance to satirize the Texas State Board of Education for its decision making process and the shoddy research skills of Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Matt had a chance to post our first 'reading' of a movie, which concerned Lars von Trier's The Antichrist.
We also had a chance to catch up with what is going on elsewhere on the net:
1. A friend of mine brought, through a very indirect way, a recent statement by the president of the MLA about dissertation monographs, in which she questions whether or not its current 'book-form' is outdated in a rapidly changing world. I don't want to sound cynical but inspirational passages such as "Future faculty ... will require flexible and improvisational habits and collaborative skills to bring their scholarship to fruition" doesn't make me think of new technologies and research skills; it makes me think of non-tenure track employment.
2. It seemed inevitable after J.D. Salinger's death that his letters would start turning up. This week his correspondence with E. Michael Mitchell, who designed the cover of Catcher in the Rye, has been made public. It also seemed inevitable that some wannabe would claim a correspondence that could not be produced (see here or here). That would be Taki Theodoracopulos, who said he exchanged hundreds of letter with Salinger, in which the recently deceased declared his hatred for Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and VS Naipaul. Reading the "excerpts" that Theodoracopulos produced on his site, should make it pretty obvious that it's a hoax.
3. Then, to return to topics related to the recently deceased, it appears that National Public Radio's obituary on Howard Zinn included rousing tributes from Noam Chomsky, Julian Bond and....wait for it...David Horowitz? I can understand the first two, friends and fellow travelers of Zinn's but so far as I can tell, the only reason that Horowitz was on the show was to 'balance' the reporting by contrasting the first two with a dissenting opinion. Here's some of Horowitz's comments that didn't make the cut (so, in case you are wondering, it is reproduced on his website; don't worry, that link right there is to Alternet, not Horowitz's site):
According to the account he published on his Web site, he told Keyes that Zinn was responsible for "helping Stalin" to "slaughter" and "enslave" Eastern Europe; that he "never flagged in his political commitment to freedom's enemies"; and that he "supported every enemy of the United States in every war...including the Islamic Nazis whose first agenda is to finish the job that Hitler started."
Those remarks didn't make the cut because, of course, they are beyond ridiculous. Here's what made the show:
"There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect," he explained. "Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse."
N.P.R was rightly scolded for including this garbage. Not only is Horowitz a charlatan, but as far as I can tell his only expertise is self-aggrandizement at the cost of others. Here, it's no different, but it's a well paying shtick. Unfortunately.
4. We can't end on that note. If you've made it this far, you might as well watch this debate, from 1969, between Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley (this is part one, I'm sure you can find part two).
A People's History of the United States is probably the most important history book I have read. It was required reading for a course taught by a professor named Al Smith that I took at Modesto Junior College in the late 1990s. American history, but for this kind of American history we read Zinn and Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror, which was to compliment Zinn's history from below with a history of the relationship between immigration and how we think of the people who make up the United States. So whole class on history with no great men ('It's not made by great men,' I would later hear in one of Gang of Four's funkier and punchier tunes...).
Zinn took history and stood it on its feet. Chronicles of war and great deeds become a constant series of attempts to oppress or calm the fires of social struggle, but the guiding thread is the resilience of people acting from the basic conviction that their rights and their justice won't be realized because these things have been written down on a few dusty documents. They have to be fought for. Zinn was right their in midst of it: like Vonnegut, he learned the right lessons from war's injustices, at Spellman he was radicalized by the growing civil rights struggle at the cost of his job, and then wrote on of the earliest books critical of the Vietnam War, VietNam: The Logic of Withdrawal, published in 1967; A People's History of the United States followed in 1980. He stayed involved, kept writing, kept pissing off other people in his profession and academia for a refusal to be a specialist and to keep to a small academic niche. Some of this is documented in You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Even up to a few weeks ago, he wrote of Obama,
I thought that in the area of constitutional rights he would be better than he has been. That's the greatest disappointment, because Obama went to Harvard Law School and is presumably dedicated to constitutional rights. But he becomes president, and he's not making any significant step away from Bush policies. Sure, he keeps talking about closing Guantánamo, but he still treats the prisoners there as "suspected terrorists." They have not been tried and have not been found guilty. So when Obama proposes taking people out of Guantánamo and putting them into other prisons, he's not advancing the cause of constitutional rights very far. And then he's gone into court arguing for preventive detention, and he's continued the policy of sending suspects to countries where they very well may be tortured.
I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president--which means, in our time, a dangerous president--unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.
It's in the second paragraph there: Zinn's saying 'presidents are not much. Kennedy dragged his feet with civil rights, Obama's going to do the same without a movement to push him, because a movement makes history.' Not these teabag jokers but a movement.
A few years ago in Toledo, Ohio, I met Zinn's friend, and scholar and activist in his own right, Staughton Lynd. At an informal discussion he brought up Howard, and I said that his book was probably one of the most influential on the way I thought about history. Staughton smiled, paused, and turned to everybody else to drive home his point: "Do you see?" he said (I apologize but this isn't verbatim), "They won't give him the time of day in academia, and everywhere we go people are reading A People's History, and it changes their lives." A bit in jest; it's not like Zinn was blacklisted. By this time he had already retired. But Staughton's point is that we pay for our convictions. We can write the chronicles of great men, or the histories of people as they demand to be heard, as they demand, and sometimes win, justice. When you don't take the well-worn road to academic comfort and ideological conformity, the other road's going to be difficult. As I'm sure we all know, it's a worthwhile trade off. But at least for us, still young, angry, and able, Howard Zinn walked it first.
In a document from the Boston FBI office (see PDF file here), an FBI "source," whose name was redacted from the publicly released documents, was quoted as being outraged over Zinn's comment at a protest that the US had become a "police state" and that prosecutions of Black Panther Party members were creating "political prisoners."
