Howard Zinn on History and Howard Zinn on War
by Howard Zinn
Seven Stories

It's difficult to come away from reading Howard Zinn without feeling like doing something drastically noble in the name of social justice. Just being aware of his background is enough — the author of the revisionist classic "People's History of the United States," for years Zinn has risked his professional standing as a professor to speak out about labor disputes, militarism and social policy. He has been a staple of the academic Left since the civil rights movement, but while his colleagues have drifted toward apathy and conservatism, he has remained stalwart.

Zinn, a professor emeritus of history at Boston University, is a public academic in an era when most intellectuals, even the supposedly progressive ones, have retreated to the ivory tower. His is the rare voice that combines intellectual rigor with a passion for social change, and in his best essays he shows how the study of history and arcane foreign policy reveals truths that can guide progressive action.

Zinn's writing, in both his academic histories and his frequent columns in the progressive press, is simple, direct and full of passion. Seven Stories, publisher of Project Censored and other left-leaning titles, has put together a twin set of Zinn's shorter political writings, "Howard Zinn on History" and "Howard Zinn on War."

The collections come at a time when the New New Left, entrenched in its opposition to globalization, has been hampered by its inability to articulate a consistent, well-expressed set of principles. The movement is literally all over the map, and its members float in and out, many lacking a sense of real commitment. Zinn's collected writings, then, should be required reading for anyone thinking of shipping out to protest the next international trade gathering. Though many of the essays were written over a quarter of a century ago, they nevertheless ring true in a time when the enormous wheels of state and corporate power are confronted by the revolutionary potential of youth.

The centerpiece of "On History," "The New Radicalism," was written in 1969, and yet is all the more relevant in the fluid and unstable world of contemporary social politics. Zinn uncannily predicts a world of multiple social interest groups and non-governmental organizations, and calls for a strategy of the multitudes:

The New Left, hopefully, will recognize that the state cannot be trusted ... It will therefore create constellations of human action, to resist its inhumane actions, and to replace it in many functions by voluntary small groups seeking to maintain both individuality and cooperation.

The key idea for Zinn is action — the New Left of the 1960s foundered because it turned on itself, producing countless splinter groups afraid to take action for fear of enunciating a flawed ideology. The Left — both then and today, he argues — can only be effective by keeping things simple, by studying the details of globalization, boiling it down to its most essential elements, and then choosing an appropriate oppositional strategy.

In contrast, "The Bombing of Royan" (in "On War") is a case study of history as a guide for the present. Zinn meticulously examines the unnecessary aerial bombing of a French town during World War II in order to point out how bureaucracy becomes self-motivating and can lead to otherwise avoidable tragedies:

One can see in the destruction of Royan that infinite chain of causes, that infinite dispersion of responsibility, which can give infinite work to historical scholarship and sociological speculation, and bring and infinitely pleasurable paralysis of the will.

Though published in "On War," "The Bombing of Royan" is really a critique of the historical profession. Historians will always be able to find ways to blame this or that general, but academic finger pointing obscures the tragic loss of life war brings, and misrepresents what history is about. It is not about facts and figures, or about motives and narratives as ends in themselves, but rather about learning from the past so as to work toward a better future.

In the flurry of "publish or perish" academia, which seems to value density and obscurity over clarity and courage to speak out, it is heartening to find someone like Zinn, still willing to use his intellectual standing to agitate for change. We can only hope that Zinn's work is not in vain, and that books like "On History" and "On War" will motivate a new generation of scholars to follow in his image.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)