Howard Zinn and history

I didn’t have anything to say about Howard Zinn because I’ve always been taught not to speak ill of the dead. But I don’t think there’s any stricture against speaking ill of the dead’s life work, is there? Luckily, Michael Moynihan is on the case:

Just how poor is Zinn’s history? After hearing of his death, I opened one of his books to a random page (Failure to Quit, p. 118) and was informed that there was “no evidence” that Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of La Belle Discotheque in Berlin. Whatever one thinks of the Reagan administration’s response, it is flat wrong, bordering on dishonest, to argue that the plot wasn’t masterminded in Tripoli. Nor is it correct to write that the American government, which funded the Afghan mujahadeen in the 1980s, “train[ed] Osama bin Laden,” a myth conclusively debunked by Washington Post correspondent Steve Coll in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars.

Of Cuba, the reader of A People’s History is told that upon taking power, “Castro moved to set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants.” Castro’s vast network of gulags and the spasm of “revolutionary justice” that sent thousands to prison or the executioners wall is left unmentioned. This is unsurprising, I suppose, when one considers that Zinn recently told an interviewer “you have to admire Cuba for being undaunted by this colossus of the North and holding fast to its ideals and to Socialism….Cuba is one of those places in the world where we can see hope for the future. With its very meager resources Cuba gives free health care and free education to everybody. Cuba supports culture, supports dance and music and theatre.”

I remember reading A People’s History in AP U.S. History all those years ago…and even then, at the tender age of 17, I could smell the BS wafting off of Zinn’s prose. In his view, American history has been one long, uninterrupted tale of genocide and oppression. I’ve always found it at least a little amazing that someone who grew up in the freest, most prosperous, most technologically advanced nation on the planet could hate it so much.