It isn't "Our beloved Free Syria Army has actually advertised its own murders on YouTube"
Robert Fisk Independent/UK 27 August 2012
Every day, a new massacre is reported in Syria. Yesterday, it was Daraya. Slaughter by Syrian troops, according to those opposed to Bashar al-Assad. Slaughter by Bashar's "terrorist" opponents, the Syrian army said, producing the wife of a soldier whom they said had been shot and left for dead.
Of course, all armies want to stay clean. All that gold braid, all those battle honours. Thank God for Our Boys. Trouble is that when they go to war, armies ally themselves to the most unsavoury militias, gunmen, reservists, killers and mass murderers, often local vigilante groups who invariably contaminate the men in smart uniforms, until the generals have to re-invent themselves and their history.
Take the Syrian army. It kills civilians but claims to take every care to avoid "collateral damage". The Israelis say the same. The Brits say the same, the Americans and French. And of course, when an insurgent group – the Free Syrian Army or Salafists – set up positions in the cities and towns of Syria, government forces open fire on them, kill civilians, thousands of refugees cross the border and CNN reports – as it did on Friday night – that refugees cursed Bashar al-Assad as they fled their homes.
And I cannot forget how Al Jazeera, loathed by Bashar now as it was once hated by Saddam, came back from Basra in 2003 with terrifying footage of dead and wounded Iraqi women and children who had been shredded by British artillery firing at the Iraqi army. And we don't need to mention all those Afghan wedding parties and innocent tribal villages pulverised by US gunfire and jets and drones.
The Syrian military, whether it admits it or not - work with the shabiha (or "village defenders" as one soldier called them), who are a murderous, largely Alawite rabble who have slaughtered hundreds of Sunni civilians. Maybe the International Court in the Hague will one day name Syrian soldiers responsible for such crimes – be sure they won't touch the West's warriors – but it will be impossible for the Syrian army to write the shabiha out of the history of their war against the "terrorists”
The disconnect has already begun. Syrian troops are fighting at the request of their people to defend their country. The shabiha have nothing to do with them. And I have to say that the German Wehrmacht tried to play the same narrative game in 1944 and 1945 and then in post-war Europe. The disciplined lads of the Wehrmacht never indulged in war crimes or genocide against the Jews in Russia, Ukraine or the Baltic states or Poland or Yugoslavia. No, it was those damned SS criminals or the Ukrainian militia or the Lithuanian paramilitary police who besmirched the good name of Germany. Bulls***.
The Vichy French army tried to clean its claws by claiming that all atrocities were committed by the "Milice", while the Italians blamed it all on the Germans. The Americans used the vilest criminal gangs in Vietnam, the French used colonial troops to massacre insurgents in Algeria. The Brits tolerated the B Specials in Northern Ireland until they invented the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), which got contaminated by sectarian killings and was disbanded. No, the UDR was squeaky clean compared to the Germans. But at the height of their Iraqi occupation war, the Americans were paying Sunni "neighbourhood guards" to liquidate their Shia enemies, and paying thug-like reservists – along with quite a few professionals – to torture their prisoners in Abu Ghraib. And then there is Israel – forced to grovel when their own Lebanese Phalangist militia slaughtered 1,700 Palestinians in 1982.
Of course, war stains all who take part in it. Wellington's men in the Peninsula Wars could no more prevent their Spanish guerrilla allies committing atrocities than the Brits and Americans could prevent their Soviet allies raping five million German women in 1945. Didn't the Turkish army use its own version of the SS to help in the genocide of the Armenians in 1915? Keeping clean is a dirty business.
[Abridged]
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-syrian-army-would-like-to-appear
Tuesday, 28 August 2012
The South African Connection
By Ian Harris Otago Daily Times Aug. 24, 2012
In a remarkable turnaround, causes once viscerally hostile to each other joined forces to mark the centenary of the African National Congress in Wellington last weekend. The causes were the decades-long anti-apartheid campaign, supported by thousands of New Zealanders, and the South African sporting connection, championed by the New Zealand Rugby Union and supported by thousands of others. The occasion was a conference recalling New Zealand’s contribution to ending a brutal apartheid regime.
The parties are now at peace – and the NZRU contributed $1000 to conference costs. Rugby administrators also met a delegation representing those who were once at loggerheads with the rugby union. After all, the anti-tour movement is part of the union’s history, too. The delegation included a South African whose evidence, in a case brought by Philip Recordon, Patrick Finnigan and counsel Ted (now Sir Edmund) Thomas, helped scupper the All Black tour of South Africa in 1985.
He is Makhenkesi Arnold Stofile, a Presbyterian minister and Princeton graduate who, on returning to South Africa after the court injunction stopping the tour, was arrested on a trumped-up charge and sentenced to 11 years’ jail. He served three years before the changing political scene brought his release. His wife Nambita was also jailed. Though lawyers in New Zealand met the expenses of the case, the Stofiles bore by far the greater cost, and the conference gave them a standing ovation. In post-apartheid South Africa, Mr Stofile became premier of Eastern Cape, sports minister, and is currently ambassador to Germany.
Former All Blacks Bob Burgess and Graham Mourie and Olympic 5000m runner Anne Hare told why they refused to play sport on apartheid terms. Their reasons boiled down to morality and human decency – qualities unfortunately rather rare among their sporting contemporaries, administrators, fans and government politicians, whose focus was their own freedoms, not others’.
Halt All Racist Tours leader Trevor Richards and other protesters recalled high days and low days in their efforts to disrupt the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand. There was passion, courage, humour, doggedness, anger, creative energy, weariness and fear as thousands turned out week after week in protest. The campaign spanned trade unionists, church members, teachers, students, lawyers, diplomats, artists and other groups. In the process, New Zealanders were forced to face the reality of racist attitudes at home – and how ready certain politicians were to exploit those prejudices for their own ends. Defending the morally indefensible helped National to win the 1981 election.
Maori were as divided as everyone else over rugby contacts, but the trauma of the tour proved a turning-point. Its legacy is a heightened awareness of how far New Zealand had to go (and still has) to achieve full equality of opportunity, status and respect for Maori. Christian conviction played a major role in the campaign against apartheid, and attending the conference were two New Zealand churchmen whose contribution to freedom and equality in Southern Africa stands out. Anglican Bishop John Osmers has spent 47 years in the region, helping South African and other refugees and joining the ANC himself.
In 1979 South African security sent a parcel bomb that blew off his right hand – with an unintended consequence in the formation of an ANC church front. Expelled from Lesotho, he was nevertheless encouraged because the attack brought home to him the importance of the work he was doing. In Botswana, Bishop Osmers again became a target of South African security, who in 1988 sent a death squad to assassinate him. Tipped off, he hastily escaped to Zambia, where he continued to support ANC cadres and served as an ANC chaplain. “If the national military can have chaplains,” he says, “why can’t the liberation movements?”
The other churchman is Anglican monk Michael Lapsley, who went to South Africa in 1973, was expelled in 1976, and lost both arms and an eye in 1990 when he opened a letter bomb in Zimbabwe. Also an ANC chaplain during the liberation struggle, today he heads the Institute of Healing Memories in Cape Town.
On the eve of the Wellington conference, police shot dead 34 striking workers at a platinum mine near Johannesburg. Mr Stofile condemned the massacre, and the conference observed a minute’s silence for the victims.
Inevitably, the killings revived memories of similar incidents during the apartheid era. And there is a link – not overtly racial now, but in the continuing economic exploitation of South Africa’s people and resources by foreign companies. On the road to human dignity, there is still a long way to go.
In a remarkable turnaround, causes once viscerally hostile to each other joined forces to mark the centenary of the African National Congress in Wellington last weekend. The causes were the decades-long anti-apartheid campaign, supported by thousands of New Zealanders, and the South African sporting connection, championed by the New Zealand Rugby Union and supported by thousands of others. The occasion was a conference recalling New Zealand’s contribution to ending a brutal apartheid regime.
The parties are now at peace – and the NZRU contributed $1000 to conference costs. Rugby administrators also met a delegation representing those who were once at loggerheads with the rugby union. After all, the anti-tour movement is part of the union’s history, too. The delegation included a South African whose evidence, in a case brought by Philip Recordon, Patrick Finnigan and counsel Ted (now Sir Edmund) Thomas, helped scupper the All Black tour of South Africa in 1985.
He is Makhenkesi Arnold Stofile, a Presbyterian minister and Princeton graduate who, on returning to South Africa after the court injunction stopping the tour, was arrested on a trumped-up charge and sentenced to 11 years’ jail. He served three years before the changing political scene brought his release. His wife Nambita was also jailed. Though lawyers in New Zealand met the expenses of the case, the Stofiles bore by far the greater cost, and the conference gave them a standing ovation. In post-apartheid South Africa, Mr Stofile became premier of Eastern Cape, sports minister, and is currently ambassador to Germany.
Former All Blacks Bob Burgess and Graham Mourie and Olympic 5000m runner Anne Hare told why they refused to play sport on apartheid terms. Their reasons boiled down to morality and human decency – qualities unfortunately rather rare among their sporting contemporaries, administrators, fans and government politicians, whose focus was their own freedoms, not others’.
Halt All Racist Tours leader Trevor Richards and other protesters recalled high days and low days in their efforts to disrupt the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand. There was passion, courage, humour, doggedness, anger, creative energy, weariness and fear as thousands turned out week after week in protest. The campaign spanned trade unionists, church members, teachers, students, lawyers, diplomats, artists and other groups. In the process, New Zealanders were forced to face the reality of racist attitudes at home – and how ready certain politicians were to exploit those prejudices for their own ends. Defending the morally indefensible helped National to win the 1981 election.
Maori were as divided as everyone else over rugby contacts, but the trauma of the tour proved a turning-point. Its legacy is a heightened awareness of how far New Zealand had to go (and still has) to achieve full equality of opportunity, status and respect for Maori. Christian conviction played a major role in the campaign against apartheid, and attending the conference were two New Zealand churchmen whose contribution to freedom and equality in Southern Africa stands out. Anglican Bishop John Osmers has spent 47 years in the region, helping South African and other refugees and joining the ANC himself.
In 1979 South African security sent a parcel bomb that blew off his right hand – with an unintended consequence in the formation of an ANC church front. Expelled from Lesotho, he was nevertheless encouraged because the attack brought home to him the importance of the work he was doing. In Botswana, Bishop Osmers again became a target of South African security, who in 1988 sent a death squad to assassinate him. Tipped off, he hastily escaped to Zambia, where he continued to support ANC cadres and served as an ANC chaplain. “If the national military can have chaplains,” he says, “why can’t the liberation movements?”
The other churchman is Anglican monk Michael Lapsley, who went to South Africa in 1973, was expelled in 1976, and lost both arms and an eye in 1990 when he opened a letter bomb in Zimbabwe. Also an ANC chaplain during the liberation struggle, today he heads the Institute of Healing Memories in Cape Town.
On the eve of the Wellington conference, police shot dead 34 striking workers at a platinum mine near Johannesburg. Mr Stofile condemned the massacre, and the conference observed a minute’s silence for the victims.
Inevitably, the killings revived memories of similar incidents during the apartheid era. And there is a link – not overtly racial now, but in the continuing economic exploitation of South Africa’s people and resources by foreign companies. On the road to human dignity, there is still a long way to go.
Friday, 24 August 2012
Paul Ryan: Galt, Gold and God
by Paul Krugman New York Times August 24, 2012
So far, most of the discussion of Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee for vice president, has focused on his budget proposals. But Mr. Ryan is a man of many ideas. Most of those ideas appear to come from Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged, a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page speech by John Galt, the angry elite’s ringleader. Yet the book is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it. Some, however, remain devotees for life. And Mr. Ryan is one of those devotees.
True, in recent years, he has tried to downplay his Randism.. It’s not hard to see why: Rand’s fervent atheism — not to mention her declaration that “abortion is a moral right” — isn’t what the G.O.P. base wants to hear. But Mr. Ryan is being disingenuous. In 2005, he told the Atlas Society, which is devoted to promoting Rand’s ideas, that she inspired his political career: “If I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” He also declared that Rand’s work was required reading for his staff and interns.
And the Ryan fiscal program clearly reflects Randian notions. As I documented in my last column, Mr. Ryan’s reputation for being serious about the budget deficit is completely undeserved; his policies would actually increase the deficit. But he is deadly serious about cutting taxes on the rich and slashing aid to the poor, very much in line with Rand’s worship of the successful and contempt for “moochers.”
This last point is important. In pushing for draconian cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other programs that aid the needy, Mr. Ryan isn’t just looking for ways to save money. He’s also, quite explicitly, trying to make life harder for the poor — for their own good. In March, explaining his cuts in aid for the unfortunate, he declared, “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”
Somehow, I doubt that Americans forced to rely on unemployment benefits and food stamps in a depressed economy feel that they’re living in a comfortable hammock. But wait, there’s more: “Atlas Shrugged” apparently shaped Mr. Ryan’s views on monetary policy, views that he clings to despite having been repeatedly, completely wrong in his predictions. But Mr. Ryan seems undaunted in his monetary views. Why?
Well, it’s right there in that 2005 speech to the Atlas Society, in which he declared that he always goes back to “Francisco d’Anconia’s speech on money” when thinking about monetary policy. Who? Never mind. That speech (which clocks in at a mere 23 paragraphs) is a case of hard-money obsession gone ballistic. Not only does the character in question, a Galt sidekick, call for a return to the gold standard, he denounces the notion of paper money and demands a return to gold coins.
For the record, the U.S. currency supply has consisted overwhelmingly of paper money, not gold and silver coins, since the early 1800s. So if Mr. Ryan really thinks that Francisco d’Anconia had it right, he wants to turn the clock back not one but two centuries. Does any of this matter? Well, if the Republican ticket wins, Mr. Ryan will surely be an influential force in the next administration — and bear in mind, too, that he would, as the cliché goes, be a heartbeat away from the presidency. So it should worry us that Mr. Ryan holds monetary views that would, if put into practice, go a long way toward recreating the Great Depression.
And, beyond that, consider the fact that Mr. Ryan is considered the modern G.O.P.’s big thinker. What does it say about the party when its intellectual leader evidently gets his ideas largely from deeply unrealistic fantasy novels?
© 2012 New York Times http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/24-2 {Abbrev.]
Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Why the US is out to get Julian Assange
Seumas Milne Guardian/UK 21 August 2012
Considering he made his name with the biggest leak of secret government documents in history, you might imagine there would be some concern for Julian Assange among those trading in the freedom of information business. But the virulence of British media hostility towards the WikiLeaks founder is now unrelenting. The ostensible reason for this venom is Assange's attempt to resist extradition to Sweden (and onward extradition to the US) over sexual assault allegations. But as the row over his embassy refuge has escalated into a major diplomatic stand-off, with the whole of South America piling in behind Ecuador, such posturing looks increasingly specious.
Can anyone seriously believe the dispute would have gone global, or that the British government would have made its asinine threat to suspend the Ecuadorean embassy's diplomatic status and enter it by force, or that scores of police would have surrounded the building, swarming up and down the fire escape and guarding every window, if it was all about one man wanted for questioning over sex crime allegations in Stockholm?
To get a grip on what is actually going on, rewind to WikiLeaks' explosive release of secret US military reports and thousands of diplomatic cables two years ago. They disgorged devastating evidence of US war crimes and collusion with death squads in Iraq on an industrial scale, the machinations and lies of America's wars and allies, its illegal US spying on UN officials – as well as a compendium of official corruption and deceit across the world.
WikiLeaks provided fuel for the Arab uprisings. It didn't just deliver information for citizens to hold governments everywhere to account, but crucially opened up the exercise of US global power to democratic scrutiny. Not surprisingly, the US government made clear it regarded WikiLeaks as a serious threat to its interests from the start. Vice-president Joe Biden has compared Assange to a "hi-tech terrorist". Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old soldier accused of passing the largest trove of US documents to WikiLeaks, who has been held in conditions described as "cruel and inhuman" by the UN special rapporteur on torture, faces up to 52 years in prison.
The US interest in deterring others from following the WikiLeaks path is obvious. And it would be bizarre to expect a state which over the past decade has kidnapped, tortured and illegally incarcerated its enemies, real or imagined, on a global scale – and continues to do so under President Barack Obama – to walk away from what Hillary Clinton described as an "attack on the international community". In the meantime, the US authorities are presumably banking on seeing Assange further discredited in Sweden.
None of that should detract from the seriousness of the rape allegations made against Assange, for which he should clearly answer and, if charges are brought, stand trial. The question is how to achieve justice for the women involved while protecting Assange (and other whistleblowers) from punitive extradition to a legal system that could potentially land him in a US prison cell for decades.
The politicisation of the Swedish case was clear from the leak of the allegations to the prosecutor's decision to seek Assange's extradition for questioning – described by a former Stockholm prosecutor as “unreasonable, unfair and disproportionate" – when the authorities have been happy to interview suspects abroad in more serious cases.
Why, Assange's critics charge, would he be more likely to be extradited to the US from Sweden than from Britain, Washington's patsy, notorious for its one-sided extradition arrangements. There are specific risks in Sweden – for example, its fast-track "temporary surrender" extradition agreement it has with the US. But the real point is that Assange is in danger of extradition in both countries – which is why Ecuador was right to offer him protection.
The solution is obvious. It's the one that Ecuador is proposing – and that London and Stockholm are resisting. If the Swedish government pledged to block the extradition of Assange to the US for any WikiLeaks-related offence (which it has the power to do) – and Britain agreed not to sanction extradition to a third country once Swedish proceedings are over – then justice could be served. But with loyalty to the US on the line, Assange shouldn't expect to leave the embassy any time soon. [Abridged]
Twitter: @SeumasMilne
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/21/why-us-is-out-to-get-assange
Considering he made his name with the biggest leak of secret government documents in history, you might imagine there would be some concern for Julian Assange among those trading in the freedom of information business. But the virulence of British media hostility towards the WikiLeaks founder is now unrelenting. The ostensible reason for this venom is Assange's attempt to resist extradition to Sweden (and onward extradition to the US) over sexual assault allegations. But as the row over his embassy refuge has escalated into a major diplomatic stand-off, with the whole of South America piling in behind Ecuador, such posturing looks increasingly specious.
Can anyone seriously believe the dispute would have gone global, or that the British government would have made its asinine threat to suspend the Ecuadorean embassy's diplomatic status and enter it by force, or that scores of police would have surrounded the building, swarming up and down the fire escape and guarding every window, if it was all about one man wanted for questioning over sex crime allegations in Stockholm?
To get a grip on what is actually going on, rewind to WikiLeaks' explosive release of secret US military reports and thousands of diplomatic cables two years ago. They disgorged devastating evidence of US war crimes and collusion with death squads in Iraq on an industrial scale, the machinations and lies of America's wars and allies, its illegal US spying on UN officials – as well as a compendium of official corruption and deceit across the world.
WikiLeaks provided fuel for the Arab uprisings. It didn't just deliver information for citizens to hold governments everywhere to account, but crucially opened up the exercise of US global power to democratic scrutiny. Not surprisingly, the US government made clear it regarded WikiLeaks as a serious threat to its interests from the start. Vice-president Joe Biden has compared Assange to a "hi-tech terrorist". Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old soldier accused of passing the largest trove of US documents to WikiLeaks, who has been held in conditions described as "cruel and inhuman" by the UN special rapporteur on torture, faces up to 52 years in prison.
The US interest in deterring others from following the WikiLeaks path is obvious. And it would be bizarre to expect a state which over the past decade has kidnapped, tortured and illegally incarcerated its enemies, real or imagined, on a global scale – and continues to do so under President Barack Obama – to walk away from what Hillary Clinton described as an "attack on the international community". In the meantime, the US authorities are presumably banking on seeing Assange further discredited in Sweden.
None of that should detract from the seriousness of the rape allegations made against Assange, for which he should clearly answer and, if charges are brought, stand trial. The question is how to achieve justice for the women involved while protecting Assange (and other whistleblowers) from punitive extradition to a legal system that could potentially land him in a US prison cell for decades.
The politicisation of the Swedish case was clear from the leak of the allegations to the prosecutor's decision to seek Assange's extradition for questioning – described by a former Stockholm prosecutor as “unreasonable, unfair and disproportionate" – when the authorities have been happy to interview suspects abroad in more serious cases.
Why, Assange's critics charge, would he be more likely to be extradited to the US from Sweden than from Britain, Washington's patsy, notorious for its one-sided extradition arrangements. There are specific risks in Sweden – for example, its fast-track "temporary surrender" extradition agreement it has with the US. But the real point is that Assange is in danger of extradition in both countries – which is why Ecuador was right to offer him protection.
The solution is obvious. It's the one that Ecuador is proposing – and that London and Stockholm are resisting. If the Swedish government pledged to block the extradition of Assange to the US for any WikiLeaks-related offence (which it has the power to do) – and Britain agreed not to sanction extradition to a third country once Swedish proceedings are over – then justice could be served. But with loyalty to the US on the line, Assange shouldn't expect to leave the embassy any time soon. [Abridged]
Twitter: @SeumasMilne
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/21/why-us-is-out-to-get-assange
Howard Zinn at 90
by Bill Bigelow Common Dreams August 23, 2012
This Friday -- August 24 -- would have been the 90th birthday of the great historian and activist Howard Zinn, who died in 2010. Zinn did not merely record history, he made it: as a professor at Spelman College in the 1950s and early 1960s, where he was ultimately fired for his outspoken support of students in the Civil Rights Movement, and specifically the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); as a critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and author of the first book calling for an immediate U.S. withdrawal; and as author of arguably the most influential U.S. history textbook in print, A People's History of the United States.
Zinn reminded teachers that the point of learning about social studies was not simply to memorize facts, it was to imbue students with a desire to change the world. "A modest little aim," Zinn acknowledged. Zinn insisted that teachers must help students challenge "fundamental premises which keep us inside a certain box." Because without this critical rethinking of premises about history and the role of the U S in the world, "things will never change." And this will remain "a world of war and hunger and disease and inequality and racism and sexism."
Zinn points out that the "one big family" myth begins with the Constitution's preamble: "We the people of the United States..." Zinn noted that it wasn't "we the people" who established the Constitution -- it was 55 rich white men. Glossed over in the traditional textbook are race and class divisions, including the rebellions of farmers in 1787. Zinn argues that it "established the rule of slaveholders, and merchants, and bondholders."
Teaching history through the lens of class, race, and gender conflict is not simply more accurate, according to Zinn; it makes it more likely that students -- and all the rest of us -- will not "simply swallow these enveloping phrases like 'the national interest,' 'national security,' 'national defense,' as if we're all in the same boat." No, the soldier who is sent to Iraq does not have the same interests as the president who sends him to Iraq. The person who works on the assembly line at General Motors does not have the same interest as the CEO of General Motors. No -- we're a country of divided interests, and it's important for people to know that."
Another premise -- the idea that the United States is fundamentally freer, more virtuous, more democratic, and more humane than other countries. For Zinn, the United States is "an empire like other empires. There was a British empire, a Dutch empire, and a Spanish empire, and yes, we are an American empire." The United States expanded through deceit and theft and conquest, just like other empires.
Patriotism is another premise that we need to question. And going to war on behalf of "our country" is offered as the highest expression of patriotism. Howard Zinn cuts through this curricular fog: "War is terrorism ... Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause. Zinn urged educators to teach a people's history: "We've never had our injustices rectified from the top. No. The important changes that we've had in history, have not come from government. They have reacted to social movements."
Thus when we single out people in our curriculum as icons, as "people to admire and respect," Zinn advocated shedding the traditional pantheon of government and military leaders: "But there are other heroes that young people can look up to. And they can look up to people who are against war. They can have Mark Twain as a hero who spoke out against the Philippines war. They can have Helen Keller as a hero who spoke out against World War I, and Emma Goldman as a hero. They can have Fannie Lou Hamer as a hero, and Bob Moses as a hero, the people in the Civil Rights Movement -- they are heroes."
One final "people's history" premise we need to remember -- "People change." Zinn did not look to President Obama to initiate social transformation; but in 2008, he saw the election as confirmation that the long history of anti-racist struggle in the United States produced an outcome that would have been inconceivable 30 years prior. And this shift in attitude should give us hope. Ordinary people can change the world.
Bill Bigelow is curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine
This Friday -- August 24 -- would have been the 90th birthday of the great historian and activist Howard Zinn, who died in 2010. Zinn did not merely record history, he made it: as a professor at Spelman College in the 1950s and early 1960s, where he was ultimately fired for his outspoken support of students in the Civil Rights Movement, and specifically the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); as a critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and author of the first book calling for an immediate U.S. withdrawal; and as author of arguably the most influential U.S. history textbook in print, A People's History of the United States.
Zinn reminded teachers that the point of learning about social studies was not simply to memorize facts, it was to imbue students with a desire to change the world. "A modest little aim," Zinn acknowledged. Zinn insisted that teachers must help students challenge "fundamental premises which keep us inside a certain box." Because without this critical rethinking of premises about history and the role of the U S in the world, "things will never change." And this will remain "a world of war and hunger and disease and inequality and racism and sexism."
Zinn points out that the "one big family" myth begins with the Constitution's preamble: "We the people of the United States..." Zinn noted that it wasn't "we the people" who established the Constitution -- it was 55 rich white men. Glossed over in the traditional textbook are race and class divisions, including the rebellions of farmers in 1787. Zinn argues that it "established the rule of slaveholders, and merchants, and bondholders."
Teaching history through the lens of class, race, and gender conflict is not simply more accurate, according to Zinn; it makes it more likely that students -- and all the rest of us -- will not "simply swallow these enveloping phrases like 'the national interest,' 'national security,' 'national defense,' as if we're all in the same boat." No, the soldier who is sent to Iraq does not have the same interests as the president who sends him to Iraq. The person who works on the assembly line at General Motors does not have the same interest as the CEO of General Motors. No -- we're a country of divided interests, and it's important for people to know that."
Another premise -- the idea that the United States is fundamentally freer, more virtuous, more democratic, and more humane than other countries. For Zinn, the United States is "an empire like other empires. There was a British empire, a Dutch empire, and a Spanish empire, and yes, we are an American empire." The United States expanded through deceit and theft and conquest, just like other empires.
Patriotism is another premise that we need to question. And going to war on behalf of "our country" is offered as the highest expression of patriotism. Howard Zinn cuts through this curricular fog: "War is terrorism ... Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause. Zinn urged educators to teach a people's history: "We've never had our injustices rectified from the top. No. The important changes that we've had in history, have not come from government. They have reacted to social movements."
Thus when we single out people in our curriculum as icons, as "people to admire and respect," Zinn advocated shedding the traditional pantheon of government and military leaders: "But there are other heroes that young people can look up to. And they can look up to people who are against war. They can have Mark Twain as a hero who spoke out against the Philippines war. They can have Helen Keller as a hero who spoke out against World War I, and Emma Goldman as a hero. They can have Fannie Lou Hamer as a hero, and Bob Moses as a hero, the people in the Civil Rights Movement -- they are heroes."
One final "people's history" premise we need to remember -- "People change." Zinn did not look to President Obama to initiate social transformation; but in 2008, he saw the election as confirmation that the long history of anti-racist struggle in the United States produced an outcome that would have been inconceivable 30 years prior. And this shift in attitude should give us hope. Ordinary people can change the world.
Bill Bigelow is curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine
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