Zinn & his disciples
Mark Kohut
mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Dec 11 07:00:26 CST 2014
I see another admittedly strained extension of the great Iceland Spar metaphor. Or the tragic comic masks.
Sent from my iPad
> On Dec 11, 2014, at 5:42 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I love Zinn for writing about the people who built America, but I
> dislike his simple minded approach to debunking the orthodox history
> that, he and his disciples, and so many others ... stuff into the
> strawman. The problem, Zinn argues, is not history but who tells it
> and how. Of course, Zinn has an excellent point: how we tell stories
> and who tells them to whom is an excellent point to focus on, as any
> high school history student knows.
>
> They also know that you can't do anything about history. It's history.
>
> But you can teach people history, and, though I don't think history
> ever repeats itself, it does, sometimes, as someone said, echo, and
> so, by teaching it we might make things a bit better in the future,
> and we might even solve some big problems.
>
> I like to think the Beatles had it right when they said things are
> getting better all the time. And they are. Zinn's history is too often
> focused on how things are getting worse because of who has been
> telling us a pack of lies.
>
> The truth is, this kind of conspiracy theory approach to history, not
> muckraking or truth finding, but radical debunking all the lies our
> history teaches told us, assumes that we've been lied to all our lives
> and, stupid people that we are, we believed the lies.
>
> First off, this is not 1955. This is not because Zinn awakened us,
> but, as Zinn shows us in his history of people, because countless
> others made and wrote and spoke history that countered the American
> propaganda books and broadcasts, and because we are not stupid people
> who suck in the slime from the TV set and salute the flag. Though we
> have our moments of hysteria and jingoism, and even decades of
> retrograde (Nixon to Reagan revolution plus Bush Clinton and the black
> president ...etc.), we won't be fooled again. So Zinn is history. And
> knocking Fox news or these other idiots in the "press" is a waste of
> time. Unless of course, you really believe that we are still a nation
> of slime sucking idiots.
>
> The shining light on the hill is capitalism. America is the Empire.
> You live in it. I don't love capital anymore than the next poor
> person, but you can't fight the Fed, or a coordination of central
> banks or the maniacs who run nation states. That's over.
>
> Buy oil stocks. They are cheap now. Growth will never increase enough
> to improve your welfare. You must own assets. Hate it, but don't be a
> fool. Hell, you've read Zinn. So even if you were a fool in 1955, you
> been educated now.
> -
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