Zinn & his disciples

[Charles F Abel]

Ideology rampant; "they do not know it, but they are doing it".

C. F. Abel
Department of Government
Stephen F. Austin State University
Editor-in-Chief, Administrative Theory and Praxis

“The harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language-game.”
--Witttgenstein


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of John Bailey
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2014 5:56 AM
To: alice malice
Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Zinn & his disciples

Read Candide.

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 10:42 PM, 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.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l