America's Blinders by Howard Zinn

[kach22i]

It's a long one, but a good read....................debate if you wish.

Part-1

America's Blinders
by Howard Zinn

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen—rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq.
A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

Everyone lied about Vietnam—Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991—hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq’s taking of
Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil?

A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was “we the people” who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that—not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor—is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

[kach22i]

Part-2

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there—the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances”—do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The deeply ingrained belief—no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general—that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance” (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”

And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” announcing that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is also the unofficial national anthem “God Bless America,” and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation—just 5 percent of the world’s population—for his or her blessing.
If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.
It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this “the American century,” saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was “the calling of our time.” Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: “The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities.”

What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison—more than two million.

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

[TheMentat]

Interesting read...

He makes alot of valid points and thought-provoking observations. But unfortunately he also makes a few questionable assertations that will lead many on this board to dismiss it in its entirety

[Rodeo]

Well, he overstates his case, pretty significantly for my taste, but overlooking Zinn's radical conclusions, that is one thoughtful and powerful piece of writing.

We are taught to believe that patriotism means condemning those that speak frankly about America's faults, and fault lines. I think just the opposite. Zinn brings up some extremely valid points, about our past sins and about our current flawed presumptions regarding America.

In my view, he hits the nail on the head comparing George Bush's interests to some kid that will die in Iraq tomorrow. It's a valid contrast, yet we all automatically lump the two together as though they are the same.

They are not. That's why neither Bush nor Cheney went to war, and why virtually no political leaders have children in harm's way in Iraq.

Very thought provoking. Thanks for sharing it.

[jkarolyi]

This revisionist history article sounds like it was written by Al Zarqawi. Is there one positive thing about the US said in this biased rant? Yeah...we're the destroyers of all that's good in the world, our presidents are all liars (notice how he conveniently skipped FDR and WWII), and the USA should kneel down before the world begging for forgiveness.

I don't mind a balanced discussion of mistakes we've made in the past, but this is anti-American, anti-war BS.

[Rodeo]

Um, I think the point of the piece was to discuss America's faults, not a rally around the flag.

Anyway, your response is typical jingoistic bullcrap. Stay the course.

[TheMentat]

Originally posted by jkarolyi
our presidents are all liars (notice how he conveniently skipped FDR and WWII

when did FDR lie about WWII?

[jkarolyi]

>>Um, I think the point of the piece was to discuss America's faults, not a rally around the flag.

That's all that is discussed, giving only one side to the story. When was the last time you heard the anti-war liberal crowd say anything good about the USA?

>>when did FDR lie about WWII

He didn't, that's my point. An honest president and a just war, which goes against his "America is evil" mantra. Why you libs listen to (and take to heart) one-sided biased BS like this is beyond me. You're worse than Republicans who only listen to Rush.

[TheMentat]

Originally posted by jkarolyi
He didn't, that's my point. An honest president and a just war, which goes against his "America is evil" mantra. Why you libs listen to (and take to heart) one-sided biased BS like this is beyond me.

Let me get this straight... the guy is illustrating that "Presidents have made [similar] declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies", and you somehow turn this into "our presidents are all liars ". You then trash the entire article because he "convieniently" skips a situation where you both agree that a president didn't lie?

Get a grip... seriously. some of you guys are so predictable (see my earlier post).

[RoninLB]

The anti-Bush pathology is so hot it's blurred the bounds between the far left and the mainstream left. Russ Feingold seems to be about the only Dem smart enough to cash in on the heat with a mission to accomplish. Russ knows that the facts won't matter as long as he has a forum to be center stage. He's gotta beat Hillary and he well might. That's politics. I've been waiting for Hillary to get involved in the censure discussions to confirm my position on this one. If she jumps in then Feingold is a threat to her because the anti-Bush pathology is a losing position for losers. Even Hillary knows that so I was wondering how she'll handle it.

Kach's article is only more of cashing in by a writer that's bored and waiting for better action.

[rrpjr]

Perhaps some background on Howard Zinn would be helpful. He is a professor of Political Science at Boston University, and probably most famous for his book, A People’s History of theUnited States, a boilerplate Marxist-revisionist take on US history that is one of the sacred texts of the academic Left, and thus commonly assigned to many poly-sci courses.

Zinn asserts that "objectivity is impossible" – these are his own words – and that the teaching of history should be a tendentious pursuit to advance the interests of socialism and Communism. He has also said that America is a terrorist state. Among his other claims: Maoist China was the apogee of Chinese history, the Sandinistas were the most popular political group in Nicaragua (no matter the elections which proved otherwise), and that Cuba under Castro has no record of suppression (nevermind the death factory for dissenters that was Che Guevera’s El Cabano prison).

According to Zinn, every event in US history was motivated by greed. The Founding Fathers were master patriarchs, he says, who designed a nearly perfect system of institutionalized suppression. The United States government, Zinn says, remains an actively malevolent and oppressive agent both at home and abroad, guilty of “endless atrocities,” and therefore the true wellspring of terror in the world. It goes on and on like this: hackneyed and anhistorical anti-Americanism and monotonous Marxist mendacity.

If you are interested in the dispassionate inquiry into truth -- the “great and noble risk” of men, as Harvey Mansfield of Harvard puts it -- Zinn is useful as an example of the opposite.

[jkarolyi]

>You then trash the entire article because he "convieniently" skips a situation where you both agree that a president didn't lie?

You are putting words in his mouth. He never acknowledges that sometimes wars are just and sometimes presidents are honest.

I read the article (and responded as I did) after reading up on who the author is. Do any of you guys do that before reading what somebody has to say? Always consider the source. Read up on Howard Zinn and tell me he's a non-extremist (he tends towards communism and marxism, published a book called "The People's history of the USA", etc.):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

I honestly don't understand why people like him don't move to Cuba or North Korea where they can get a taste of a true "worker's paradise", instead of trying to rip apart the best country in the world.

[Nathans_Dad]

He lost me after the word obsequiousness...

That's one big word. That fella must be smart.

[Moses]

I once told my politically hyperactive high school history teacher that if he had to exaggerate to make a point, it could very well be that he didn't have much of a point to make.

Zinn, like my high school teacher, has grown too comfortable with his own hyperbole.

[TheMentat]

Originally posted by jkarolyi
You are putting words in his mouth. He never acknowledges that sometimes wars are just and sometimes presidents are honest.

I read the article (and responded as I did) after reading up on who the author is. Do any of you guys do that before reading what somebody has to say? Always consider the source. Read up on Howard Zinn and tell me he's a non-extremist (he tends towards communism and marxism, published a book called "The People's history of the USA", etc.):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

I honestly don't understand why people like him don't move to Cuba or North Korea where they can get a taste of a true "worker's paradise", instead of trying to rip apart the best country in the world.

I'm not putting words in his mouth... you, are. The fact that he doesn't acknowledge that some presidents are honest is not the same as saying that all presidents are liars.

But let's not lose sight of the real point that I'm trying to make... I don't agree with everything he says. My point however is that some people around here are able to see valid points in any discussion. Others seem to be too shallow minded to even consider anything that conficts with their world view. Rather than challenge the points made by somebody, they resort to mis-quotes and ad hominem attacks as their only defense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

[jkarolyi]

All I'm saying is consider the sources from which you read and form your opinions. Reading only from sources with obvious agendas only lead to extremist views.

Whoops...just noticed that you're from Canada...I forgot that you guys take communist/Marxist schlop seriously up there.

[Moneyguy1]

If objectivity in politics is not impossible, it is damn close.

[RoninLB]

Originally posted by jkarolyi
All I'm saying is consider the sources from which you read and
Whoops...just noticed that you're from Canada...I forgot that you guys take communist/Marxist schlop seriously up there.

lets be objective for a sec.

Social issues is the main political discourse up there. "schlop" wins elections.

If I discussed why war never is and the politics between western and eastern Canada I'd get slammed so enough said above..

[stuartj]

Originally posted by jkarolyi
[B

>>when did FDR lie about WWII

He didn't, that's my point. An honest president and a just war, which goes against his "America is evil" mantra. [/B]

Except of course that there is a strong school of thought that maintains FDR knew about the Pearl Harbor attack and allowed it to happen so that he could politically justify US entry into WW2.

I suppose thats not a lie.

[stuartj]

Originally posted by jkarolyi
All I'm saying is consider the sources from which you read and form your opinions. Reading only from sources with obvious agendas only lead to extremist views.

Fck me. The US invaded and occupied another country under utterly false pretences. Short of crashing planes into buildings, how extreme do you wnat to get?

This is not Conservative Republican adminstration. Its a radical cabal.

Edit: The "Coalition of the Willing" invaded and occupied Iraq....