“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” This was one of Howard Zinn’s famous bon mots, but heaven forbid that a liberal like me should dissent from the unanimous chorus of praise from the left in the wake of Zinn’s death last week.
Michael Kazin’s withering 2004 critique of A People’s History of the United States, published in Dissent no less, says everything I wish to say.
History from below is a noble and important mode of scholarship, but as Kazin points out, there are other historians who have taken up the task more insightfully and scrupulously than Zinn, who proposed a one-note and drastically oversimplified view. Zinn’s “ruling elite is a transhistorical entity, a virtual monolith,” Kazin writes; “neither its interests nor its ideology change markedly from the days when its members owned slaves and wore knee-britches to the era of the Internet and Armani.” Moreover, “By Zinn’s account, the modern left made no errors of judgment, rhetoric, or strategy. He never mentions the Communist Party’s lockstep praise of Stalin or the New Left’s fantasy of guerilla warfare. Radical activists simply failed to muster enough clear-eyed troops to pierce through the enemy’s mighty, sophisticated defenses.” (This Guardian obit, via Oliver Kamm, cites critiques of Zinn from Eric Foner and Michael Kammen, making clear that Kazin is not the only credentialed historian willing to speak up on this.)
Note that Kazin doesn’t harp on Zinn’s lack of “objectivity,” which is a red herring. A historical narrative can be opinionated without being tendentious.
A tribute by earlofhuntingdon on Firedoglake asserts:
Howard Zinn challenged orthodoxy, he challenged comfortable perspectives and asked awkward questions. More importantly, he made YOU ask “Why?”, something many of us stop doing after the age of three. His model for doing so made it too uncomfortable to accept a simple, parental-like dismissal of, “Because I said so.”
There are plenty of orthodoxies and comfortable perspectives on the left that Zinn never challenged; there are many awkward questions he never asked of his own side. He was thoroughly a part of the fanatical milieu of Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, and signed on to all of their dubious Israel-Palestine pronouncements in recent years. And far from being skeptical by nature, Zinn was in fact credulous, as his blurb in praise of 9/11 conspiracy crank David Ray Griffin shows (“admirable and painstaking research”). The notion that he and his supporters have a monopoly on the qualities of intellectual curiosity and truth-seeking — this too is a comfortable perspective and an orthodoxy, and it should be challenged.
PS — Case in point, this sentimental homage to Zinn (and Chomsky) by Fred Branfman. The elevation of these men into “more than people,” into “some of the most important nouns of our life,” borders on frightening and bears no resemblance whatsoever to critical thought. And Branfman’s portrait of Chomsky bears no resemblance to Chomsky’s actual record.
PPS — In this NYT story, Jack Healy refers to Chomsky as a “liberal political activist,” which is flatly incorrect. Chomsky has directed some of his most bilious attacks against liberals and liberalism, in stark contrast to his apologetic, mealy-mouthed opinion of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and other unsavory figures.
4 Comments
"9/11 conspiracy crank David Ray Griffin"
http://davidraygriffin.com
David Ray Griffin is the most scrupulously scientific voice available on the entire 9/11 soap opera. The towers came down by controlled demolition. Liberal sissy can't even contemplate it.
Your dismissive tripe about those great voices of our time (Zinn, Chomsky, Roy) is formulaic. It could come right out of the "prescriptions" detailed in Manufacturing Consent (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). You are obsequiously playing the role of a little cog in that big wheel Herman & Chomsky described.
Griffin is a retired theologian with no scientific training that I'm aware of.
Funny how someone who snivels indignantly about "those great voices of our time" can call *me* obsequious.
Re your citation of Manufacturing Consent: this is typical of how totalizing snake-oil theories dispense will all argument by simply claiming that the arguer is "a little cog in that big wheel." How formulaic, and pathetic, and unsurprising.
"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism"
Zinn's dissent never superceded his patriotism.