This is excerpted from Chapter 25 of my forthcoming.

Chapter 25

Howard Zinn is the author of a cultic classic called A People’s History of the United States, which is a tour-de-force of historical misinformation, sloppy scholarship, and outright prevarication.

This perhaps partially explains why on the subject of history and the role of the historian in academia and society Howard Zinn once wrote:

“History is not about understanding the past but about changing the future.”

I know of no serious historian who’d in any way agree with this statement — which in fact strikes me now as a good working definition of propaganda.

Given that Howard Zinn was not, however, by any reasonable standard — or, for that matter, any standard imaginable — a historian, his remarks read as entirely apposite.

Still, it’s more than a little paradoxical that this same Howard Zinn authored a book entitled A People’s History of the United States, which purports to be actual history and is almost universally regarded as such, which has long been a staple in the curricula of American colleges and high-schools and junior-highs all across the country.

It’s for this reason that I’ve included an entire chapter, albeit a brief one, discussing A People’s History of the United States — Howard Zinn’s mediocre work of fiction which claims to be actual history — in a book entitled The Art of Independent Thinking. Because prevarication on this level — i.e. the highest level — for decades and counting now influencing young minds beyond number, all across America and the world, must be countered relentlessly, forcefully, intellectually, factually.

It is, for example, easily inferred and thus fairly well-known, though rarely discussed, that Howard Zinn grew spectacularly wealthy in the United States of America, which all his adult life he repeatedly and explicitly expressed his hatred for. It’s also fairly well-known that Zinn never once over the course of his long life migrated to any of those places and countries governed by the Marxist and Neo-Marxist dictators for whom, all his adult life, he professed his admiration. Yet never to my knowledge has the reason for either of these two things been discussed — neither the specifically why Zinn grew spectacularly wealthy in the United States of America, which he loathed, nor the explanation for why he never migrated way from a country he regarded with such deep and lasting loathing. The two things are, in my opinion, closely connected.

This is a subject is of great interest here — in part because the explanation for both things boils down to the exact same thing, and in part also because the reason, singular and specific, is closely related to the ideology around which Zinn’s entire life and literature orbited. It lies at the heart of his undying hatred of America and is in many way the source of his all-consuming love for despotic regimes, which regimes, however — even in spite his great love of despotism and the despots who rule them, and in spite also of his lifelong loathing of America for her comparative lack of despotism — Zinn never chose to live under.

The reason Zinn grew spectacularly wealthy in the United States of America and the reason he therefore never left the land he loathed is as follows:

A free people voluntarily, willingly, freely paid Zinn their money in exchange for his book of misinformation and prevarication, which he titled A People’s History of the United States.

In fact, to this day, over fifteen years after Zinn’s death, droves of Americans from sea to shining sea continue to voluntarily, willingly, freely pay money in exchange for Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

This is process, please note, which I fully support — fully and enthusiastically — caveat emptor.

For this reason and for no reason other than this Howard Zinn accumulated millions of the dollars he purported to hate, via the laissez-faire system he explicitly antipathized, repeatedly denounced, passionately condemned.

Please recall — and never forget — that Howard Zinn was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and yet never once allowed a single dollar of his legitimately earned millions to be expropriated and redistributed, as the CPUSA dictates would have it.

Recall also that Zinn — who (did I mention?) never once lived in any country other than the United States of America which he deeply loathed, dying here in 2010, an old and venerable man, mischaracterized as a great scholar of history, it is true, yet near universally beloved and esteemed, world famous and wealthy well beyond anything permissible in any communistic ideology imaginable — was a vocal defender of Joseph Stalin and the Stalin era Soviet Union, Pol Pol and his Communist atrocity exhibition called the Khemer Rouge, which in four years (1974-1979) massacred one quarter of the Cambodian population, and also Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer in human history, who according the United Nations, Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, the Red Cross, and World Population Review, to name but a few organizations who concern themselves with such ghastly statistics as these, murdered an estimated 65 million of his own people. Right up to the day he died, Zinn remained a steadfast and unapologetic admirer of Chairman Mao and his despotic communistic Chinese ideology. Never once that I’ve heard or read did Zinn address the millions of innocent Chinese people whom Chairman Mao murdered — the individual human lives senselessly snuffed out by a communist dictator, all in the name of a worn-out politico-economic ideology known as Marxism — more broadly socialism, and even more broadly collectivism — which was doomed from the start to fail, for one reason above any other: its explicit denial of the primacy of each individual human life, which is the bedrock of all forms collectivism, whether Marxist, Neo-Marxist, or otherwise.

“China,” wrote Howard Zinn in A People’s History, “was in the hands of a revolutionary movement, the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” This, as you can see, was in praise of Chairman Mao. At the time Zinn wrote this, it was already known that Mao had committed unspeakable massacres.

Noam Chomsky, meanwhile, who also propagandized for Pol Pot’s genocidal Khemer Rouge, called Mao’s China “a just society,” and also described Mao’s blood-red China as “a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level.”

It is a poorly known fact as well that Howard Zinn was a huge supporter of the homophobic dictator Fidel Castro who, wrote Howard Zinn, “set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants.” In his saccharine over-romanticization so typical of socialist sympathizers and propagandists, Zinn neglects to mention, let alone elaborate, Castro’s decades and decades of systematic repression, forced international isolation, and the horrific poverty created by Castro and fostered by him, the grinding oppression, and of course the mass executions of regime opponents, intellectuals, journalists, and, it almost goes without saying, all homosexuals.

When Zinn wrote this, Castro’s crimes in the name of Marxist Communism were by now well-documented and publicly available — first-hand accounts primarily, given across a span of decades by numerous Cuban people who’d escaped Castro’s socialist regime. These testimonies remain remarkably consistent — both internally and also with one another. Not only was this public knowledge, in fact — it was easily accessed public knowledge: interviews and accounts which anyone, whether researcher, historian, or not, could read and corroborate within hours. Why, then, does Howard Zinn, who all his life worshipped at the shrine of Marxism and socialist ideology, neglect to mention a word of it — anywhere, at any time — neither in his world famous book, which is a staple in the history curricula of schools all across America — which is not nor was ever intended to be socialistic — nor in his published writing outside of his world famous book?

To ask the question is to answer it.

_______________

In the opening of A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn begins with the following description of Christopher Columbus:

“So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians…. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.”

Now read how Hans Koning — who, like Howard Zinn, wasn’t an actual historian — described Christopher Columbus in a book titled Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth, which appeared the year before Howard Zinn’s book appeared:

“The population were Arawak Indians … a people who had developed agriculture (corn, yams, cassava), who could spin and weave, but had no iron, no horses, no beasts of burden…. Their society seems to have been based on village communes where most property was jointly held…. Some of these people wore little gold ornaments in their ears and noses.”

Neither Koning’s book nor Zinn’s book cite any sources, which is unheard of for a work of history that purports to contain authentic historical scholarship. Yet this fact will surprise absolutely no reader who remembers that neither men were actual historians.

The following, however, is the primary thing I wish to point out here:

Among the most famous passages in all of Howard Zinn’s literature is the opening paragraph of A People’s History, wherein readers are treated to a loose transcription of Christopher Columbus’s log (or diary). Zinn’s transcription, which is again following the lead of Hans Koning’s description in the book that appeared just the year before Zinn’s, introduces passages with leading sentences and then, in an appalling display of academic dishonesty, omits full sentences — at which point proceeding to quote completely out of context and striking out all passages from Columbus’s log that controvert his pre-formulated genocidal narrative.

Christopher Columbus, whatever you think you know of him, wasn’t, for the record, guilty of genocide.

In his log entry for October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus wrote:

“I warned my men to take nothing from the people without giving something in exchange.”

Both Howard Zinn and Hans Koning completely omitted this passage.

But the worst is still to come.

In the same paragraph of A People’s History, Howard Zinn, purporting to transcribe Columbus’s log, writes the following. I’m quoting Howard Zinn precisely – and by that I mean I’m including Zinn’s crucial use of ellipses:

“They have no iron. Their spears are made out of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

That is, I say again, an exact quote from Chapter 1, paragraph 1, of A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. This passage has been cited countless times over the years and decades, and it’s not a stretch to say that this Howard Zinn passage has had and continues to have real societal ramifications.

It is a total deception and fraud.

Please look now at what Howard Zinn omitted, without any mention of omitting it, and look what he replaced with ellipses. I quote from Christopher Columbus’s log:

“I saw some who bore marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to them to ask how this came about, and they indicated to me that people came from other islands, which are near, and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believed and still believe that they come here from the mainland to take them for slaves.”

This translation comes from a well-known scholar named Robert Henderson Fuson – perhaps the most widely used translation of Columbus’s logs – who explains this passage further:

“The cultural unity of the Taino” (a more specific name of the tribe which Zinn calls the Arawaks [something like “Native American Indians” verus “Apache Indians”]) “greatly impressed Columbus. Those who see Columbus as the founder of slavery in the New World are grossly in error. This thought occured to Samuel Eliot Morison (among many others), who misinterpreted a statement made by Columbus on the first day in America, when he said ‘They (the Indians) ought to be good servants.’ In fact, Columbus offered this observation in explanation of an earlier comment he had made [in his logs], theorizing that the people from the mainland came to the islands to capture these Indians as slaves because they were so docile and obliging.”

The boldface emphasis is mine.

Zinn’s use of ellipses between the sentences “They would make fine servants” and “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want” is in actuality Zinn’s linking together two sentences which are not even in the same paragraph.

As a matter of fact, they’re not even in the same entry date in Christopher Columbus’s log. They’re two days apart.

The truth is that Christopher Columbus, who was a devout Catholic at a time when Spain was under Muslim siege – the Muslims had long-ago conquered the Iberian Penisula, and 1492 was the very year that the crucial Battle of Granada occurred – the truth, I repeat, is that Christopher Columbus, who was no saint or angel, but a soldier, sailor, and missionary, was driven to save Christianity. He therefore made it his mission to counter Muslim conquest and to, in turn, spread Christianity in order to combat Muslim rule.

Christopher Columbus was a man motivated, like all missionaries, by his drive to convert people to his faith. Which is why Christopher Columbus also wrote in his log, about these same natives – and this is something else you find nowhere mentioned in any of Howard Zinn’s literature:

“I want the natives to develop a friendsly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.”

Howard Zinn’s famous passage is outrageously deceptive in its selective quoting, and Howard Zinn, who has influenced so many millions of young minds, is arrantly guilty of context-dropping and academic fraud. His deliberate omissions are crafted precisely to convince all readers that Christopher Columbus had no care or concern for the physical or mental well-being of the natives but was only driven by “a frenzy for gold,” as Zinn says, which then led Columbus to enslave the natives for profit – when, that is, he wasn’t hunting them down with dogs, since they could not supply him with vast treasures of gold, from mines which existed only Columbus’s imagination.

Howard Zinn writes:

“The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”

In response to which, the anthropologist Carol Delaney, also translator of Columbus’s logs, writes this:

“Columbus wanted to launch a new Crusade to take back the Holy Land from the infidels (the Muslims). This desire was not merely to reclaim the land of the Bible and the place where Jesus had walked; it was part of the much larger and widespread, apocalyptic scenario in which Columbus and many of his contemporaries believed.”

In reference to Columbus’s October 12, 1492, entry, Carol Delany writes this:

“In my first reading of the diary I could not understand why he seemed so driven to find gold. But this understanding changes when one realizes that finding the gold was necessary not only to repay the people who had invested in the voyage (and to induce them to finance another), [but was also] essential if he was ever to finance another Crusade. Today, we might disapprove of that motive, but at the time [when the Moors were taking over, with extreme force and violence, much of Europe] it was felt to be a worthwhile and Christian duty.”

Carol Delany writes as well:

“Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect. There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there. There were terrible diseases that got communicated to the natives, but he can’t be blamed for that.”

The natives also gave back diseases to the Europeans.

It is also a fact that Christopher Columbus never owned a slave.

It is a fact that Christopher Columbus adopted an indigenous child and made this child his son. Howard Zinn does not mention this.

It is a fact that Christopher Columbus did not commit genocide.

I’m no wild-eyed defender of Christopher Columbus, come to redeem him here — though Columbus has unquestionably been smeared, and in a shameful fashion; but that is not my primary point here. I believe in accuracy and historical truth, of which Howard Zinn and his detestable book make a mockery, and that — historical truth and historical accuracy — is what I seek to defend.

The fact is that Howard Zinn’s heroes Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh have far more blood on their hands than Christopher Columbus ever did, and I will leave you with a quote from an excellent historian named Oscar Handlin, of Havard University, who’s meticulous in his research and mind-spinningly well-read, and who in 1980 reviewed Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States, before Zinn’s book developed its cultic and slavish following:

It simply is not true that ‘what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.’ It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. ‘Tet’ was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders.

Dr. Oscar Handlin, The American Scholar, 49, 1980.