| RATING: | 100% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
A book disrespectful of governments and respectful of people is a superb antidote to those history books of White culture’s that valorize and aggrandize the beneficiaries of that culture – Whites.
A veritable hatchet job on the lies and delusions of US White culture based, as it is, on the White supremacy of Columbus, the genocide of Native-Americans, the emancipation from colonial rule that was only freedom for rich White males, the conquest of large parts of Mexico and the US Empire up to and including the Islamophobic War on Terror.
Wealth for a few meant a culture based on ethnicity, gender, national origin and social class. This means that wars – internal and domestic – are the heath of the state. The First World War being a good example of the means of obtaining a false cultural unity through patriotism and loyalty to the state – a state that is of little benefit to its citizens. The Second World War cemented the policy of totalitarianism, White supremacy and militarism by fighting the same in other White cultures - a battle for whom among the White nations could be the best exemplars of these three White tendencies. The Vietnam War showed that such over reaching could be dangerous.
White cultures tend toward the childish view that superior saviors are going to save them from the problems they have created for themselves. That citizenship means being obedient and voting regularly with no ethical concerns whatsoever – as if democracy were a moral system rather than a political. This surrender of human strength, demeans Whites’ abilities and volitionally obliterates White selves. To conceal poverty, groups are deliberately divided against one another: Homeowners against the propertyless; Black against White; native-born against foreign-born; intellectuals & professionals against the uneducated & unskilled. Their only commonality being sharers of the leftovers of a wealthy country: An artificial unity.
Christianity is held largely to blame for all this for defending piracy with meanness, loot and pious hypocrisies. And for the basic discontent and political alienation that such attitudes ultimately foster when they are shown to be inoperable in practice.
We now face a White culture of economic insecurity, environmental deterioration, generalized violence and family disarray with no White politician suggesting fundamental political change to counter the decline. Such people are only concerned with their own political power; hence, the lack of enthusiasm for democracy because little fundamental criticism is tolerated nor reported in the media. Political consensus equals economic stagnation: All that remains is bread and circuses. This has led to scapegoating other cultures, immigrants, foreigners, welfare mothers and minor criminals instead of major ones. Corporate wealth and power are still protected as well as a military machine that drains the nation’s wealth while forming alliances with foreign tyrannies.
A history book disrespectful of governments - as such - and making clear that the project of egalitarian life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has largely failed – except for rich White males.
Zinn makes the point that history is written from the point of view of the historian because of the facts he regards as important and because of those he omits. He is not exist outside of the invented genetic, gender and the social class privileges granted him at birth. Thus, many points of view need representation before anything approaching a full - non-arrogant - appreciation of history is achieved. Zinn’s hope is that history is the history of the individual’s assertion of his own humanity rather more than it is the assertion of the demands of an irrational system of intimidation and control.
Politically naïve in its hippie solutions, but an indispensable guide to a particular White culture.
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