Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar
Regnery History, 2019, 327 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

hy do young people believe Howard Zinn's phony American history? Pretend you're a kid. Adult A tells you your principal is a fine, upstanding citizen who drives a Buick. Adult B other tells you, in hushed tones, he's a child molester who ate his family dog and howls at the moon. Which are you going to believe? Adult B, of course. B is the cool cynical guy who knows all the dirt.

My exposure to A People's History of the United States was when a grad student loaned me her copy and recommended it. In the margin where Zinn makes up his story about Columbus murdering Indians, she had written “How crude we are!” This was a highly educated person, yet the book consisted of page after page of errors and she had swallowed them in their entirety.

Kids want to believe theirs is the best of all possible times. But like the flying saucer believers, they also want to be in on all the hidden conspir­acies and all the dirt. So they're convinced that Columbus chopped off the hands of the Arawak Indians and committed genocide. Never mind that doing that would make no sense. We all want to believe what the teacher told us was a lie.

Zinn saw the world in simple terms: everything that happened was caused by class oppression of the poor and powerless. Young people bought it because they too feel poor and powerless. They think they're getting a corrective, but since Zinn's side is all they actually get, they grow up believing it to be the truth. Nobody says, as one member of the History News Network did, that it's “the historians' equivalent of medical malpractice.” Zinn died filthy rich from it.

Despite what Wikipedia says, Howard Zinn was not a real historian. He produced no worthwhile scholarly work after grad school. He was a radical activist whose goal was to destroy Americans' belief in their country in the hope of creating a communist state. No less a figure than Arthur Schlesinger called him “a polemicist, not a historian.” Even The Guardian, an ultra-left-wing newspaper, agreed, calling Zinn's book “highly polemical.” Zinn had a knack for calumny, innuendo, and conspir­acy theories. But much of the blame goes to the conventional textbook writers who were so dull that teachers turned to Zinn, not only from ideological comradeship, but just to keep the students awake.

Those who seek the truth must be familiar with Zinn's book and know the evidence for and against his claims. This makes Grabar's book an excellent and much-needed corrective to Zinn's ‘corrective.’ One might expect it to be a hate-filled political polemic, but it's actually an attempt to sort out what Zinn said that was true and what was not.

The legacy of Zinn and his comrades is not just the falsehoods they spread. It was that they solidified the conviction that history is political, and therefore it is impos­sible ever to get an honest account of what really happened or why. There are few things more destructive.

oct 26, 2019