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  • The Left's Blind Spot

    History News Network, WA
    June 1 2008


    The Left's Blind Spot

    by Rick Shenkman

    Let's start with Howard Zinn and then move on.

    Zinn, rather unlikely for a historian, has been feted like a Hollywood
    celebrity, receiving encomiums from stars like Danny Glover, James
    Earl Jones, and of course, Matt Damon, whose character in Good Will
    Hunting famously brandishes a copy of Zinn's A People's History of the
    United States during a raucus encounter with Robin Williams. In 2003 a
    large crowd turned out at a celebration in Manhattan at the 92nd
    Street Y to mark the sale of the one millionth copy of the
    book. Recently, there was even a television series built around the
    book's themes.

    Why is Zinn so popular (with the general public, if not with
    historians, many of whom have expressed reservations about his books)?
    The answer is that Zinn plays the role in a self-satisified
    often-uncritical mainstream culture of the seemingly attractive
    dangerous rebel. "If you want to read a real history book, read Howard
    Zinn's A People's History of the United States," Damon exclaims in the
    movie. "That book will knock you on your ass."

    But just how dangerous is Zinn? Like many left-wingers he regularly
    calls attention to a long list of crimes American officials have
    committed against various groups and countries while celebrating the
    virtues of ordinary folks. But what he doesn't do is admit the
    obvious: that the ordinary people he is so eager to lionize have often
    turned a blind eye to what their government's leaders through the
    years have done in their name.

    That the people's responsibility for our foreign policy choices is
    seldom mentioned is strange. For many years now it has been a staple
    of the left-wing approach to history to draw attention to the people
    operating at the grassroots. History faculties, dominated by liberals
    at most schools, now include few professors who even care to do
    research into the papers of political leaders. The fashion instead is
    to do social and cultural history where the emphasis is on the
    masses. And yet in the context of foreign policy debates public
    opinion is relegated to the shadows, as if it were almost irrelevant.

    Flip open A People's History almost anywhere and what you are likely
    to find is a relentless focus, in all cases where the United States
    acted badly in Zinn's view, on our leaders. Consulting the index, I
    looked up Iran, which figures prominently in left-wing indictments of
    America. There on page 430 is the story of the CIA's coup against
    Mossadegh: `In Iran, in 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency
    succeeded in overthrowing a government which nationalized the oil
    industry.' On this same page there are attacks on the Marshall Plan,
    criticisms of the invasions of Latin America, and even a denunciation
    of the Alliance for Progress. It is the standard left-wing laundry
    list of postwar American crimes, follies and hypocrisies:

    The Marshall Pan comes in for criticism because its real purpose
    allegedly was to help create markets for the benefit of our
    corporations. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson stated, in what Zinn
    supposes is an admission of rank venality, `These measures of relief
    and reconstruction have been only in part suggested by
    humanitarianism. Your Congress has authorized and your Government is
    carrying out, a policy of relief and reconstruction today chiefly as a
    matter of national self-interest.'

    The Alliance for Progress, JFK's program to promote social reform in
    Latin America, is lambasted because `it turned out to be mostly
    military aid to keep in power right-wing dictatorships and enable them
    to stave off revolutions.'

    Our support for the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 is castigated
    as a plot to replace an elected government-the `most democratic
    Guatemala had ever known'- with a military junta on behalf of United
    Fruit. (Arbenz had expropriated 234,000 acres of the company's land.)

    Our dispatch of thousands of troops to Lebanon in 1958 was designed
    `to make sure the pro-American government there was not toppled by a
    revolution.' We also wanted to `keep an armed presence in that
    oil-rich area.'

    Finally, there is our support for the Cuban dictator Batista and our
    attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro.

    Zinn's chief theme in the book's chapters on foreign affairs is that
    the United States has played the role of a bully on the world stage
    and has frequently done so at the behest of our corporations. Our
    leaders' idealistic talk? So much claptrap. Dig a little, Zinn
    recommends, and what you find is that these leaders approved nefarious
    policies at odds with basic assumptions about America's stated
    commitment to human rights.

    Our concern here is not with the content of Zinn's indictment. He may
    be right or he may be wrong. (I think he is right in some cases and
    dead wrong in others.) The concern at hand is rather with what he has
    not said than with what he has. And what he has not said is that the
    American people are associated with the policies to which he objects.

    Indeed, it is the peculiar practice of Zinn to put The People front
    and center in his narrative only when they are doing good as he
    defines good. When The People are doing bad things-as when they are
    allowing their leaders to adopt unsavory foreign policies-they are
    largely invisible. The narrative subtext that runs throughout his
    book can be summed up this way. Leaders bad, ordinary people good.
    Or rather, white leaders bad, ordinary people good.

    Not that The People are infallible. But in Zinn's accounts he hastens
    always to indicate that their mistakes are owing to their manipulation
    by elites. In the notorious case of Vietnam, for example, he notes
    that LBJ `used a murky set of events in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the
    coast of North Vietnam, to launch full-scale war.' That ordinary
    people allowed themselves to be bamboozled by the president doesn't
    occur to Zinn. I do not mean to suggest that ordinary people should
    have been able to pierce through LBJ's lies-and they were lies, as we
    now know-about the events that transpired in the Tonkin Gulf. But
    their attitude was passive. Whatever the president said they
    believed. This was not LBJ's fault. This was their fault.

    In Zinn's narrative of the Vietnam War ordinary people do eventually
    surface as noble actors in a movement of popular resistance. `Early
    in the war,' he writes,

    there had been two separate incidents, barely noticed by most
    Americans. On November 2, 1965, in front of the Pentagon in
    Washington, as thousands of employees were streaming out of the
    building in the late afternoon, Norman Morrison, a thirty-two year old
    pacifist, father of three, stood below the third-floor window of
    Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, doused himself with kerosene,
    and set himself afire, giving up his life in protest against the war.
    Also that year, in Detroit, an eighty-two- year-old woman named Alice
    Herz burned herself to death to make a statement against the horror of
    Indochina.

    A `remarkable change' then took place, says Zinn.

    In early 1965, when the bombing of North Vietnam began, a hundred
    people gathered on the Boston Common to voice their indignation. On
    October 15, 1969, the number of people assembled on the Boston Common
    to protest the war was 100,000. Perhaps 2 million people across the
    nation gathered that day in towns and villages that had never seen an
    antiwar meeting.

    Zinn's purpose is to correct the imbalance he sees in other books
    which neglect the activities of The People altogether. And to this
    extent his book is useful. It opens one's eyes to a largely-or once
    largely-neglected aspect of history. But it leaves its readers
    unprepared. Framing history as a battle between malevolent elites and
    darling ordinary people is too limiting. History encompasses a
    broader range. There is about Zinn's approach a kind of arch
    determinism that finds in the messy details of history a pattern of
    great simplicity. On its face this is suspect.

    More to the point of this chapter, Zinn's approach is
    self-contradictory. Many of the people who serve in top government
    posts have themselves emerged from the masses. When in their
    evolution should we therefore begin to say that they have made the
    transition from a blessed state of innocence to the ranks of the
    damned? Take Lincoln. In his years as a callow youth and unimportant
    political figure he fits Zinn's ideal, one supposes. As a young
    soldier in a state militia he whiles away the time fighting a losing
    battle with mosquitoes, apparently indifferent to medals and the lure
    of military valor. Later in his single term in Congress he opposes
    President Polk's war of aggression in Mexico. But he is already on
    the road to compromise with power. Unlike, says Zinn, the fiery Ohio
    antislavery orator, Congressman Joshua Giddings, Lincoln decides `he
    would not try to end the war by stopping funds for men and supplies.'
    By the time Lincoln is elected president he has become a sell-out: The
    war is not between two peoples, northerners versus southerners as most
    books declare. It is a war between elites. `The northern elite
    wanted economic expansion-free land, free labor, a free market, a high
    protective tariff for manufacturers, a bank of the United States. The
    slave interests opposed all that.' Lincoln is the chosen
    representative of the northern elite. At first, he refuses even to
    commit the country to the abolition of slavery. But then `casualties
    mounted, desperation to win heightened, and the criticism of the
    abolitionists threatened to unravel the tattered [Republican]
    coalition.' Lincoln, in response to the pressure, finally moves left
    and commits the country to a policy of emancipation. Zinn quotes
    Wendell Phillips, who said that if Lincoln was able to grow as
    president `it is because we have watered him.'

    One would think that readers would see through Zinn's approach. But
    the book keeps selling like hotcakes. But why is it the object of
    such affection? One reason is that we have a soft spot in our hearts
    as Americans for the thirties and Zinn's book is very much a product
    of the thirties. Reading his book is like stepping into a Frank Capra
    movie where The People battle the Bosses for control of Small Town
    USA. If his book were a painting it would look like those magnificent
    murals from the thirties that adorn the ceiling of the lobby of
    Rockefeller Center, the ones depicting Heroic Working People
    Confronting the Forces of Nature and Capitalism. But the chief reason
    his book sells-and I say this in the full knowledge that my
    observation will be greeted with some astonishment-is because Howard
    Zinn, self-described radical, has tapped into the hoary myth that
    suffuses The People in an almost divine burst of sunlight. That is,
    Zinn, the debunker of American myths, appeals not despite the classic
    American myth that underlies his approach, but because of it. Try as
    he does to escape from American assumptions to present something fresh
    he is actually beholden to one of the oldest assumptions there is.

    Lest it be thought that I am picking on Mr. Zinn, let me hasten to add
    that the list of left-wingers who share his rosy assumption about The
    People is long and distinguished. It includes many writers and
    scholars whose work I have been privileged to publish at the History
    News Network. But rather than get into the business of naming names,
    I prefer to broaden the indictment. Our problem is not that certain
    left-wing writers have let the public off the hook, it is that
    left-wing readers have. The writers can write what they will. The
    trouble is that their readers have not called into question the
    assumptions the writers have been making.

    Take as an example one of the familiar arguments made during the
    debate about the Iraq War. It was summed up by a handy photograph
    that surfaced on the eve of the war and was quickly distributed
    widely. The picture showed Saddam Hussein, Iraqi dictator, shaking
    hands with Donald Rumsfeld, when he was serving as an American envoy
    of President Reagan in the early 1980s. The Left loved the
    photograph. Here was powerful visual evidence of the complicated and
    hypocritical history of the United States in Iraq. Contrary to
    President George W. Bush's assertion that Saddam was a wily dictator
    so heinous we had to drop bombs on him, the picture suggested that he
    was a man with whom we could do business, as the diplomats say. But
    left-wingers failed to extend the argument as they properly should
    have to include the responsibility of ordinary Americans for our
    friendship with Saddam. It is the absence of an argument then that is
    at issue rather than the argument that was made. To be sure Rumsfeld
    was a hypocrite, shamelessly capable of pirouetting from support to
    hostility in an instant, as circumstances dictated, without regard to
    questions of morality. But was not the American public's shameless
    switch also of interest? It is a peculiarity of our culture and the
    inadequacy of the Left's approach that we could acknowledge Rumsfeld's
    hypocrisy but not our own.

    The failure is not universal. In `A Problem from Hell': America in
    the Age of Genocide, which appeared in 2002, the sympathetic,
    intelligent and articulate leftist Samantha Power clearly writes of
    the American public's complicity or at the least indifference to
    Saddam's many crimes against humanity. By the end of her book it
    seems almost incredible that Americans have greeted revelations of
    genocide with apathy. Recounting the story of the 1988 gassing of the
    Kurds at Halabja, which President Bush used as Exhibit A in his
    indictment of Saddam's evil rule, Power movingly shows how our
    indifference cost lives:

    "It was different from the other bombs," one witness
    remembered. "There was a huge sound, a huge flame and it had very
    destructive ability. If you touched one part of your body that had
    been burned, your hand burned also. It caused things to catch fire."

    The official reaction of the American government at the time was
    embarrassingly weak. First the government downplayed the reports of
    the attack attributing them to suspect Iranian accounts. Then when
    the evidence mounted and became undeniable official spokespersons like
    Marlin Fitzwater denounced Saddam's use of gas but not the attack
    itself. As Power observes, "The United States issued no threats or
    demands." Furthermore, a State Department spokesman muddied the
    waters by suggesting that both Iran and Iraq had possibly used gas.

    This terrible record cast a shadow over the leadership of the American
    government and obviously is further evidence of the hypocrisy of
    leaders like Rumsfeld. But it also suggests that Americans themselves
    were uninterested in the attack. The broad outline of what happened
    in Halabja was known. Our response as a country to the news of the
    attack was known. But by choice, both our leaders and our people
    preferred to respond-maybe this is too harsh-with a yawn.

    Power herself indicts the public along with its leaders for their
    insouciance. She claims convincingly that the public responded
    apathetically time and again in the twentieth century to the most
    horrendous reports of man's inhumanity to man, beginning with the
    Armenian Genocide, the century's first. But if that is the case why
    did leftists reviewing the volume not focus their ire on public
    opinion? Why did the New York Times book review, written by an editor
    at the liberal American Prospect, carry the headline, `Turning a Blind
    Eye/A human rights expert surveys a century of American policy toward
    mass killings,' as if the problem were with our leaders' policy and
    not ourselves, and then devote not a single sentence out of 1,341
    words to the question of the American public's culpability?

    Curious to see if the Times's review was representative, I checked the
    website of the Nation, the country's leading left-wing publication,
    for comparison. In its 4,000 word review the public's responsibility
    is alluded to just once. Admittedly it is easier to indict specific
    policymakers than it is to survey the response-or non-response, as it
    were-of the general public. But the conclusion I drew and I do not
    think it is an unreasonable one is that the Left is bored with the
    theme of democratic weakness. The public's indifference is now so
    taken for granted on the Left that few seize the opportunity to
    comment on it.

    The result is that all sorts of rather incomplete statements parading
    as serious arguments have been advanced and accepted. The arguments
    are not so much wrong as they are inadequate, the propounders of the
    arguments unwilling to follow their premises to their logical
    conclusion, as if they were traveling along a speedy highway and
    suddenly decided to draw to a dead stop even though they had yet to
    reach their destination. Where they were going had seemed plain
    enough. But why on earth they had ceased to go forward no one bothers
    to say.

    Mr. Shenkman, the author of the new book, Just How Stupid Are We?
    Facing the Truth About the American Voter (Basic Books, June 2008), is
    an associate professor of history at George Mason University and
    editor of the university's History News Network


    http://www.hnn.us/articles/50997.html
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