CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

A People’s History of Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn giving a lecture at MIT on the Myth of American Exceptionalism. (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.)

Even if he had sought it out, it seems unlikely that Howard Zinn ever thought he would achieve the fame that he came his way.  This is one of the essential lessons taken from the new biography of Zinn by Dave Zirin titled The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn.  Zirin, who spent time on the road with Zinn several years ago staging public conversations about history, imperialism, and more, provides an overview worthy of the energy which defined Zinn’s life.  Naturally enough, the book begins with a survey of Zinn’s childhood as a child of immigrants living in a section of Brooklyn crowded with newcomers to the United States, most if not all of them working class and with little income beyond the meager wages paid by their employers.  Zinn, while correctly perceiving the existence of economic and social inequality around him as the result of the political and economic system in place, pursued his dreams as best as he could.

Like many young men in the United States in the early 1940s, this meant he ended up in the military eager to fight fascism in Europe.  His time as a bombardier in the United States Army Air Force convinced him that war—especially those between nations—was a bloodthirsty and inhumane exercise that should be eradicated from the human species.  Zirin returns to one of the last, if not the last, bombing missions Zinn participated in.  His unit was sent to bomb a peaceful French seaside town because the generals and their staff believed a few dozen Nazi troops remained in the village.  As a result of the bombing raid, over three thousand French civilians—thankful........

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