My head probably should be the other way around,1 because I’m bouncing off a piece by the living Ronald, “Howard Zinn: Fake Historian”, over at Law & Liberty, whatever and wherever that is, taking down poor old Howard, who died back in 2010. Radosh is, in turn, bouncing his piece off a new book by Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn, which is a full-length assault on Zinn’s one-note “America Sucks” best-seller, A People’s History of the United States, published back in 1980, a book that surely provides the foundation for about 80% of the “thinking” of current lefties like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka “Allie OC”, though without the current riffs on patriarchy and colonialism, because Zinn, like the still functioning (unfortunately) Bernie Sanders, tried to avoid issues relating to race and sexuality, issues which, as a straight old white guy, he didn’t find interesting. “It’s economics, stupid!”
Ronald, to get back to him, has this to say about Debunking: “Grabar’s thoughtful and well-researched critique is most necessary and timely.” Well, maybe it is, but I kind of doubt it. Zinn’s book (which I have not read, though I’ve often read about it) has been frequently, and I believe correctly, described as a “negative image” of the received, triumphant story of American history that was “sold” to the American people prior to 1980—in other words, the old “everything you know about [the Beatles’ White Album, making “perfect” scranbled eggs, etc.] is wrong!” shtick applied to everyone from the Pilgrim Fathers to Jimmy Carter. We already know this, if we want to. The passages of Zinn’s book that I have read all sound exactly alike: “I couldn’t believe this, but it’s all true!
I’ll begin my take on Radosh’s take on Grabar’s take on Zinn (yes, this is getting complicated) with a chunk of Radosh’s review dealing with everyone’s favorite genocidal maniac, Christopher Columbus. Says Radosh,
Grabar first lets the reader know what Zinn argued about various seminal periods in America’s past, and she then proceeds to critique. According to Zinn, America was founded in sin: Christopher Columbus was guilty of genocide against the native population already living in America. Zinn’s charges, she writes, are “a shocking tale of severed hands, raped women, and gentle, enslaved people worked to death to slake the white Europeans’ lust for gold.”
Zinn, she notes, claimed to have been startled himself about his discoveries of the real Columbus, so far removed from the heroic, romantic story beloved for decades by Americans. Today, in part thanks to Zinn, every Columbus Day features scores of attacks on the great explorer and demands to call the holiday “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” Grabar claims that Zinn most likely never read Columbus’ actual journals, which showed him to be far more complicated and nuanced than Zinn portrays him to be.
Well, Columbus, and the conquistadors who followed, didn’t want to exterminate the Indians, or even, necessarily, to enslave them, but they did intend to treat them as a subject people and turn them into peasants, who would spend their lives working for their masters. Columbus, of course, when he first arrived, had no idea of who he would encounter. Since he thought he was headed for “India”, or possibly even China, he probably assumed he might even encounter an outpost of the kingdom of a descendant of the great Kublai Khan. When it became clear how unsophisticated the actual “Indians” were, his plans changed. Power corrupts, after all, and the Spaniards had power the Indians could not imagine. “The European is the connoisseur of evil,” remarked Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and so it turned out to be.
Radosh makes no mention of the staggering loss of life that occurred among the native population of the Americas due to the unintentional introduction of European diseases, far worse than even the “Black Death” in Europe. Since the Europeans weren’t morally responsible, it somehow “doesn’t count.” But the Indians still died.
I’m sure Columbus’ journals present him as “far more complicated and nuanced than Zinn portrays him to be,” but the fact remains that Columbus and his two brothers were thrown in jail by the Spanish government for six years. Recently, a contemporary fact-finding document prepared by one Francisco de Bobadilla indicting Columbus’ rule was found in Spain, described as follows in a 2006 article by Giles Tremlett appearing in the Guardian:
“Columbus' government was characterized by a form of tyranny,” Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian who has seen the document, told journalists.
One man caught stealing corn had his nose and ears cut off, was placed in shackles and was then auctioned off as a slave. A woman who dared to suggest that Columbus was of lowly birth was punished by his brother Bartolomé, who had also travelled to the Caribbean. She was stripped naked and paraded around the colony on the back of a mule.
The wild struggle for control of the riches of the New World (never conclusively identified as such in Columbus’ time) led to the rival Spanish “gentlemen” constantly informing on one another, and many of them, like Columbus, ended up in prison, at least for a time. Vasco Núñez de Balboa was beheaded as a result of one such power struggle, while the lesser known Cabeza de Vaca was sent from the New World to Spain as a prisoner and convicted of various crimes, though he managed to win an appeal. Cortéz himself, though never sent to prison, was denied the title of “viceroy”, awarded instead to a nonentity of more distinguished lineage, and ended his life “embittered”, according to Wikipedia.
It’s “amusing”, to me, at least, that Zinn credits himself, in the case of Columbus (and, in fact, virtually every American “hero”) as the original debunker of the myth, the man who found the “real truth” about the past, because as a 10-year-old boy in 1955, I read the truth about Columbus’ often brutal rule, his imprisonment, and much else, in a children’s book, part of the “Landmark” series.2 The information was there; it just wasn’t proclaimed in Columbus Day speeches.
Radosh’s takedown of Zinn’s takedown of Abraham Lincoln is a similar struggle of competing half truths. Says Radosh
Abraham Lincoln was no hero, according to Zinn. He sought only to save the Union, not to put an end to slavery. Lincoln, according to Zinn, was actually responsible for the Civil War, an assessment which ignores the fact that the Southern states fired the first shots at Fort Sumter.
Well, when the southern states first started seceding, Lincoln stated “if I could save the Union without freeing one slave, I would do it.” That’s pretty conclusive, isn’t it? He did not act to free slaves until well into the war, when he was confident that it would be politically “safe” to do so. And, notoriously, the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves in the Confederate States, not the United States. Rather a limited proclamation, wouldn’t you say? And while Lincoln went to great lengths to maneuver the South into firing the first shot, he was certainly determined not to let the rebellion secede. And, indeed, why should he?
But, again, this was no secret. Richard Hofstadter’s once famous book, The American Political Tradition, first published in 1948, “exposed” the calculation of Lincoln and other American “heroes” long before Zinn’s Popular History. Naturally, Hofstadter’s book lacks the “I can’t BELIEVE this!” note of sustained outrage which is the only one functioning on Howard’s kazoo, but for me that’s the furthest thing from a deal breaker.
But I feel disappointed by Radosh’s review first because Radosh himself, with co-author Joyce Milton, wrote The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth, a truly great work of historical research, first published in 1983, setting a very high standard for accuracy and honesty, from which he here significantly departs, it would seem, out of resentment for Zinn’s hackneyed Marxist message, his widespread (and, I agree) unfortunate influence, and even his mere success (over two million copies sold!). As I have said, I’m not impressed with what Radosh has to say in critiquing Zinn, which makes me dubious of the unrestrained praise he heaps on Grabar, viz., “Grabar has done a great service in writing the first serious book exposing Zinn’s scholarship and offering a corrective to his fables.” Her book doesn’t sound all that serious to me, from Radosh’s description, and it sounds even less so when I consult her publisher’s blurb, which lists the following “revelations” contained in Grabar’s book:
How Columbus was not a genocidal maniac, and was, in fact, a defender of Indians;
Why the American Indians were not feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their time;
How the United States was founded to protect liberty, not white males’ ill-gotten wealth;
Why Americans of the “Greatest Generation” were not the equivalent of Nazi war criminals;
How the Viet Cong were not well-meaning community leaders advocating for local self-rule;
Why the Black Panthers were not civil rights leaders.
Most of us don’t need to learn these things, and those who do will almost surely not be convinced by Grabar’s outraged right-wing exposé of Zinn’s outraged left-wing tome. (In particular, while Columbus was indeed not a genocidal maniac, he did “capture” a number of Indians more or less as specimens to take home and on at least one occasion “gave” an Indian woman to one of his companions essentially as a sex slave.3 So I guess he didn’t defend them, you know, all the time.)
The New York Times “1619 Project”, unmentioned by Radosh, about which I’ve bitched here, unfortunately continues Zinn’s exaggerated guilt tripping. Sean Wilentz has received a good deal of well-earned praise for taking down one of the “Project’s” biggest claims, that the whole “point” of the American Revolution was to defend slavery against the anti-slavery movement then developing in Great Britain. Well, Sean is convincing, but, at the same time, people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington did own slaves, and, more than that, prior to about 1750, the “story” of European colonialization of the Americas was not about white settlers building a free nation but Europeans getting rich through the brutal forced labor of non-whites, living and dying as either virtual or actual slaves, first via the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru and then through the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, where millions of slaves were literally worked to death. The slave trade itself—“the shame of the white race and the sorrow of the black”, wrote the not terribly egalitarian Edward Gibbon—was both immensely profitable and immensely fought over by the Spanish, the English, the French, and the Dutch. If you want to learn more than is dreamt of in Ron’s, Howard’s, Mary’s, Sean’s, and the New York Times’ philosophy about the colonialization of the New World, try J. H. Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830.
Unfortunately Extended Afterwords: What was the deal with the cryptic headline, which after a good 1800 words, still doesn’t make any sense?
Good question! What I was getting at with my head “Howard Zinn, apologist with nothing to apologize for, meets Ronald Radosh, former commie with no place to go” is this: Radosh tells us, as a young man, Zinn had been a member of the communist party, but “like many CPUSA members and fellow travelers, he had become disillusioned after the revelation of Stalin’s crimes and had left its ranks by the time the New Left and the civil rights movement came on the scene.” But what he doesn’t tell us (here, at least), is that he himself was also was a member of “the Party” and also left it the same time, ultimately following, of course, a very different path. Radosh isn’t required to make a “confession” every time he writes an article, of course, but here a little “background” would be more than appropriate.
In his later years, Zinn would try to distance himself from his communist roots by describing himself vaguely as an “anarchist”, yet he always identified with totalitarian murderers like Castro and the Viet Cong—while also always insisting that their monstrous body count was grossly exaggerated. He was always the apologist, though often an implicit rather than an explicit one. Only the absolute and unrestricted power of the totalitarian mindset, first “invented” by Marx and then institutionalized by Lenin and Stalin, could gratify Zinn’s desire for revenge against the “System”, but he lacked the moral courage to admit it. After the collapse of the Soviet Union circa 1990, exposing not only its savage immorality but also its stunning incompetence, there was no point to his game, nothing to apologize for, because the utter worthlessness of his supposed “alternative” to capitalism had been revealed. Yet he continued the pose rather than admit what a fool and hypocrite he had been.
Radosh’s fate has been less deserved yet equally conflicted. Radosh’s great book should have made his career; in fact, the indisputable truths he revealed of the Rosenbergs’ guilt (and, implicitly, the hypocrisy of all those who defended them) brought down on his innocent head the great rage of all those who couldn’t accept the extent to which many New Deal liberals were deceived and betrayed by the communists, whom they all too often accepted as fellow progressives and then later defended, often for decades and often to conceal their own half-conscious guilt at having been deceived and betrayed. Not too surprisingly, Radosh was ultimately driven strongly in a “neoconservative” direction, where he easily found a home with the Weekly Standard crowd, “moderate” on social issues, strongly anti-communist, and, not incidentally, devoted to the cause of Israel, Radosh being not the first Jew to identify more and more closely with Israel as he aged.
Well, that was fine pre-Trump, but now what? Radosh is honestly, and nobly, repelled by Trump and all his works, and all his apologists—see his takedown in the Daily Beast, “The Deep State Conspiracy Is About to Go Into Overdrive”—but he can’t stand anyone else either, and not only Bernie Sanders, whose cranky Brooklyn Jew socialism Ron thought he had escaped back in the sixties. Radosh has his own “Deep State”—or “Deep Pockets”—conspiracy, limned here (also for the Beast)—“The War Against Endless War Heats Up With Koch-Soros Salvo”, denouncing the formation of the “realist” think tank known as The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which I am afraid Ron sees as a plot directed against Israel. Ron produces a (very) potted “history” of left-right “isolationism”, though he does call the war in Yeman, financed and promoted by Saudi Arabia, as “horrific”. Well, fine, but what about, you know, Vietnam (opposed by Radosh in “real time”)? Or Iraq? Or Afghanistan? Or Libya? Were they all “good wars”? And is it anti-Semitic to think overwise?
I confess that I am almost as bereft as Ron, hating Trump, hating the prospect of either Bernie or Lizzie as either a candidate or a president, and with my own “Deep State”, the military intellectual complex, to worry about. O mores, O tempores, eh, Ron? Well, you wrote a great book. That’s more than most of us accomplish.
I’ve written about Ron several times in the past, usually, I would say, making the same point. Well, I just like keeping the guy honest.
1. Both my heads, surely, but we’ll stick with the metaphorical one for the time being.
2. Finding the “Landmark Book” that I actually read would be a difficult task, because there is a new Landmark series, perhaps several, including a children’s book with a title, Meet Christopher Columbus, written in the sixties.
3. Can you say “Patriarchal Colonialism"? I thought you could.
