Howard Zinn and the People Speak
January 16th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
In December 2009 the much anticipated documentary “The People Speak” (based on Howard Zinn’s excellent A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History) premiered on the History Channel. The DVD is expected to be released on January 26 and features narrations and performances by prominent and progressive American celebrities including Danny Glover, Sean Penn and Viggo Mortensen.
Be sure to also check out Voices of a People’s History of the United States, a nonprofit founded by Zinn that seeks to:
…bring to light little known voices from U.S. history, including those of women, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and laborers.
Teachers who are looking for informative teaching matierals and resources will also appreciate the Zinn Education Project.
Also check out this clip (brought to you by The REAL News Network) where 87 year old Zinn challenges the supposed sanctity of the United States’s ‘Three Holy Wars’ — the American Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II – during an informal speech at The Progressive’s 100th anniversary in 2009.
I volunteered to be in World War II and flew bombing missions over Europe. I did it because it was the Good War, it was the right war, it was a just war. After I got out of the war, I began to go back over things and learn about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, I had just finished my missions in Europe, and was going to go to the Pacific for more missions. So when the war ended soon after Hiroshima, I thought, “Wow, that’s great!” I welcomed it. Did I really know what happened when that bomb was dropped on Hiroshima? Did I have any idea what that meant to those hundreds of thousands of people—men, women, and children? No, I did not. When I began to think about it, then I began to think about the people under my bombs. I never saw them. I was flying 30,000 feet above them.
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We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.
