Thursday, May 20, 2021
When I responded saying I wish he would not romanticize a culture that was hardly peaceful. I pointed out that for the most part Native Americans were just as vicious before the Europeans came, slaughtering each other and having wars -- if not as massive as European campaigns -- often just as bloody.
The only difference was that Europeans when they came over had better weapons than the Native Indians did.
he shot back and said I should learn my facts. In his response I could almost hear him sputtering with shocked that anyone would actually question the idea of the noble savage.
I pictured him thumbing through his well-worn copy of Howard Zinn to provide him confirmation, much in the way early Christians must have sought out favorite portions of The Bible.
This vision of the American Indian, of course, his nearly a complete fabrication by a man unqualified to pass himself off as a historian – yet who has become the icon of the Woke movement, who literally take his work as gospel.
Zinn, whose masterwork came out in 1980, capitalized on a trend that took place with hippies in the late 1960s, bridging the gap between radical philosophy and communal living.
Unfortunately, both the radicals as portrayed by the likes of my friend Abbie Hoffman and the hippies as seen in Woodstock could not made their model of society work, both scrambling to find a new symbol of harmony they could idolize.
Zinn, who is a hardcore Marxist, exploited this need, a remanufactured history in order to take advantage of a needy and gullible portion of the population, basing his vision of the Native American on an already disavowed concept as the noble savage.
Although based partly on fact, Zinn – as he does with all his work – left out important passages that would have provided a better, deeper and more comprehensive picture of what Native American life was like, instead building a fictional character to which needy wannabe hippies are attracted, a perfect communal society where women have equal rights and people live in harmony. If there is evil, it was – in Zinn’s vision – thrust upon them by invaders from Europe, who wanted to exploit the natives as slaves to acquire gold.
All Zinn’s work is about greedy capitalism, and so he paints Indians and blacks as victims of European greed.
Zinn like his counterpart Norm Chomsky – both of whom I met at one point when I returned to college in the early 1980s but have become well versed in having heard countless interviews and lectures by them on WBIA – is totally unqualified as a history, a two-bit professor with big ideas but almost no expertise to actually back up his theories. Where he isn’t completely fabricating his version of history, Zinn is stealing from other equally unqualified 1960s Marxists radicals or misquoting legitimate historians to reshape their ideas to fit his skewed an inaccurate portrayal of American history.
I lived through much of the failings of the 1960s, watched radicals like my friend Abbie, turn to criminals or outlaws. I watched the communal model fail because like all such efforts, they were filled with the greed and lust of humanity, creating disharmony and despair.
My artist friend wasn’t old enough to be a hippie or to witness the failure of the Marxist left as charlatans like Zinn exploited the innocence of the baby boom generation. With all that in the rearview mirror, Zinn was able to remanufacture himself and become a voice of still new Marxist movement and his work – as utterly flawed as it is – the New Testament of the Woke movement.
Nearly everything that the Woke believes about the American Indian and its relations to the Western world comes out of the misguided and often dishonest pages of Howard Zinn book – as does much of the recent research that uses Zinn as the foundation.
The devious Marxist Zinn recreates the Americas as an idea Garden of Eden before the arrival of the Europeans, despoiled by the greed of western culture within Zinn’s twisted mind, Columbus as the forerunner of this cultural conquest. Zinn not only inaccurately saddled Columbus with the genocide of Native Americans but slavery as well.
Very little of what Zinn says about Columbus is true or even accurate, nor was Zinn’s perception of Columbus’ motives.
To the Marxist Zinn, everything is about greed and capitalistic lust for gold.
Leaving aside Zinn’s obsession with gold for another chapter on his psychological problems, nearly everything Zinn says about Columbus is wrong, and in some cases, exactly opposite.
Zinn boasted about finding new information about Columbus that showed him as an exploiter, but in reality, Zinn created this illusion by leaving out details that completely exonerated Columbus – clearly intentionally in his Marxist zeal to undermine the American culture Zinn so despised.
This rewriting of history has been repeated over and over again in such things as Critical Race Theory and Project 1619 which in all or part base their work on the corrupt theories of Zinn.
My former friend – who I thought of as intelligent – has written three books on Marx, Chomsky and Zinn, never bothering to check the validity of any of their claims.
Zinn did a good job covering his tracks, attacking the work of more qualified scholars in where the truth could be found.
This not to say Europeans were innocent. Many came to America seeking riches and deeply racist when it came to the “savages” they encountered. Even many who sailed with Columbus sought gold and abused natives to get it.
But Zinn paints the Indians Columbus encountered as innocent victims (a philosophy well adapted to other uses in contemporary woke society), but often, the natives were engaged in conflicts Columbus’ arrival interrupted. Some natives sought to ally themselves with Columbus against other natives. Natives prior to his arrival, murdered, enslaved and even ate their enemies.
Even those who admire Columbus admit he was arrogant, aloof, brash even deceitful, but he was also a Christian – whose motives came out of his faith, not lust for gold, and for the most part, he had a paternal affection for the natives, and frequently intervened on their behalf, ordering his men not to harm them, orders often disregarded by the Spaniards, who hated Columbus because he was Italian.
Zinn’s questionable history paints a simplistic picture of relations between Europeans and natives, an “us vs. them” dishonest portrait that unfortunately has been adopted as legitimate scholarship with so-called institutions of higher learning.
Zinn, Chomsky and even my friend, attempted to salvage the failed Marist ideology from the 1960s that had ridden the back of the baby boom until baby boomers grew up and realized they had been suckered into an illusion.
This Marist brain trust, however, has managed to sucker a new generation into putting faith in lies and falsehoods, selling the same old snake oil we mistaken bought for a brief time in the 1960s.
My artist friend never actually lived in a commune the way I did, so had no point of reference to understand communal living by Native Americans as painted by Zinn could not possibly exist or if it did, survive, since natives being human beings bring all the greed and lusts of being human to the mix.
Zinn not only deliberately remanufactured and distorted hit reality when rewriting history on Columbus almost every one of his statements on Indians in the West were wrong from the Aztecs to the Iroquois often ignoring the absolute viciousness of those cultures prior to the arrival of people from Europe. This vision of an Adam and Eve like World of simple and passive communist like Indians has become the pervasive theme and has infected many other books evoking the history of Native Americans in it in America.
Zinn blurred the lines between native and European, neglecting to point out the many instances where the two cultures thrived side by side. Zinn claimed whites came to America for gold, most came because of religious freedom and access to land.
This last became the friction that eventually led to conflict, Europeans encroaching on native hunting grounds.
Zinn claims Europeans forced natives off land by violence, another distortion. Most natives sold their lands willingly and studies show that for the most part early on, these agreements were fair and mostly honored.
This is not to say European tour innocent either as pointed out to that misguided artist.
Europeans wear no better or worse than what they found here, they were simply more advanced in their machinery of war, and even the most aggressive tribes could not complete. European technology might be akin to the landing of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise today.
Zinn a devout Marxist blamed everything on hunger for gold.
But deliberately misled people into understanding what that gold was for especially in regard to Columbus who needed to pay back the king and queen of Spain for funding his voyages.
But his voyage was more motivated by finding a way to Asia and to get out from under the economic thumb of the Muslims who controlled trade routes. He also hoped to find a military ally in Asia that might help Christians retake the Holy Land.
Zinn’s deliberate misinformation has caused a backlash against Columbus, but this is a model Zinn used again and again to describe relations between Europe and natives.
He deliberately depicted Europeans as evil in regard to the Aztecs, The Iroquois, the Hurons and others, when in fact, those tribes were extremely violent long before Europeans came, and lesser tribes allied themselves with Europeans – culminating in the French and Indian Wars in which native Americans made up a huge part of the British and colonial military.
Zinn takes advantage of the naïve 1960s belief that all Indians were victims of European exploitation, noble savages to be admired and even emulated. Zinn says that had Europeans not arrived, America would have been nirvana – deliberately ignoring the routine wars between tribes that slaughtered natives long before the first sail from Europe was on the horizon.
Zinn’s sins against legitimate scholarship are magnified as other equally deluded scholars and teachers accept his version of history of accurate, when it is not, a history that paints Europeans as exploiters and native as innocent victims, a history that ignores the ability of natives to torture each other, enslave each other and slaughter each other long before they saw a white face.
Unfortunately, Zinn vision of the world has so pervaded the new woke movement that it is hard to untangle the tentacles from their grip on our culture, especially in the education system which has adopted his version of history. Legitimate scholars seem to have been hoodwinked by the Zinn cult, or perhaps are too scared to voice their outrage since careers have been ruined by questioning this faith.
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