The People's Historian by David Zirin Book Review

 

The People's Historian by David Zirin

The People's Historian by David Zirin

BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

This is an in depth biographical exposé of Howard Zinn’s actively fulfilled and outspoken life from the depths of the Hoover days depression in NYC’s slum lord tenement housing to being a bombardier in WWII. He also was a civil rights and antiwar Vietnam protester as a university professor.

Read this action packed fast moving book to discover a one of a kind crusader who has left an everlasting impact on our lives.

EXCERPTS;

“free speech warriors” trying—often successfully—to have A People’s History of the United States banned from libraries and classrooms. They would question me with hearty mockery how Zinn would feel about their counterrevolution against the twentieth century: their own “struggle from below”—bankrolled by Musky billionaires—to sack the Capitol, try to overturn free elections, fire people for thought crimes, and have the military occupy our cities. This is done both to mock Zinn’s hopes for the world and to point out proudly that they are making their own version of a “people’s history.” They want to know what Zinn would think about their radically authoritarian remaking of this country. What would Zinn say about that? Even though he had never flown in a plane, he became a bombardier during World War II, risking his life to stop the spread of fascism. Zinn was also a target of the far-right YouTubers of his day: the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover. He stood against racism his entire adult life. Therefore, while the political violence of January 6, 2021, may be some people’s idea of a “people’s history,” these were not his people. Fascist movements taking orders from billionaire insurrectionists were the kinds of struggles that Howard Zinn demonstrated a willingness to fight and, if necessary, die to oppose.

The police received record funding. The movement called to “abolish ICE,” and now ICE agents have a budget higher than that of most of the world’s military and they maraud through cities as masked shock troops, killing people and detaining immigrants indefinitely without charges, and even arresting Indigenous people on suspicion of their being in the country illegally. The arc of history was not bending toward justice. A global axis of far-right authoritarianism, led by a virulent strain of fascist politicians, is now on the rise, supported by street-thug loyalists. The response to this disaster for democracy has been a mixture of thwarted actions, numbing apathy, and, more and more, desperate outrage.

“What would Howard Zinn have said about that?” I am asked with grave concern by those politically raised on his ideas. “Was he wrong to have faith in the people?” They would ask this as if their belief systems had been suddenly thrown in doubt. Resistance was God and God had failed.

In 2024, 77 million voters checked the box for an authoritarian to take power once again, even though four years earlier he had provoked the January 6 insurrection to violently overturn an election loss.

Trump had won masses of white working-class people and, according to political pundits, a not-insignificant number of Black and Latino men; stunning, as his campaign and life have been swamped with racist bigotry. One of his dullard sons called him “the people’s billionaire,” oblivious not only to the contradiction in terms but the reality that their father holds wide swaths of people, even the ones he is sworn to represent, in abject contempt. After his victory, Trump delivered his inaugural address to an audience in which the VIP front row was not filled with family or prospective cabinet members but tech oligarchs.

Normally at one anther's throats and most of them once donors to liberal causes, they had announced themselves united and ready to voluntarily comply—or be voluntarily complicit—in a brazenly reactionary project. The leader of this new tech dystopia, an apartheid-defending emigre from South Africa and the richest man on earth, was given his own inauguration speech, which ended with a Nazi salute. Perhaps even more alarming than the mainstreaming of this kind of symbology was a cowed mainstream media telling us that the raised arm twice pounded against his heart could have meant any number of things and not to believe our lying eyes.

A regime that exists without traditional guardrails and without restraint; a regime that sends in the military against its own citizens; a regime that arrests and disappears international students for their political opinions on social media; a regime that has attacked lifesaving federal research, medical programs, and vaccines in a manner that countless judges have fruitlessly branded as lawless; a regime that fires people who deliver facts the Great Leader does not want to hear. We have quickly become ruled by a new kind of tech fascism with algorithms that seek out the undesirable and proponents who destroy anything they brand as “woke,” an ugly bastardization of “stay woke,” a phrase used in the Black community to mean holding a vigilant awareness of injustice.