12.08.2009

NBC owned History Channel to air Series based on Marxist Book

You've seen Matt Damon and Castro-lover Danny Glover promoting it. Now, American Marxist professor Howard Zinn's book, "The People's History of the United States" is being turned into a History Channel TV series called "The People Speak". The History Channel is owned by NBC. Here's their press release detailing the media-extravaganza they'll try to make out of this show.

And here's a bit about who Howard Zinn is, from the wonderful website http://www.discoverthenetworks.org

  • Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Boston University
  • Marxist
  • Author of A People's History of the United States, one of the most influential books on college campuses today
Born in August 1922 to Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York, Howard Zinn is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston University. The author of more than twenty books, he is best known for writing A People's History of the United States(1980), a Marxist tract which describes America as a predatory and repressive capitalist state -- sexist, racist, imperialist -- that is run by a corporate ruling class for the benefit of the rich. The book claims to present American history through the eyes of workers, American Indians, slaves, women, blacks and populists. A People's History has sold more than a million copies, making it one of the best-selling history books of all time. Despite its lack of footnotes and other scholarly apparatus, it is one of most influential texts in college classrooms today -- not only in history classes, but also in such fields as economics, political science, literature, and women's studies.

Professor Zinn announces the overtly political agenda of A People's History in an explanatory coda to the 1995 edition: "I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching."

Zinn describes the founding of the American Republic as an exercise in tyrannical control of the many by the few for greed and profit: "The American Revolution … was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers ... created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command." In Zinn's reckoning the Declaration of Independence was not so much a revolutionary statement of rights as a cynical means of manipulating popular groups into overthrowing the King to benefit the rich. The rights which the Declaration appeared to guarantee were "limited to life, liberty and happiness for white males" -- and actually for wealthy white males -- because they excluded black slaves and "ignored the existing inequalities in property" (in other words, they were not socialist rights).

In Professor Zinn's view, Maoist China is "the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people's government, independent of outside control"; Castro's Cuba "had no bloody record of suppression"; and the Marxist dictators of Nicaragua were "welcomed" by the people, while the opposition Contras, whose candidate triumphed when free elections were held as a result of U.S. pressure, were a "terrorist group" that "seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua."

To this day, Zinn continues to sympathize with America's enemies, just as he supported the Soviet Union in the Cold War. In a pamphlet-like tract published after 9/11 calledTerrorism and War, he portrays the U.S. as a terrorist state and today's Islamic jihadistsas people valiantly standing up to America's empire. He strongly opposed the post-9/11 U.S. invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and he opposes the Patriot Act as an assault on civil liberties.

In a 2006 interview published in
AlterNet, Zinn suggested that Children's Defense Fundfounder Marian Wright Edelman would make a better presidential candidate than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, stating: "She's the epitome of what we need. A very smart black woman who deals with children, poverty…. She's in the trenches, and she ties it in with militarization."

Just as Zinn holds the United States in contempt,
so does he despise America's closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. According to the professor, Israel's creation in 1948 "meant the dispossession of the Arab majority that lived on that land," and led not only to "the occupation and subjugation of several million Palestinians," but also to "what we would today call 'ethnic cleansing.'"

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