Howard Zinn and the myth of the “People’s War”

Despite serving as a bombardier, or perhaps because of it, Zinn opposed the idea that WWII was a “People’s War”

In the days following Howard Zinn’s passing, there was some discussion on the Marxism list trying to put him into an ideological context. One subscriber wrote:

I don’t want to start a … flame war over the dubious merits of “A People’s History.” Howard Zinn had an enormously influential career and is beloved by the American left. His “Voices of a People’s History” is of great merit as a collection of source material which will enrich the study of American history. He was, in many ways, the Charles Beard of this era which is fitting considering how of his work replicates Beard’s approach.

This led another subscriber, a professional historian, to respond:

Classing Zinn as a “Beardsian” seems not to understand these central differences related to race. This isn’t some triviality like misunderstanding Whig foreign policy. There is the racial conquest of the continent foundational to the civilization, and the entire racial enslavement of Africans. Related, too, are the issues of Jeffersonian, sectionalism and the agrarian particularism for which Beard had great affinities and Zinn regarded with due skepticism.  In this regard, the “Marxist” writers of the 1930s and 1940s were far more “Beardsian” than Zinn. Indeed, these are some of the central issues that distinguished the body of New Left scholarship from the old line dogmas of those writers connected with the CP.

This discussion led me to thinking about Zinn’s approach to WWII in chapter sixteen of “People’s History of the United States”, titled appropriately enough “A People’s War?” (The entire book can be read online here.) Written in 1980, the book adopts a “revisionist” perspective that was associated with a number of younger New Left historians such as Gar Alperovitz whose 1965 book “Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam” revealed U.S. war aims as setting the stage for the Cold War.

Along with many other “revisionists”, Alperovitz studied history at the University of Wisconsin under William Appleman Williams who was a seminal figure of the New Left. Williams was born in 1920 and could be seen as a contemporary of Zinn. His 1959 “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy” was a highly influential work, arguing that the U.S. had imperial ambitions from the days of Thomas Jefferson.

Charles Beard is widely recognized as having an influence on Williams and those who followed in his footsteps. Best described as an “economic determinist”, Beard is known for a kind of class analysis of the American constitution. But he is most controversial for his refusal to toe the line on WWII. As a member in good standing of the Progressivist current in American politics, he was immune to the pressures that allowed CP historians to get on FDR’s bandwagon.

While Beard might not have deployed the analytical tools of “The 18^th Brumaire” in his writings on WWII, he was much more in line with Marxist principles in refusing to treat WWII as a “people’s war”. Unlike the “revisionists”, the Stalinist Daily Worker celebrated the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 8^th, 1945, the paper’s military analyst wrote “We are lucky to have found The Thing and are able to speed the war against the Japanese before the enemy can devise countermeasures. Thank god for that.” He added: “So let us not greet our atomic device with a shudder, but with the elation and admiration which the genius of man deserves.”

The Stalinist fools had little inkling that Truman only bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to “teach the Russians a lesson” as Gar Alperovitz reported.

The term “New Left” was largely coined in order to distinguish the 1960s radicals from the political dry rot that the Communist Party had bequeathed. To some extent, it was also a rejection of the dogmatism of all Marxist groups but whatever the movement lacked theoretically it made up for politically by breaking with the social patriotism of the CP.

It was to Howard Zinn’s everlasting credit that he identified with this outlook, even though he never attacked the CP specifically for its WWII treachery. To generations of young people, he demonstrated that WWII was an imperialist war even if it coincided with anti-imperialist struggles and the necessary defense of the USSR. For the veterans of the New Left who had absorbed his analysis, they were in a much stronger position to resist new efforts to “fight fascism”, especially in Yugoslavia and Iraq—two arenas that people like Christopher Hitchens have specifically likened to the efforts to defeat Hitlerism.

Although I had been thoroughly inoculated against the “People’s War” garbage during my training in Trotskyist politics, I found Zinn’s chapter on WWII essential in writing an article on Zimmerwald and Imperialist “Humanitarian” Interventions in 1992 prompted by a British Stalinist’s support for NATO intervention on the original Marxism mailing list. Parenthetically, I should mention that Britain did not appear to have the kind of political cleansing that the New Left historians carried out here. Lacking the equivalent of a Gar Alperovitz or a Howard Zinn, they seem far more susceptible to the sort of “People’s War” malarkey that typifies the Socialist Unity blog that in the interest of transparency should probably be renamed Stalinist Unity.

Here are excerpts from that article that rely heavily on Beard and Zinn:

Washington’s anti-fascism was the result of a recent “conversion”. American businesses sent oil to Italy in huge quantities after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Mussolini used the oil to keep the war against the African colony. When the fascists rose up in Spain in 1936, Roosevelt declared his neutrality while the fascist powers gave complete aid to the Francoists. This ensured the victory of fascism in Spain.

What brought the United States into the war was not a determination to rid the world of fascism, but a response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was only when Japan threatened US economic interests in the Pacific that Washington entered the war. There is a transcript of statement made to the War Cabinet by Henry Stimson in November, 1941 that confirms this interpretation. Charles Beard cites it in his “President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941.”

One problem troubled us very much. If you know that your enemy is going to strike you, it is not usually wise to wait until he gets the jump on you by taking the initiative. In spite of the risk involved, however, in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the ones to do this so there should remain no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who were the aggressors. We discussed at this meeting the basis on which this country’s position could be most clearly explained to our own people and to the world, in case we had to go into the fight quickly because of some sudden move on the part of the Japanese. We discussed the possibility of a statement summarizing all the steps of aggression that the Japanese had already taken, the encirclement of our interests in the Philippines which was resulting and the threat to our vital supplies of rubber from Malay. I reminded the president that on Aug. 19 [1941] he had warned the Japanese Ambassador that if the steps which the Japanese were then taking continued across the border into Thailand, he would regard it as a matter affecting our safety, and suggested that he might point out that the moves the Japanese were now apparently on the point of making would be in fact a violation of a warning that had already been given.

Beard belonged to the earlier Progressive school of history and politics. Other members were John Dewey the philosopher and cultural historian Vernon Parrington. The Progressives predated the intellectual milieu of both the CP and the New Deal–granted they are somewhat identical–and were much less likely to believe WWII war propaganda. These were people of Eugene V. Debs’ generation and likely to take the “people’s war” rhetoric with a grain of salt.

Beard was a scholar of tremendous integrity, but his outspoken opposition to World War Two caused him to become a rather isolated figure in the world of cold-war liberalism. Younger liberal historians considered him an odd duck and perhaps a little disturbed. Thomas Kennedy, in his “Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy”, entertained critical speculations that Beard was surely deaf and possibly senile when he went on the attack against WWII. He cites a critic who views Beard’s attacks on Roosevelt as “superstitions that occupied Beard in his senility.”

Of course, Beard was completely sane and clear-headed. It was the muddle-headed New Deal liberals and their CP chums who had lost control of their sanity. A new generation of “revisionist” historians came along in the 1960’s and put their support behind Beard’s interpretation.

Did the United States intervention as an ally of the USSR against the Nazis prove that it was fighting a “people’s war” as opposed to a war based on the need for power and profit? One can question the purity of the motives in the war with Japan, but how can anybody gainsay the crusade for democracy in Europe?

To begin with, Washington showed no intention of extending democracy to the colonies of its European allies. Diplomat Sumner Welles assured the French that they could hold on to their colonies. He said, “This Government, mindful of its traditional friendship for France, has deeply sympathized with the desire of the French people to maintain their territories and preserve them intact.”

Lurking beneath the surface of altruistic government propaganda of the sort uttered by Henry Wallace was the occasional honest assessment. Secretary of State Cordell Hull said “Leadership toward a new system of international relationships in trade and other economic affairs will devolve very largely upon the United States because of our great economic strength. We should assume this leadership, and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of national self- interest.” The poet Archibald MacLeish, at that time an Assistant Secretary of State, predicted the outcome of an allied victory. He declared, “As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief…without moral purpose or human interest.”

Did WWII rescue European Jewry to some extent? Supporters of imperialist intervention in Bosnia tend to make analogies with this presumed mission of WWII, but Roosevelt had no interest in saving the lives of Jews. I need not go over this sad tale in detail. You should read “While 6 Million Died”, by NY Times reporter Arthur D. Morse, which details the indifference at best, and anti-Semitic hatred at worst, that existed in the US State Department. The President refused to take decisive action against the Nazis and caused the deaths of many thousands of Jews.

Despite the no-strike pledge of Communist Party, the class-struggle continued at home with mounting fury. During the war, there were 14,000 strikes, involving 6,770,00 workers, more than in any period in American history. A million miners, steelworkers, auto and transportation workers went on strike in 1944. In Lowell, Massachusetts, there were as many strikes in 1943 and 1944 as there were in 1937. It was a “people’s war” in the eyes of CPers and their liberal allies. Despite this, textile workers there resented the fact that the bosses’ profits grew by 600% during the war while their wages only went up by 36%.

(I gathered much of the information above from chapter 16, “A People’s War?”, in Howard Zinn’s indispensable “People’s History of the United State 1942-Present”. A new edition of this classic has just appeared and I urge people to make time for careful study of this work. Howard Zinn was a bombardier on a B17 and flew in many missions during WWII. His disgust with allied bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima turned him into a pacifist.)

Cannonball

American Radical: the trials of Norman Finkelstein

a revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.

This observation by Frankfurt school luminary Max Horkheimer would serve as an epigraph to the new documentary on Norman Finkelstein that opens on February 11^th at the Anthology Film Archives Theater in New York. While the trials of Norman Finkelstein are interesting enough in and of themselves to warrant attending this powerful film, what stands out above all is the force of Finkelstein’s personality that is captured by co-directors David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier. In an age of banality and anti-heroes, Finkelstein is virtually Byronesque even if rendered with a Yiddish accent.

I first got a sense of Finkelstein’s on-screen charisma in a 2009 documentary titled Defamation that included a scene with Norman at his building out in the Coney Island neighborhood in Brooklyn, where he upbraids the director for suggesting that Norman tone down his rhetoric, especially when it comes to likening Israeli leaders to Hitler. With biting irony, Finkelstein reminds him that all Israeli politicians call each other Nazis when the opportunity arises. But it his facial expressions, hand gestures and ringing voice that make the scene as memorable as his words. If an actor such as Dustin Hoffman auditioned for a role playing Norman Finkelstein, I doubt that he could be half as compelling as the former professor himself.

The question of “going too far” runs like a red thread throughout the new film. Although the directors, veterans of leftwing documentaries, are obviously sympathetic to Norman’s views, they make sure to include interviewees who openly question some of his decisions. For example, Noam Chomsky states that it was probably a mistake to focus on Dershowitz’s plagiarism rather than the issues of Israel and Palestine. In my view, his decision to pursue this line of attack had a lot to do with his outrage over Dershowitz’s much ballyhooed academic reputation, which could only be a painful reminder of his own problems merely getting a tenured position. We learn that in 2001 Norman Finkelstein was only making $18,000 per year at Hunter College in New York. When he came out with “The Holocaust Industry” that year, Hunter demanded that he take a reduced workload and lower pay. After refusing, he took another job at Depaul University in Chicago where pressure from Alan Dershowitz and the Israeli lobby resulted in his being refused tenure, despite the overwhelming vote in favor from the faculty.

The movie fills in just enough biographical detail so that Norman’s tendency to stick his neck out becomes understandable. He says that he takes after his mother who, like his father, was a concentration camp survivor and a participant in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Unlike many such survivors, the experience left her politically engaged and vehemently anti-war. When the war in Vietnam began, she used to explode at the senselessness and brutality of the war continuously. Her outspokenness obviously had a big impact on Norman who was radicalized during the war.

In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon for the first time, the 29-year-old Princeton PhD graduate began demonstrating at the Israeli embassy in New York on a daily basis. You can see a photo of him in the film with a poster likening the invasion to Nazi barbarism, a first sign of the militancy that would turn him into a target of the Zionist movement in the U.S. From this early gut reaction against Israeli aggression, he turned into a scholarly critic of Zionism with a critique of a book by Joan Peters that essentially denied that the Palestinians lived in the land that Israel conquered. Chomsky contacted him at the time and developed a warm and supportive relationship with Norman that lasts until this day. Finkelstein states that Chomsky helped him with the conceptual framework for his Middle East analysis, if not his willingness to speak truth to power.

Although the movie does not spend any time at all on biographical material, except obviously for the role of his parents’ experience in Nazi death camps in shaping his worldview, you get a strong sense that his politics are all-consuming, even to the point of fostering a monastic existence. He lives in one of the most untrendy neighborhoods in all of New York, but one that he loves. His life revolves around research and traveling to campuses far and wide, where he gives talks on Israel to audiences that are sure to include people determined to shout him down. Things have reached a point that the Jewish Defense Organization, a crypto-fascist outfit, has plastered leaflets around his building demanding that his landlord evict him.

With his strong Yiddish accent and glowering but affectionate disposition, Finkelstein is a true prophet of the Jewish people. Refusing to bow down to officialdom, he speaks tirelessly on behalf of the Palestinians, who, as they were in the time of the fictions depicted in the Old Testament, are regarded as little more than vermin by the tribe that calls itself “the chosen people”.

As a modern day Jeremiah, Finkelstein is reminding Israel of something the prophet said long ago:

For thus hath the LORD of hosts said: hew ye down her trees, and cast up a mound against Jerusalem; this is the city to be punished; everywhere there is oppression in the midst of her.  As a cistern welleth with her waters, so she welleth with her wickedness; violence and spoil is heard in her; before Me continually is sickness and wounds. Be thou corrected, O Jerusalem, lest My soul be alienated from thee, lest I make thee desolate, a land not inhabited.

Norman Finkelstein website

Movie website

J.D. Salinger

The latest issue of Swans has brief reflections on his passing. Mine is below, all the rest can be read at http://www.swans.com/.

A Lesser Impact, With a Market — by Louis Proyect

I read The Catcher in the Rye in 1961 as a Bard College freshman. By then, I was a full-fledged member of the post-beat subculture and had been initiated to its A-list novelists and poets, from Jack Kerouac to Herman Hesse. As such, I found myself a bit underwhelmed by this tale of an alienated prep school student. While I had drunk from the bitter well of alienation myself, it was difficult to identify with such a scion of privilege.

Franny and Zooey made even less of an impact. Even though I was becoming more and more intrigued with Eastern religion, as we called it back then, I found the characters’ spiritual yearnings even more difficult to identify with than Holden Caulfield’s flight from “phoniness.” Looking back at the characters with hindsight, I suppose that I was put off by their narcissism. Indeed, I reacted to Salinger in much the same way I reacted to Woody Allen’s “serious” movies. Spiritual yearnings and neurotic tics do have a way of making me look at my watch. All that being said, nobody can deny Salinger’s ongoing influence. For as long as there are alienated teenagers, there will be a market for Salinger’s prose.

Turkish general strike

East Timor report

Last night I heard Clinton Fernandes speak on the situation in East Timor at 339 Lafayette Street, a movement center where I used to attend Nicaragua Solidarity steering committee meetings in the 1980s. Despite the Latin-sounding name, Clinton is from Goa, India, a former Portuguese colony just like East Timor that has such names bequeathed upon the citizenry, including the president, Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos Horta.

Clinton Fernandes

As a leader of the East Timor solidarity movement in Australia for the past 10 years or so, Clinton did not become an activist by the normal route. In the late 1990s, he was an intelligence officer in the Australian army where he was assigned to cover Indonesia and East Timor as part of his duties. Since this included keeping track of what the new movement in Australia was up to, Clinton began collecting their pamphlets and leaflets. As he learned more about the horrors of Indonesian occupation, the connivance between the US, Australia and the occupiers, as well as the tendency of the solidarity movement to tell the truth about the situation, he eventually switched allegiances and became an outspoken critic of Australian policy in the region. While in the military, he began work on a PhD in political science and would eventually begin teaching at the University of South Wales. His dissertation became a bone of contention with his superior officers, as this excerpt from an Australian radio show would indicate:

AM – Thursday, 13 October , 2005  09:12:33

Reporter: Nick McKenzie

PETER CAVE: The Defence Force is being accused by one of its own of misusing national security and secrecy laws to stop the publication of a book, because it was deemed overly critical of the Federal Government.

AM has learnt that Major Clinton Fernandes has complained to the Defence Inspector General that the Government was behind efforts to stop him publishing a book about East Timor’s road to independence. And while that attempt failed, he’s complained that his career has since been sabotaged.

In letters obtained by the ABC, Major Fernandes accuses senior Army figures of intimidation and ignoring his assertion that he wrote the book in an entirely personal capacity and relied only on open sources.

Nick McKenzie reports.

NICK MCKENZIE: In 2004, Major Clinton Fernandes completed a four year PhD project the Army had approved. He approached a publisher, who in turn asked him to turn his PhD thesis into a book.

He completed the manuscript of Reluctant Saviour, an extended essay on Australia’s role in East Timor’s struggle for independence, and sent his Army superiors a copy.

Major Fernandes also sent an assertion that the book relied solely on publicly available information.

The resulting correspondence between Major Fernandes and some of the Army’s most senior officers became increasingly heated and it ultimately prompted the 36-year-old major to complain to the Defence Force’s Inspector General that the Army had inappropriately invoked national security and information secrecy laws to stall or stop him publishing the book.

Read entire transcript here: http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2005/s1481113.htm

Clinton’s talk helped me to focus on past discussions about East Timor as well as learn about the current situation. In 2006 the Marxism mailing list I moderate was divided sharply over whether the left should have supported Australian military intervention in East Timor, an operation that some—including me—viewed as a violation of self-determination. Clinton and all of the Democratic Socialist Party members on Marxmail saw otherwise. They saw Australia as only making the decision to intervene under the pressure of the mass movement.

One Marxmail subscriber named Joaquin Bustelo supported Clinton and the DSP’s position by analogizing it with Eisenhower’s decision to send federal troops to defend Black students attempting to attend Arkansas high schools. Eisenhower clearly made this decision under the impact of an aroused Black community first beginning to demand protection by the government against racist terror.

I don’t think I would change my position today, but I do find myself reviewing the arguments I made in support of Pinochet being extradited to Spain in order to face charges of murder in Judge Garzón’s court. For some Marxmail subscribers, this was also a violation of sovereignty. They argued that it was up to the Chileans to bring the killer to justice, not a Spanish court.

After reading an article that Clinton wrote on “the right to protect”, a term sometimes referred to as R2P in academic circles, I have a better sense of his approach to the problem. It is clear that there was a genuine grass roots movement to force Australia to intervene. He writes:

Just before the invasion, Australian activists took decisive steps to protect some East Timorese leaders who would play an important role in the independence struggle. David Scott, a 50-year old father of two who was Founding Director and Chairman of Community Aid Abroad, was in East Timor before the invasion. His personal links with East Timor went back to his father-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Leggatt. Leggatt had commanded the 2nd/40th Battalion at Kupang (West Timor), and had gone to Portuguese Timor where he organised the landing of Australian commandoes in December 1941. Scott was evacuated to Darwin just before Indonesia invaded East Timor. Once in Darwin, Scott realised that Jose Ramos-Horta, Rogerio Lobato and Mari Alkatiri were still trapped in Dili. As key members of the East Timorese leadership, they would certainly be singled out for a swift death. He and other activists applied every available means of pressure to ensure the evacuation of these men. A frantic round of lobbying began, culminating in one final evacuation flight for the three men being personally ordered by the new Foreign Minister, Andrew Peacock. Scott flew back to Melbourne, and – although he did not realise it at the time – would work for the independence of East Timor until he was 74 years old.

During his talk, Clinton alluded to the diverse nature of the East Timor solidarity movement that included veterans of WWII from Bill Leggatt’s generation. These men were sheltered from the Japanese by the East Timorese to whom they now felt a debt. As I said before, I am still committed to the ‘absolutist’ position on military intervention by imperialist nations (even when they are a junior variety like Australia) but I have a much better sense of the case that was made by the other side.

There was some very useful discussion of East Timor’s present and future prospects that grew out of my question of how the government lined up on the “leave it in the ground” campaign that South African left scholar Patrick Bond participates in. Essentially, Bond views oil as more trouble than it is worth. In an article on the Copenhagen conference on climate change that appears on the Climate and Capitalism website, he states: “Uncivil society will have to take up the slack and apply direct pressure, starting with the slogan ‘leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole and the tarsand in the land!’”

While there is some sympathy for this perspective in East Timor, the government—at least for the time being—has a development perspective much more in line with Venezuela’s, namely to use oil revenues to develop the country. As President Horta has said, it is inappropriate for NGO’s to advise East Timor to eschew oil extraction when its employees have electricity and other benefits of development.

This is not to say that East Timor is not wary of the pitfalls awaiting countries that used oil revenues in a profligate manner. As a negative example, Clinton cited Gabon, a country that basically squandered its oil wealth and now stands exhausted of mineral wealth and any kind of future.

Perhaps the optimum outlook for East Timor is as a kind of ecotourist attraction that draws people interested in seeing a great variety of birds and other natural beauty. The government is committed to this goal, at least verbally, but has given the green light unfortunately to the typical large hotels seen in the typical tourist trap. Such hotels tend to be used by a criminal element bent on laundering money, selling drugs and other anti-social behavior. As might be obvious from Cuba’s willingness to put up with such projects, beggars can ill afford to be choosers.

With a population of about a million, East Timor might seem to defy the typical expectations of conventional Marxist thought. In my view, perhaps the best that can be expected is a mixed economy like Kerala’s with a heavy emphasis on social spending.

Clinton had some amusing remarks about the movie business, gleaned from his experience as a consultant to the production company involved with “Balibo”, a movie based on the murder of a journalist in East Timor in 1975. He met the director at a party and offered his services on a pro bono basis in the hope that his input could guarantee that the movie told the truth. Indeed, if you go to the film’s website, you will find a link to Clinton’s website.

When Clinton began working with the crew to educate them about the East Timor struggle, he found them prone to flatter him with remarks like “you are wonderful”. At first he allowed this to go to his head, but after a while he discovered that people in the movie business are always calling everything fabulous, etc. including the Subway sandwiches that were ordered for lunch one day.

Howard Zinn’s detractors

Jill Lepore

The latest instance of pissing on Howard Zinn’s grave came from Jill Lepore, a history professor at Harvard (of course) and a regular contributor to the New Yorker Magazine (of course again) where she wrote:

Every fall, the freshmen troop into town tugging laundry bags stuffed with extra-long fitted sheets and trunks packed with aspirations, Scrabble, and socks. The next week, when they gather around the seminar table with their laptops cocked, the brashest are the kids who read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” in high school. It got them thinking and gave them something to argue about, aside from how to cram for the AP and whether the DBQ ought to count for more than the multiple choice. Zinn doesn’t come up in scholarly journals, but he introduced a whole lot of people who hadn’t thought about it before to the idea that history has a point of view. Kids can figure this out all on their own, but it’s nice to read it in a book. I suspect that reading “A People’s History” at fourteen is a bit like reading “The Catcher in the Rye” at the same age (history’s so goddam phony): it’s swell and terrible and it feels like something has ended, because it has.

Zinn wanted to write a people’s history because he believed that a national history serves only to justify the existence of the nation, which means, mainly, that it lies, and if it ever tells the truth, it tells it too fast, racing past atrocity to dwell on glory. Zinn’s history did the reverse. Instead of lionizing Andrew Jackson, he mourned the Cherokee. The problem is that, analytically, upending isn’t an advance; it’s more of the same, only upside-down. By sophomore year, the young whippersnappers have figured that out, too, which can be heartbreaking to watch, but it doesn’t make them any less grateful for what Zinn taught them, or any less fond of him for having braved it. Come September, the freshmen will be back, Zinn on their Kindles, zeal in their striped messenger bags, and I’ll be awfully glad to see them.

Michael Kazin

These are the same talking points made by Georgetown University professor Michael Kazin and co-editor of Dissent Magazine in the Guardian:

Unfortunately, Zinn’s big book is stronger on polemical passion than historical insight. For all his virtuous intentions, Zinn essentially reduced the past to a Manichean fable and made no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about US history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?

Now I don’t know if Zinn did or did not address why Americans “accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live” but I have no problem explaining Kazin’s accepting such legitimacy since he is a prime example of how privileged academics, journalists and trade union bureaucrats adopt social democratic politics that put them in bed with the U.S. ruling class, a story that goes back to the late 19^th century at least. The magazine Dissent that Kazin co-edits with Michael Walzer serves as a mouthpiece for such rotten politics.

To give but one example, Michael Walzer is a defender of torture in the same terms as Alan Dershowitz and Rush Limbaugh:

Back in the early 1970s, I published an article called ‘Dirty Hands’ that dealt with the responsibility of political leaders in extreme situations, where the safety of their people seemed to require immoral acts. One of my examples was the ‘ticking bomb’ case, where a captured terrorist knows, but refuses to reveal, the location of a bomb that is timed to go off soon in a school building.

Michael Walzer

Both Kazin and Walzer have used the pages of Dissent Magazine to launch ideological missiles at Zinn. Here’s an excerpt from my response to Walzer’s attack on Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” in Dissent Magazine 6 years ago:

The interesting thing, of course, is that despite Zinn’s support for Kerry this year, he still gets mud flung at him because his history of the USA is replete with examples of Democratic Party treachery, including that which occured during FDR’s presidency, a kind of Golden Age for social democrats like Walzer.

Walzer seems particularly miffed that FDR would be depicted as a warmonger in Zinn’s book:

Of course, as an imperial bully, the United States had no right, in World War II, “to step forward as a defender of helpless countries.” Zinn thinks the meaning of the biggest war in history down to its meanest components: profits for military industries, racism toward the Japanese, and the senseless destruction of enemy cities-from Dresden to Hiroshima. His chapter on that conflict does ring with a special passion; Zinn served as a bombardier in the European theater and the experience made him a lifelong pacifist. But the idea that Franklin Roosevelt and his aides were motivated both by realpolitik and by an abhorrence of fascism seems not to occur to him.

One can certainly understand why WWII would loom large in the calculations of somebody like Walzer. Along with the European Social Democracy, they cheered on the bombing of Yugoslavia under the rubric of “stopping fascism”. Milosevic was the latest Hitler, who was necessary to stop in his tracks unless we would risk another Chamberlain appeasement. It is most odd that the USA, which has had military bases all over the world backing up ruthless dictators since WWII, would be seen in this light today. Most reasonable people that observed consistent US support for the Pinochet, Thieu, Suharto and Rhees of the world might conclude that an “abhorrence of fascism” is the last thing on the minds of American presidents. But, of course, people like Walzer are not reasonable. They are hysterical opponents of the barbarian enemy who threaten US interests everywhere in the world.

I imagine that most people have heard Woody Allen’s joke about Dissent Magazine in “Annie Hall” but I love to repeat it every chance I get:

Alvy Singer: I’m so tired of spending evenings making fake insights with people who work for “Dysentery.”

Robin: “Commentary.”

Alvy Singer: Oh really? I had heard that “Commentary” and “Dissent” had merged and formed “Dysentery.”

Sean Wilentz

The last piss-ant worth mentioning is Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University professor who bad-mouthed Zinn in the AP obit and detracted further in the Los Angeles Times:

What he did was take all of the guys in white hats and put them in black hats, and vice versa.

His view was that objectivity was neutrality, which I think is a formula for bad history. Objectivity is not neutrality; it is the deployment of evidence and building an argument based on historical logic. That’s how we engage in rational discourse. To see history as a battleground of warring perspectives is to abandon the seat of reason.

He saw history primarily as a means to motivate people to political action that he found admirable. That’s what he said he did. It’s fine as a form of agitation — agitprop — but it’s not particularly good history.

To a point, he helped correct mainstream popular conceptions of American history that were highly biased. But he ceased writing serious history. He had a very simplified view that everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great. That can’t be true. A lot of people on the left spent their lives apologizing for one of the worst mass-murdering regimes of the 20th century, and Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. You wouldn’t know that from Howard Zinn.

I must say that I am quite surprised that a Princeton professor would allege that Zinn’s writings would lend support to the proposition that Lincoln did not free the slaves. You learn something new every day, especially from big-time Ivy League professors.

Even more tawdry is the charge that Zinn had something to do with “apologizing for one of the worst mass murdering regimes of the 20^th century.” Giving the pinhead Wilentz the benefit of a doubt, we can probably assume that he was only accusing Zinn of  being a Stalin fan rather than of Hitler.

Anybody who takes the trouble to do five minutes of research on the Internet using “Zinn” and “Stalin” will turn up something like this, an excerpt from Zinn’s preface to Daniel Singer’s “Deserter from Death”. Singer was a life-long opponent of the Soviet bureaucracy and in particular a supporter of Solidarity in Poland:

This independence of dogma did not mean that he held no solid positions in the social struggles happening all around him. On the contrary, what stands out as you read Daniel Singer’s work is his unshakable commitment to the idea of socialism, but a socialism uncorrupted either by Stalinist cruelties or by liberal timidity in the face of capitalist power.

He had no use for those who called themselves “Communists” but violated the spirit of a humanistic communism by behaving like thugs. Khrushchev’s startling revelation of Stalin’s crimes at the 20th Party Congress in Moscow led Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party to break with the Soviet Union. And other Communists around the world were shaken. In the United States, many members of the Communist Party left as a result of Khrushchev’s speech, and the invasion of Hungary later that year.

One imagines that in order to get tenure in the history department at Princeton, you have to learn how to twist things into a proper pretzel, especially when it comes to turning a great American radical into a wicked tool of the Kremlin.

Finally, to return to the regrettable Professor Lepore, whose book on King Phillip’s War in Massachusetts sits on my bookshelf at home. I am fairly sure that she was more of a liberal when she was young, but years of working at Harvard and for the New Yorker do have a tendency to wise careerists up. She writes that “Zinn doesn’t come up in scholarly journals”, as if that would matter to somebody who once told a student that learning the truth about American history requires time spent at the library doing your own research rather than sitting in a classroom.

She also complains that “Instead of lionizing Andrew Jackson, he mourned the Cherokee”. One wonders why this is such a problem, keeping in mind that Jackson was responsible for the genocidal forced march of the Cherokees to Oklahoma. One supposes that Professor Lepore is capable of such an ill-considered remark only because her tenure at Harvard has taught her the ropes about how to get ahead in the academy: become sophisticated in the process of shedding your principles.

I imagine that the abuse directed at Zinn from her, Kazin, Walzer and Wilentz is ultimately explained by their own conflicted feelings about making their peace with the Establishment rather than fighting it like Howard Zinn for over 60 years. He is a constant reminder of their own failings.

Videocracy

Opening at the IFC Center in New York on February 12^th, Erik Gandini’s documentary “Videocracy” examines how Silvio Berlusconi’s control of Italian television facilitates control over a population that appears even more addicted to junk TV than the U.S.’s. One might even wonder if Gandini chose the title “Videocracy” in honor of a similar but fictional film titled “Idiocracy” directed by Mike Judge of “Beavis and Butt-head” fame. This is from my November 2007 review:

Mike Judge’s world of 2506 is a lot like today’s world, except even worse. Fed by a diet of stupid television shows and movies like “Knocked Up,” they have forgotten how to read a book and can barely speak. Their language is a mixture of grunts, slacker style “ya knows” and locker room profanity–both from men and women. Anybody who is the least bit articulate, including [hero] Joe Bauers, is seen as a “faggot”.

Watching “Videocracy”, you get the impression that the whole of Italy has been sent to Mike Judge’s future world. We meet a 26 year old machinist named Rick Canelli who is practicing karate moves on the front lawn of the house he shares with his mother. After he is finished with his work-out, he tells us that unless you appear on television in Italy, you are nothing. Or more exactly, you are condemned to do work as a machinist or whatever capitalist society has assigned you to do as a function of class origins and education. Canelli dreams of being a contestant on what appears to be the Italian version of American Idol, on one of the three private stations owned by Berlusconi. (He also controls the public stations by virtue of being prime minister. All in all, he has 90 percent of the airwaves locked up.)

Canelli says that he will be the first person on TV ever to combine martial arts moves and singing like Ricky Martin. He says that he can be the next Jean Van Damme, but with singing. After we see him auditioning, it is clear that he can sing just about as well as Van Damme. Like most people who audition for such shows (including American Idol, now in its 9^th execrable season), he has no idea of how bad he is. But nevertheless they try out because the reality of being a machinist or a nurse for the rest of their lives is unbearable. It is Berlusconi’s dubious distinction to have made what appears to be all of Italy hungering for the chance to be on television in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s 1968 observation that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In Berlusconi’s Italy, that observation seems truer than ever.

After meeting Cantelli, we meet somebody at the top of the food chain, one Lele Mora, an unpleasantly plump middle-aged man dressed habitually in white, who is Italy’s most powerful television talent agent and a long-time friend of Berlusconi. Gandini interviews him at his palatial estate on the island of Sardinia where he offers up typical insider show biz chatter of the type you might hear on the Jay Leno show, but things take a distinctly sinister turn when Mora confesses, with not a moment’s hesitation, that he is a big fan of Mussolini and then proceeds to play a music video of a fascist anthem, swastikas and all, on his cell phone.

We next meet Fabrizio Corona, a young former protégé and employee of Mora who is heavily tattooed and muscled. He looks like a Calvin Klein model and sounds like an Italian version of Simon Cowell but with fewer scruples. Corona is a new kind of paparazzi who makes his money selling compromising photos back to the celebrities who are his victims. Corona says that he resolved to start such a career because the celebrities he was meeting through Mora were nothing but idiots. You can only conclude that he is an excellent position to judge such people in “it takes one to know one” terms. He also describes himself as a modern-day Robin Hood since he steals from the rich and keeps the money.

Although I can recommend Gandini’s documentary as a piquant introduction to some of the gargoyles who sit on top of Italy’s celebrity-driven mass media today, the movie does not really dig too deep into the underlying social and political reality that has put Berlusconi in the driver’s seat.

For that you need to consult some of the long-time radical observers of the Italian political scene like historian Paul Ginsborg and journalist Alexander Stille who have both written biographies of Berlusconi. Stille is also the author of “Excellent Cadavers”, a study of the Sicilian Mafia that was turned into an excellent documentary that he narrated.

In the May-June 2003 New Left Review article titled “The Patrimonial Ambitions of Silvio B”, Ginsborg explains how the sleazy politician/media mogul took advantage of the sexism that pervades Italian society:

Another strong connexion between Christian Democracy and the House of Liberties, all to the detriment of the Left, lies in the long-term patterns of gender voting. After the war the culture of the Church and that of Italian women overlapped in a very strong way. It was with some trepidation that both the French and the Italian Left had agreed to universal suffrage in the period 1945–47. Nearly sixty years later, women over the age of 55 and those who are practising Catholics still show a very marked preference for the centre-right. However, the pattern of women’s voting in the 2001 elections is not limited to this unsurprising fact. An extraordinary 44.8 per cent of housewives—in themselves a significant social category, given the low percentages of female occupation in Italy—voted not just for the centre-right but specifically for Forza Italia. Furthermore, the more television women watched, the more they showed a propensity to vote for Silvio Berlusconi. 42.3 per cent of those who watched more than three hours a day voted for Forza Italia, compared to 31.6 per cent of those who only watched between one or two hours daily. The connexions between housework and the advertising of commodities, between the consumption of goods and the formation of subjectivities, between female viewing and the packaged messages of the charismatic male political figure, are here to be found in striking form.

For his part, Stille supplies crucial information about the dirty role played by the Italian Socialist Party leader in enabling Berlusconi’s rise to power in a Nation Magazine article titled “Emperor of the Air” from November 29, 1999:

Squeezed on the judicial and financial fronts, Berlusconi launched a political campaign that took Italy by storm. He combined telegenic charm, can-do entrepreneurial rhetoric and a confident “It’s morning in Italy” smile. Berlusconi was anything but a political outsider: He needed to enter politics because party protection had always been central to his entrepreneurial success. As a young real estate developer in the early seventies, Berlusconi convinced politicians to reroute the flight patterns of a Milan airport, turning a noisy and unattractive piece of real estate into a financial gold mine. In his rise as a real estate and, later, media mogul, Berlusconi was provided critical assistance by Bettino Craxi, whose ascent to the top of the Italian Socialist Party coincided with Berlusconi’s own rising prominence. Craxi built the Socialist Party on a vast system of political patronage and bribery that financed the party and feathered his own nest.

Various judicial authorities saw through the ruse and tried to shut down Berlusconi’s operation. When the battle came to a head and Fininvest was threatened with a court-ordered blackout, Craxi, then prime minister, issued a special decree keeping Berlusconi’s television stations on the air. Berlusconi’s gratitude was expressed in several ways. He made Craxi the best man at his wedding to his second wife. And prosecutors in Milan have located at least” $6 million that was moved from foreign bank accounts belonging to Fininvest to bank accounts in Tunisia they insist are controlled by Craxi.

Although it is beyond the scope of this review, it should be mentioned that Berlusconi’s rise to power has been made easier by the fecklessness of the Italian left, of which the Socialists are one of the main components.

A promising new left party called Rifondazione Comunista made the mistake of forming a coalition government with the Socialists and bourgeois parties headed by one Romano Prodi. This bourgeois politician, serving possibly as an inspiration for Barack Obama, then proceeded to use his leftist backing as a way to pass legislation that led to the deployment of Italian troops in Lebanon in 2006. The disillusionment of the left in this umpteenth attempt at a popular front led to Berlusconi’s election. Like the U.S., Italian politics appears mired in videocracy (cf. Mayor Bloomberg) and lesser-evil Sisyphean frustrations.

Cairo Station

With the raw energy of a stampeding bull, Youssef Chahine’s 1958 “Cairo Station” (Bab el hadid)—now available from Netflix—is a good introduction to one of Egypt’s great directors hitherto unknown to me. In his compassion for the lower classes, Chahine would remind one of his contemporary Naguib Mahfouz, who also ran afoul of government repression and religious fundamentalism over a long career. Indeed, the two men collaborated in 1963 to make “Saladin”, a movie that implicitly likened the 12^th century defender of Arab sovereignty to President Nasser, a hero to the two progressive-minded nationalists and defenders of Egyptian culture.

Youssef Chahine: a great director

Set on location in Cairo’s main railway station, the movie tells the story of the lower depths of Egyptian society: the soft-drink vendors, luggage porters and newsboys who are in a struggle for survival. One of the newsboys, a grown man actually, is Qinawi, played by the director. When sleeping on the street as a young arrival from the countryside, he is discovered by an older man who runs a refreshment stand in the station and who then sets him up in a shack and with a job selling papers. The older man, not religious by any means, is shocked to discover one day that Qinawi has covered the walls of the shack with pictures of scantily-clad women—what we used to call cheesecake in the 1950s.

Qinawi walks with a limp and is generally shunned by the other denizens of the station who sense that he is off, particularly Hanuma (Hind Rostom), a soft drink seller who resists his sweaty advances. In general, she treats him as the butt of her cruel jokes even as she enjoys his flattery. She is engaged to Abou Seri (Farid Shawqi), a brawny porter with a striking resemblance not only to Anthony Quinn but to the blustering macho figure that Quinn often played. The love triangle of these three figures will not only evoke “Pagliacci” but Todd Browning’s “Freaks”.

If the primary focus of the movie is on the tortured psyche of Qinawi, who is eventually driven to homicidal actions, it is also a remarkable study of Egypt at a particular time and place. In one scene that evokes Fellini, Hanuma has run into a group of musicians playing rock and roll with a guitar and an accordion in a railway car where she is peddling lemonade. As she proceeds to dance with open sexual energy, you immediately understand why Chahine rubbed Egypt’s clerical bosses the wrong way. The entire movie, in fact, is a study in hormone energy—you almost expect a young Elvis to come swaggering through the station.

Rock and Roll in “Cairo Station”

Qinawi professes his love for Hanuma

The movie also points to the deep changes taking place in Egyptian society at the time as a group of feminists rally outside a railway car where a spokeswoman for the cause dressed in what looks like a man’s suit is delivering a speech. A major subplot of the movie involves Hanuma’s fiancée, the porter Abou Seri, trying to organize the porters into a union with the help of a government agency. Apparently, Nasser had some interest in winning working class support even though he never would stand for working class independence.

Although the story in itself would be sufficient to engage any movie-lover, there are stylistic aspects to “Cairo Station” that elevate it to the top ranks of movie-making. Using the palette of neorealism, Chahine draws out as much poetry from the streets of Cairo as Vittorio De Sica did from the streets of Rome. If the movie is Italian opera of the 19^th century dramatically, it is austere neorealism of the post-WWII era in visual terms.

Chahine lived from 1925 to 1988. In 1947 his parents allowed him to study acting in Pasadena, California where he obviously became exposed to Hollywood movie-making techniques. In an example of globalization at its best, he wedded Hollywood conventions to the story-telling traditions of his homeland. Describing his work, he once said, “I make my films first for myself. Then for my family. Then for Alexandria. Then for Egypt. If the Arab world likes them, ahlan wa sahlan (welcome). If the foreign audience likes them, they are doubly welcome.”

(The quote is from the excellent wiki article on Chahine.)

A July 28, 2008 NY Times obituary for Chahine provided more information:

Youssef Chahine (pronounced Sha-HEEN) was born into a Christian family in Alexandria on Jan. 25, 1926. His mother was of Greek descent, his father Lebanese, a mixed heritage representative of the city’s long history as a Mediterranean melting pot where various faiths and languages mingled and flourished. Alexandria was the subject of four films Mr. Chahine made from 1979 to 2004: ”Alexandria … Why?,” ”An Egyptian Story,” ”Alexandria Again and Again” and ”Alexandria … New York” — a tetralogy that many critics regard as his finest work.

Mr. Chahine attended Victoria College for a year and then left Egypt for California, where he studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and acquired a taste for American movie musicals. Returning to Egypt, he began a period of prolific cinematic activity and accelerating success. In 1951, he was invited to the Cannes Film Festival to show ”Nile Boy,” the beginning of a long relationship that would culminate in 1997, when he received a special award commemorating the festival’s 50th anniversary. He is widely credited with discovering Omar Sharif, who played the lead in Mr. Chahine’s 1954 film, ”The Blazing Sun.” The director’s own artistic breakthrough came a few years later with ”Cairo Station,” a complex drama notable at the time for its frank exploration of sexual behavior and psychology.

It is also a hard film to categorize, and thus typical of Mr. Chahine’s oeuvre. The critic Elliott Stein described ”Cairo Station” as ”an idiosyncratic mixture of neorealist social commentary, grotesque horror, and lighthearted comedy.” ”Idiosyncratic mixture” is an apt summary of the director’s mature style, which also incorporated musical numbers, sudden changes of tone and, when the mood struck and the technology allowed, computer-generated special effects.

Running through this eclecticism were a consistent engagement with the realities of Egyptian life and an often impatient sense of the nation’s resistance to progress. ”You can’t be an artist if you don’t know the social, the political and the economical context,” he said in a 2006 interview with a German Web site. ”If you talk about the Egyptian people, you must know about their problems. Either you are with modernity or you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.’

Finally, a word should be said about the excellent Typecast Production Company that is responsible for making this great movie available as a dvd with a terrific extra short featuring Youssef Chahine taking you on a tour of Cairo. This is the same company that has released the documentary on Norman Finkelstein that I will be reviewing soon. Good work, Typecast!

Youssef Chahine website

Iranian hip-hop

(Hat tip to Mike Ely)