Dear Friends,

Howard Zinn inspired many throughout the movement for peace and
social justice to raise our voices, speak out, and organize. For the last
two Sundays a group of local activists has come together to organize a celebration of his contributions as well as the causes that he supported. We decided we would like to hold an activity on March 6 which would have an outdoor as well as indoor character; an activity where everyone was invited, a “peoples celebration” of sorts. Our next planning meeting
is scheduled for this Sunday at 12:00 PM to work through more of the details. Everyone is invited so please spread the word.

City-wide Planning Meeting

Sunday, February 21, 12:00 PM
Encuentro 5
33 Harrison Avenue, 5th Floor
Boston, MA
(Chinatown Stop on the Orange Line T)

On the other hand, another part of me thinks that Zinn was a little too facile in setting up a moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union.

http://libcom.org/history/world-war-ii-peoples-war-howard-zinn

The victors were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work—without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but under the cover of “socialism” on one side, and “democracy” on the other, to carve out their own empires of influence. They proceeded to share and contest with one another the domination of the world, to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to do. They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques-crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States—to make their rule secure.

All of that is certainly true, but what it doesn’t acknowledge is that the American and English people paid a fairly small price for beating Hitler. The Russian people, on the other hand, not Stalin but the Russian people, paid an enormous price. To be an out and out pacifist about the Second World War neglects to honor the 20 million Russians who died fighting Hitler.

I may be one of the only people I know to have read the unabridged version of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, but I think that Hugo manages to capture the irony of reactionary powers beating a tyrant almost perfectly.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm

England has been too modest in the matter of Wellington. To make Wellington so great is to belittle England. Wellington is nothing but a hero like many another. Those Scotch Grays, those Horse Guards, those regiments of Maitland and of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack and Kempt, that cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders playing the pibroch under the shower of grape-shot, those battalions of Rylandt, those utterly raw recruits, who hardly knew how to handle a musket holding their own against Essling’s and Rivoli’s old troops,—that is what was grand. Wellington was tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we are not seeking to lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and of his cavalry would have been as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth as much as the Iron Duke. As for us, all our glorification goes to the English soldier, to the English army, to the English people. If trophy there be, it is to England that the trophy is due. The column of Waterloo would be more just, if, instead of the figure of a man, it bore on high the statue of a people. But this great England will be angry at what we are saying here. She still cherishes, after her own 1688 and our 1789, the feudal illusion. She believes in heredity and hierarchy. This people, surpassed by none in power and glory, regards itself as a nation, and not as a people. And as a people, it willingly subordinates itself and takes a lord for its head. As a workman, it allows itself to be disdained; as a soldier, it allows itself to be flogged.

The English people beat Napoleon only to go home to be rules by their aristocracy. The Russian, American and English people beat Hitler only to go home to the Cold War.

He has a deep impact on a generation of people. Many had never heard about some of the stories he told. They were inspired and this history took them to awhole new way of looking at the world.

He will be missed.

He really wrote magnificent chapters of history untold till then.

I’m still reading his book.

I think it is worth understanding the power of Zinn’s SNCC experience — the mass radical organization that led so much of the most militant and daring organizing in Mississippi.

This was a model of organizing, and of relating to the people that was highly influential (in SDS and the new communist movement), and that embodied a particular sense of radical democracy, base organizing, and high unapologetic non-respectable moral plane.

He was one of the few radicals of his generation who was not infatuated with the U.S. role in world war 2, and who came out of that war more radical (not more patriotic). And there he broke in many ways with the trajectory of the CPUSA (that was such a defining force for his generation).

He was in many ways a radical pacifiist in his approach to modern war — seeing clearly how modern war was one of the great horrors of capitalism’s merger with vast industrial power.