Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train – (2004) A documentary of historian and activist Howard Zinn, who speaks for himself, is narrated by Matt Damon. Howard Zinn says that his parents’ cold-water flat had no books; the first book he read, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs, he found in the street. He later found political consciousness in the street at Times Square when he was 17 and in the midst of a Communist demonstration: a cop knocked him unconscious. A year later he went to work in the shipyard, building landing craft, and before the end of World War II he’d earned his wings as a lieutenant in the Air Force with which he dropped bombs and napalm (first use in the European theater) on Germans. After the war he married Roz, raised two children in low-income housing, worked in a warehouse, and eventually earned a PhD in history from Columbia University in 1956.

Woody Guthrie’s song about the Ludlow massacre fed his moral outrage, and his scholarship gradually revealed that what he had been taught in graduate school differed in viewpoint from what he’d learned in elementary school only in that graduate studies included footnotes. Next he accepted a teaching position at Spelman College, a college for black Americans, in Atlanta, where he inspired students such as Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman with his challenge to achieve justice with aggressive struggle and honesty but without violence. His students joined sit-ins and peaceful demonstrations in opposition to racial segregation; the college administration dismissed him from the faculty. J. Edgar Hoover’s agents kept an eye on him for his criticisms of the Eisenhower administration and the FBI.

An undercurrent of anger at the worst abuses of American capitalism ran through his thinking and writing as he focused on racial and economic injustices in his books: The New Abolitionist (1964) and Disobedience and Democracy (1968). Civil disobedience was necessary for a democracy to remain valid, especially at times of war. In 1968 Zinn and Daniel Berrigan responded to the North Vietnamese offer to release three American airmen captured in Laos if representatives from the peace movement would come to claim them. During his visit to Southeast Asia, Zinn experienced what being bombed was like after having been a bomber pilot. The US ambassador to Laos, Robert Sullivan, interfered and mishandled the transfer of prisoners.

Tom Hayden, Daniel Ellsberg (one must tell the truth to save lives), Noam Choamsky, and others provide commentary. At Boston University, Zinn prepared his students with the intellectual justification for resistance to the war: direct action is required because waiting for something or someone else is neutral, passive behavior, tantamount to collaboration with the warmongers, with the men who have placed their faith in weapons and bombs rather than in peace. “The wrong people are in power; the wrong people are in jail,” he told them, which led to a confrontation with university president John Silber. He taught that laws are merely rules invented by mortals who then expect people to treat them as holy writ.

“Wars are always accompanied by lies … deception.” Euphemisms such as “’collateral damage’ is the language of terrorism,” he told students rallying against George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Therefore, we need our freedom of speech to protest the demagoguery of the establishment. Fear of speaking out is a crippling of democracy. Instead of contributing billions of dollars to wars, we should be spending our tax dollars on universal health care, welfare, education, decent wages, and a clean environment. “Don’t ask who deserves it,” says the protagonist in his play Marx in Soho, “every human being deserves it.”

His widely-read 1980 publication A People’s History of the United States provides alternative viewpoints of the events that make up our national story from Amerindians, socialists, blacks, people’s movements, and others, exposing “the hidden episodes of the past” and resistance to power. In Declarations of Independence (1991) he wrote of resistance to orthodoxy, arguing that compassion and kindness were alternatives to cruelty. In a recent clip Zinn asks us if we feel as though we reside in an occupied country ruled by aliens.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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