#HowardZinn
#SystemFail
#TopsyTurvy
#DefyAuthority

From Voices of A People's History, edited by Zinn and Arnove

"I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth."...

..."And our topic is topsy-turvy: civil disobedience.

As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience.

That is not our problem.... Our problem is civil obedience.

Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience.

And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war.

Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty.

Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.

That's our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany.

We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler.

People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them.

Even in Stalin's Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people. "...

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnproblemobedience.html

@drsepinwall

Hi.

As you know, there's a book called 'The People's History Of America' by #HowardZinn

Could you refer me to a French History book, which has the same goal? A People's History of France, if you like

Merci

@breadandcircuses
#HowardZinn on the importance of disobedience

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
Howard Zinn

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=H7Zzs-YNjkg

#DemocracyNow
#book #APeoplesHistoryOftheUnitedStates

#HowardZinn

#book, #VoicesOfAPeoplesHistoryOfTheUnitedStates by #HAleyPessin and #AnthonyArnove

I have been reading #HowardZinn's, 'A People's History of the United States' (slowly). It is great, if very sad. What I really like is how clear he is that electoral politics and the two party system is absolutely not in the interest of the working class and poor.

The observation that the two state parties, for all their differences, share and serve a basic set of interests, those of owners of big capital, is trite radical politics. Nevertheless, we see radical movements getting sucked into electoral politics again and again.

I think that this because in the belly of the beast, the US and Europe, revolutionary action seems so impossible and, unfortunately, for a significant proportion of us frightening and undesirable. We prefer to naively belief that this time we will grab control of the party of liberalism. That is what happened with Corbyn or Ocasio Cortes and in slightly different systems Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. The movements are of course either neutered or crushed.

It may also be that we don't have a vision of how we take power. The Marxist Leninists and the Trots are still fantasising about building a giant party of the working class. The Anarchists don't have a serious strategy beyond resistance.

Revolutionary movements outside of the belly tend to get crushed by the beast's jaws.

Today’s Philosophy Unleashed looks at the myth of impartiality: https://www.philosophyunleashed.com/theblog/150-you-cant-be-neutral-on-a-moving-train-gary-lineker-and-the-myth-of-impartiality

#Philosophy #PhilosophyUnleashed #impartiality #GaryLineker #SaraAhmed #HowardZinn

#HowardZinn wrote that,
"If those in charge of our society– politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television– can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves." I don't think it's much of an "IF." We spend most our lives dutifully going to work to produce profit, rent, interest, and taxes for the capitalist class without raising much fuss other than campaigning, voting, or marching in protest that wage employment, rent, and the rest of capitalism are just fine so long as it's fair, livable, and "green." Pretty sure the political and capitalist class have us right where they want us - fixated on their "suggestion box" every November in the name of "Freedom and Democracy," and working hard to chase their capitalist notions of success.

"These [Court] decisions kept wealth at the top of the pyramid. One Supreme Court justice, David J. Brewer, said in 1893, “It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few…”

#HowardZinn

"They have guns, we have poets. Therefore, we will win."

#HowardZinn

“When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.”

#HowardZinn

"The country therefore was not "born free" but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich."

#HowardZinn

“All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act. They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us: in the Revolutionary crisis, the Founding Fathers; in the slavery crisis, Lincoln; in the Depression, Roosevelt; in the Vietnam-Watergate crisis, Carter. And that between occasional crises everything is all right, and it is sufficient for us to be restored to that normal state. They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.”

#HowardZinn

I think part of Howard Zinn's radiance and brilliance came from his astounding ability to make anybody understand how we shouldn't trust 'authority' but always think for ourselves.

#HowardZinn #books #quote #bookstodon @bookstodon

#HowardZinn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG8PC8bsY5Q

#HowardZinn
#CivilDisobedience
#Resistance
#WeThePeople
#SocialJustice
#HumanRights
#Equity
#Peace
#Antiracism
#Community
#BDS
#XR
#ExtinctionRebellion
#ClimateAndEcologicalEmergency

#Corporations
#BillionaireClass
#CorruptPoliticians
#Plutocracy
#Kleptocracy

@Strandjunker

“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world.”

#HowardZinn

24 August 1922, #HowardZinn, #historian , was born.

#DemocracyNow dedicates an hour to #Zinn

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=18OvSra5Di8

#ABuyNothingDaySpecial

On Nov 17, 2022, the world lost Staughton Lynd at the age of 92. His life defies quick sysnopsis. A self-described Quaker-Marxist, he was a historian and peer of Howard Zinn, and with Zinn, taught at Spelman College and was once acting director is the SNCC Freedom School. Relocating to Yale with his wife Alice (who survives him), he was eventually blacklisted from academia due largely to his Vietnam War protest activities. He and Alice began studying and working in law, developing a practice of ‘accompaniment,” which loosely plays out as developing skills (like becoming a lawyer) useful to disenfranchised communities, and offering those services as activism and solidarity within your community. From labor organizing to Palestine, the Lynds placed themselves at the service of radical need.

The quote below is from his remarkable book with Andrew Grubec, “Wobblies & Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism, And Radical History” (2008, PM Press):

“On the one hand folks who consider themselves part the movement need the freedom to experiment, to experiment, to try out organizing ideas. I’m the Sixties I compared it to (a) traveling without a map, (b) planting seeds to see, in the words of the New Testament, which seeds grow and which do not. On the other hand we need methods and moments of drawing the experiences together.

I know something about traveling without a map. I have done it both on foot and by canoe, in each case with my son. It is. It is not so much traveling without a map. There is a map, at least there has been anywhere I have adventured. (One can compare Marxism to the map.) The question is, Where are we? I have climbed over a dangerous ridge because I somehow took the wrong fork at the juncture where the trail divided. I have recognized that we were mistakenly canoeing down an arm of water, exhausted but with the wind behind us, so that we had to turn around and paddle back against the wind.

The metaphor of sowing asks us not to be self-centered. If your organizing project prospers, while mine fails, it may have to do with the soil.”

PM Press #staughtonlynd #freedomschool #union #iww #wobblies #zapatistas #anarchism #rip #HowardZinn

#HowardZinn #historian
1969 speech against the VietNamWar

https://shows.acast.com/jacobin-radio/episodes/howard-zinn-1969-speech-moratorium-end-vietnam-war

#HappyBirthdayHowardZinn
"War Poisons Everybody": Remembering Legendary #Historian #HowardZinn on His 100th Birthday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFmcdWTxyHk