A-Infos (en) US, Boston, Anti Authoritarian Movement - BAAM Extra edition: - A World Without Borders By David Barsamian - An interview with Howard Zinn.

Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, is perhaps this country’s premier 
radical historian. He was an active figure in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War 
movements of the 1960s. Today, he speaks all over the country to large and enthusiastic 
audiences. His book, A People’s History of the U.S. continues to sell in huge numbers. His 
latest work is Original Zinn. ---- Barsamian: Donald Macedo, in the introduction to On 
Democratic Education, mentions the Tom Paxton song, “What Did You Learn in School Today?” 
He quotes a couple of the lyrics.”I learned that Washington never told a lie/I learned 
that soldiers seldom die/I learned that everybody’s free.” What does a democratic 
education mean to you? ---- Zinn: To me, a democratic education means many things: it 
means what you learn in the classroom and what you learn outside the classroom. It means 
not only the content of what you learn, but also the atmosphere in
which you learn it and the relationship between
teacher and student. All of these elements of
education can be democratic or undemocratic.
Students as citizens in a democracy have
the right to determine their lives and to play a
role in society. A democratic education should
give students the kind of information that will
enable them to have power of their own in so-
ciety. What that means is to give students the
kind of education that suggests to the students
that historically there have been many ways
in which ordinary people can play a part in
making history, in the development of their
society. An education that gives the student
examples in history of where people have
shown their power in reshaping not only their
own lives, but also in how society works.
In the relationship between the student and
the teacher there is democracy. The student
has a right to challenge the teacher, to ex-
press ideas of his or her own. That education
is an interchange between the experiences of
the teacher, which may be far greater than
the student in certain ways, and the experi-
ences of the student, since every student has a
unique life experience. So the free inquiry in
the classroom, a spirit of equality in the class-
room, is part of a democratic education.
It was very important to make it clear to
my students that I didn’t know everything,
that I was not born with the knowledge that
I’m imparting to them, that knowledge is ac-
quired and in ways in which the student can
acquire also.
Barsamian: How do you as a teacher foster
that sense of questioning and skepticism and
how do you avoid its going over to cynicism?
Zinn: Skepticism is one of the most im-
portant qualities that you can encourage. It
arises from having students realize that what
has been seen as holy is not holy, what has
been revered is not necessarily to be revered.
That the acts of the nation which have been
romanticized and idealized, those deserve to
be scrutinized and looked at critically.
I remember that a friend of mine was teach-
ing his kids in middle school to be skeptical of
what they had learned about Columbus as the
great hero and liberator, expander of civiliza-
tion. One of his students said to him, “Well,
if I have been so misled about Columbus, I
wonder now what else have I been misled
about?” So that is education in skepticism.
Barsamian: When you taught at Spelman
College, and later at Boston University, you
were teaching kids just coming out of high
school. They come with a lot of baggage, a
lot of embedded ideas. How difficult was it
for you to reach them?
Zinn: In the case of teaching at Spelman
College, my students were African Ameri-
can and I was one of a few white teachers.
For most of my students I was the first white
teacher they had ever encountered.
I tried to have them realize that my values
and ideas were different from those of the
white-supremacist society they had grown up
in, that I believed in the equality of human be-
ings, and that I took the claims of democracy
seriously, not only to try to break down the
barrier between us by what I said in the class-
room, but by how I behaved toward them, by
not indicating that their education had been
poor, which it very often was, by not mak-
ing them feel that they were coming into this
classroom handicapped.
Also by showing them that outside the
classroom I was involved in the social strug-
gle that related to their lives. When they de-
cided to participate in this struggle and go
to Atlanta and try to desegregate the public
library or when they decided to follow the
example of the four students in Greensboro,
North Carolina and sit in, I was with them, I
was supporting them, I was helping them, I
was walking on picket lines with them, I was
engaging in demonstrations with them, I was
sitting in with them. More than anything, I
tried to create an atmosphere of democracy in
our relationship.
Barsamian: You’ve been a lifelong reader
from the time when as a kid you found Tarzan
and the Jewels of Opar in the street with the
first few pages torn out. Later, your parents got
you the complete collection of Charles Dick-
ens’s novels. What’s the value of reading?
Zinn: I don’t know if my experience agrees
with the experience of other people-I have
talked to people, young people especially,
who would say to me, “This book changed
my life.” I remember sitting in a cafeteria in
Hawaii across from a student at the Universi-
ty of Hawaii and she had a copy of The Color
Purple by Alice Walker. Since Alice Walker
had been my student at Spelman, I didn’t im-
mediately say, “That’s my student.” I sort of
cautiously said, “Oh, you’re reading The Col-
or Purple. What do you think of it?” The stu-
dent said, “This book changed my life.” And
that startled me, a book that changed your life.
And also, I must say, in all modesty, that I
have run into a number of students who have
read A People’s History of the United States,
and who’ve said, in ways that I first did not
believe but I’m almost beginning to believe
now, “You know, your book changed my life.”
There are books that have changed my
life. I think reading Dickens changed my life.
Reading Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
changed my life. Reading Upton Sinclair,
yes, changed my life.
...Barsamian: The economist John Kenneth
Galbraith once said that the paradox of the
U.S. was “private wealth and public squalor.”
There is a story on page 16 in the New York
Times describing how in John Steinbeck’s
hometown of Salinas, California where they’re
facing record deficits. The town is closing the
three public libraries, including those named
for Steinbeck and one for Cesar Chavez.
Zinn: It’s interesting that that item ap-
peared on page 16. It should have appeared
on page 1 because it might have alerted more
people to what is a horrifying development
today. What is happening in Salinas, Califor-
nia, should be a wake-up call.
Barsamian: But this attack on libraries, on
schools, is it part of a pattern of undermining
the commons?
Zinn: Let me interject my own personal
note because I grew up in a cockroach-in-
fested tenement in New York and we had no
books in our house. I would go to a library
in East New York on the corner of Stone and
Sutter. I still remember that library. That was
my refuge. It was a wonderful eye-opener and
mind-opener for me.
But your question is a larger one. And that
is, what is happening to the public commons?
That is what Galbraith pointed to when he
wrote The Affluent Society. What has been re-
ally one of the terrible consequences of the
militarization of the country is the starving of
the public sector, education, libraries, health,
housing. This is why people become social-
ists. People become socialists in the way that
I became a socialist when I read Upton Sin-
clair and when I read Karl Marx.
Barsamian: There are lots of distortions
and misrepresentations attached to Marx.
Should people be reading Marx today?
Zinn: Yes, but I wouldn’t advise them to
immediately plunge into Volume II or III
of Das Kapital, maybe not even Volume I,
which is formidable. But I think The Commu-
nist Manifesto, although the title may scare
people, is still very much worth reading be-
cause what it does is suggest that the capital-
ist society we have today is not eternal. The
Communist Manifesto presents an historical
view of the world in which we live. It shows
you that societies have evolved from one
form to another, one social system to another,
from primitive communal societies to feudal
societies to capitalist societies. That capitalist
society has only come into being in the last
few hundreds years and it came into being as
a result of the failure of feudal society to deal
with the change in technology which was in-
exorably happening-the commercialization,
industrialization, new tools and implements.
Capitalist society was able to deal with this
new technology and to
enhance it enormously.
But
what
Marx
pointed out-and I think
this is a very important
insight-is that capitalist
society, while it’s de-
veloped the economy
in an impressive way,
nevertheless did not
distribute the results of
this enormous produc-
tion equitably. So Marx
pointed to a fundamen-
tal flaw in capitalism,
a flaw that should be
evident to people today,
especially in the U.S.
Here is this enormously
productive and advanced technological coun-
try and yet more than forty-five million peo-
ple are without health insurance, one out of
five children grow up in poverty, and millions
of people are homeless and hungry.
I think another thing that would be important
is Marx’s view that when you look beneath the
surface of political conflicts or cultural con-
flicts, you find class conflict. That the impor-
tant question to ask in any situation is, “Who
benefits from this, what class benefits from
this?” If Americans understood this Marxian
concept of class then, when they went to the
polls and they had to choose between the Re-
publican and Democratic Party, they would
ask, “Which class does this party represent?”
Barsamian: There was a parade in Taos,
New Mexico on February 15, 2003. The lead
banner read, “No Flag Is Large Enough to
Cover the Shame of Killing Innocent People.”
That’s a quote from you. How is patriotism
being used today?
Zinn:  Patriotism is being used today the
way patriotism has always been used and that
is to try to encircle everybody in the nation
into a common cause, the cause being the
support of war and the advance of national power.
Patriotism is used to create the illusion of
a common interest that everybody in the
country has.
I just mentioned about the necessity to see society
in class terms, to realize that we do not
have a common interest in our society, that
people have different interests. What patrio-
tism does is to pretend to a common interest.
And the flag is the symbol of that common in-
terest. So patriotism plays the same role that
certain phrases in our national language play.
Barsamian: The U.S. is the only country
in history to use weapons of mass destruction.
The year 2005 marked the 60th anniversary
of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That anniversary, incidentally, came amid
reports that the U.S. was redesigning atomic
weapons that would be sturdier and more re-
liable and last longer. Where were you when
the bombs were dropped and what were your
thoughts at the time?
Zinn:  I remember it very clearly because
I had just returned from flying bombing mis-
sions in Europe. The war in Europe was over,
but the war in Asia with Japan was still on.
We flew back to this country in late July 1945.
We were given a 30-day furlough before re-
porting back for duty with the intention that
we would then go to the Pacific and continue
in the air war against Japan.
We were there waiting at the bus stop and
there was this newsstand and the big head-
line, “Atomic Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima.”
Because the headline was so big, although
I didn’t know what an atomic bomb was, I
assumed it must be a huge bomb. And my
immediate reaction was, well, maybe then I
won’t have to go to Japan. Maybe this means
the end of the war on Japan. So I was happy.
I began to question the bombing of Hiro-
shima when I read John Hersey’s book, Hiro-
shima, which is based on a series of articles
he wrote for the New Yorker. He had gone
to Hiroshima after the bombing and spo-
ken to survivors. You can imagine what the
survivors looked like-people without arms,
legs, blinded, their skin something that you
couldn’t bear to look at. Hersey spoke to
these survivors and wrote down their stories.
When I read that, for the first time the effects
of bombing on human beings came to me.
I had dropped bombs in Europe, but I had
not seen anybody on the ground because
when you’re bombing from 30,000 feet, you
don’t see anybody, you don’t hear screams,
you don’t see blood, you don’t know what’s
happening to human beings. When I read John
Hersey, it came to me, what bombing did to
human beings. That book changed my idea
not just about bombing, but it changed my
view of war because it made me realize that
war now, in our time, in the time of high-level
bombing and long-range shelling and death at
a distance inevitably means the indiscriminate
killing of huge numbers of people and cannot
be accepted as a way of solving problems.
Barsamian: You’re sometimes described
as an anarchist and/or a democratic socialist.
Are you comfortable with those terms? And
what do they mean to you?
Zinn: How comfortable I am with those
terms depends on who’s using them. I’m
not uncomfortable when you use them. But if
somebody is using them who I suspect does
not really know what those terms
mean, then I feel uncomfortable because I feel
they need clarification. After all, the term
anarchist to so many people means somebody who
throws bombs, who commits terrorist acts,
who believes in violence. Oddly enough, the term
anarchist has always applied to individuals
who have used violence, but not to govern-
ments that use violence. Since I do not believe
in throwing bombs or terrorism or violence, I
don’t want that definition of anarchism to ap-
ply to me.
Anarchism is also misrepresented as being
a society in which there is no organization,
no responsibility, just a kind of chaos, again,
not realizing the irony of a world that is very
chaotic, but to which the word anarchism is
not applied.
Anarchism to me means a society in which
you have a democratic organization of so-
ciety-decision making, the economy-and in
which the authority of the capitalist is no lon-
ger there, the authority of the police and the
courts and all of the instruments of control
that we have in modern society, in which they
do not operate to control the actions of peo-
ple, and in which people have a say in their
own destinies, in which they’re not forced to
choose between two political parties, neither
of which represents their interests. So I see
anarchism as meaning both political and eco-
nomic democracy, in the best sense of the term.
I see socialism, which is another term that
I would accept comfortably, as meaning not
the police state of the Soviet Union. After all,
the word socialism has been commandeered
by too many people who, in my opinion, are
not socialists but totalitarians. To me, social-
ism means a society that is egalitarian and in
which the economy is geared to human needs
instead of business profits.
Barsamian: The theme of the World So-
cial Forum, which is held annually, is “An-
other World Is Possible.” If you were to close
your eyes for a moment, what kind of world
might you envision?

Zinn: The world that I envision is one in
which national boundaries no longer exist,
in which you can move from one country to
another with the same ease in which we can
move from Massachusetts to Connecticut, a
world without passports or visas or immigra-
tion quotas. True globalization in the human
sense, in which we recognize that the world is
one and that human beings everywhere have
the same rights.
In a world like that you could not make war
because it is your family, just as we are not
thinking of making war on an adjoining state
or even a far-off state. It would be a world
in which the riches of the planet would be
distributed in an equitable fashion, where ev-
erybody has access to clean water. Yes, that
would take some organization to make sure
that the riches of the earth are distributed ac-
cording to human need.
A world in which people are free to speak,
a world in which there was a true bill of
rights. A world in which people had their
fundamental economic needs taken care of
would be a world in which people were freer
to express themselves because political rights
and free speech rights are really dependent on
economic status and having fundamental eco-
nomic needs taken care of.
I think it would be a world in which the
boundaries of race and religion and nation
would not become causes for antagonism.
Even though there would still be cultural dif-
ferences and still be language differences,
there would not be causes for violent action
of one against the other.
I think it would be a world in which people
would not have to work more than a few hours
a day, which is possible with the technology
available today. If this technology were not
used in the way it is now used, for war and for
wasteful activities, people could work three
or four hours a day and produce enough to
take care of any needs. So it would be a world
in which people had more time for music and
sports and literature and just living in a hu-
man way with others.
Barsamian: You’ve said that you became
a teacher for a very modest reason: “I wanted
to change the world.” How close have you
come to achieving your goal?
Zinn: All I can say is, I hope that by my
writing and speaking and my activity that I
have moved at least a few people towards a
greater understanding and moved at least a
few people towards becoming more active
citizens. So I feel that my contribution, along
with the contribution of millions of other peo-
ple, if they continue, and if they are passed on
to more and more people, and if our numbers
grow, yes, one day we may very well see the
kind of world that I envision.

See also:
http://Baamboston.org
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