Agin' 'Em

To say that Howard Zinn's 1980 book A People's History of the United States has detractors undersells the widespread work of polemicists, opinion writers and historians right and left who question its scholarship, aims and the honesty of its author. Zinn was a political science professor at Boston University when he wrote the book that would define the rest of his life. He said he intended it to counter the kind of historical narrative that only focused on the powerful, political and economic elites and the winners. He wanted a history that told the stories of the people that those traditional narratives overlooked.

Almost immediately, the book would draw rabid praise and cold-eyed criticism. As expected, conservative-leaning intellectuals dismissed Zinn's class-struggle based iconoclasm. But a number of centrist and left-leaning historians also pointed out that Zinn had only inverted the hero-villain narratives of the histories he disliked rather than corrected them. The vision of history in People's History was just as simplistic, they said, and Zinn's zeal to lift up what he saw as oppressed classes led him to omit information that might suggest a more nuanced history.

Nevertheless, excellent publicity and strong financial support have kept Zinn's book and his work at the forefront of academic debate -- its use in high school classes is frequently targeted even today. That's why 2019 can see something like Mary Grabar's Debunking Howard Zinn, a 350-page fisking of Zinn's 40-year-old book. Grabar, a longtime English professor who now works with the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, takes a couple of chapters to outline the popularity of People's History before diving into its text and errors.

Although not herself a historian, Grabar is a scholar and mostly follows standard academic practice in Debunking. She extensively footnotes her work and relies on a wide range of attributed sources -- something Zinn himself did less well at. It's certainly a book that Zinn detractors and folks interested in more honest history should keep for ready access. Grabar's meticulous dissection makes it easy to point out what the professor got wrong, where he may very likely have plagiarized other work and where he ignored clear evidence from his own cited works that says the opposite of what he says it does.

But as a work in its own right, Debunking's polemic tone begins to take on the air of a rather heated PowerPoint presentation. Fisking is fun at first but since Zinn isn't all that creative in his errors Grabar is also stuck repeating herself. The world will be a better place when A People's History winds up in the dustbin of the same and scholars like Mary Grabar can turn their attention to more interesting topics.

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Starting in 1967, MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky began his blizzard of brief books and pamphlets about the United States, its history and its politics. At the risk of eliding the hundreds of thousands of words he's put into print, let's just say he holds a negative view of all three.

Writers Peter Collier and David Horowitz began as leftists like Chomsky, but over time migrated to the right, while keeping their laser-intense focus and gift for highly charged writing. In 2004, they collected several essays by historians, political scientists and opinion writers -- and Horowitz contributed a pair himself -- dissecting Chomsky's viewpoints and analysis. They also collected two essays about Chomsky's professional field of linguistics and linguistic analysis. At the risk of eliding the thousands of words they put into print, let's just say they hold a negative view of almost every bit of his work.

Specific targets include Chomsky's view of the actual heroes and villains of the United States' involvement in southeast Asia, his analysis of the true causes as well as the heroes and villains of the Cold War, and the actual reasons behind the September 11, 2001 attacks and some of the subsequent conflict as it was happening in that time.

According to the contributors to this Anti-Chomsky Reader, Chomsky believes the only reason something wrong with the world isn't the United States' fault is because Israel beat them to it. Both, and to a lesser extent some western European nations, cause most of the trouble in the world as ways to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. Nearly every American action is seen as a way for wealthy elitists, industrialists and other such power brokers to strengthen or maintain their grip on the reins of power. Pre-USSR collapse, the good guys in the story were the world's Communist dictatorships; now it's a rotating cast of whoever Chomsky believes is getting picked on or bullied by the United States.

These essays also start to wear thin, although their authors are surveying a body of work rather than one book. The Reader could be a useful reference work when countering some of Chomsky's own work on the subjects in question but turns into a kind of heavy slog. The linguistics section presupposes the average reader knows quite a bit about the subject and can leave that reader wondering just what's being written about beyond the claim that Chomsky's a dishonest hack in his own legitimate field of study, not just politics and history. Like Zinn, Chomsky shows little variation in his errors and thus pointing them out takes on a feeling of sameness as well.