Howard Zinn

Gerechtigkeit sollte die Grundlage allen politischen Handelns sein. Doch was, wenn staatliche Maßnahmen und Gesetze dieser Norm widersprechen? Können dann auch in Demokratien Akte des zivilen Ungehorsams gerechtfertigt sein? Und wenn ja, unter welchen Bedingungen? Dieser Band versammelt erstmals die zentralen Positionen einer Debatte, die von Thoreau über Gandhi und Martin Luther King, über John Rawls, Hannah Arendt und Jürgen Habermas bis zur Occupy-Bewegung führt. Auch kritische Stimmen kommen zu Wort, denen ziviler Ungehorsam mal zu viel, mal zu wenig Widerstand bedeutet.

"Good Will Hunting" is a cultural treatment of two Boston communities—working-class Irish-Catholic immigrants and their descendants; and the landed Protestant establishment—through the story of a boy-genius from a traditionally Irish Catholic neighborhood, South Boston (or Southie). This paper investigates the norms of this subnational imagined community through the filmmaker’s (and screenwriters’) use of language, alcohol consumption, military service, color symbology, and other collective cultural devices, as instruments of social orientation, both for the Irish-Americans and their antitheses, which are made up of Harvard students and one MIT professor. This argument will emphasize the dynamic relations and interconnected discourses that Boston Irish have with the nation’s contemporary process of self-imagining, of forging what are sometimes non-geographic cultural borders, and of projecting a harmonious cohabitation of diverse groups through popular culture.

American prevailing perceptions of the Cold War serve current US national foreign policy process goals that emphasize the expansion of US global influence. The prevailing view in the American polity remains that the Soviet Union was an aggressive, imperialist threat that the US defeated through its containment strategy. The validity of this ultimately self-serving assumption requires critique because Communist state postwar foreign and public policy behavior patterns did not conform with this prevailing position. Failure of the academy generally to predict the remarkably peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union is further evidence that this politically prevailing viewpoint was fundamentally flawed. Current dissent is in effect tied to the New Left that emerged partly as a critique to Cold War assumptions that produced the Vietnam debacle. This article analyzes the political interests that support the prevailing belief that the US nevertheless won the Cold War despite this left dissent. These interests overwhelm current critique of US global dominance that continues to rely on Cold War-era formulated hard power containment prescriptions. By accepting the validity of this assumption that the US won the Cold War, the academy weakens its ability to critique US foreign policy behavior in the so-called war on terror.

A central pillar of contemporary conspiracy theories is the notion that all modern wars were secretely plotted and instigated by the Federal Reserve Bank. In these circles, the founding of the so called "Creature from Jekyll Island" in 1913 is considered a coup d'état of the international haute finance which enabled the U.S.'s entry into World War One a year later and the building of the American Empire. Also right-wing libertarians critical of U.S. foreign interventions like the U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul have led a long struggle to "End the Fed" (as his 2009 book is called), and signs to "End the Fed" could also be seen at demonstrations of the international Occupy movement leading to heated debates and confrontations. Against these conspiracy theories and drawing on key American historians' debates, this paper scrutinizes the actual historical origins of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and shows that the founding of the Federal Reserve took place not in a period of defeat but rather the advance of subaltern social forces and that the Federal Reserve Act is an embodiment of a historic compromise between various social classes and class fractions in the political economy of the United States prior to World War One. Drawing on the theoretical tradition of neo-Gramscianism, the paper argues that the emergence of a U.S. variant of a central bank is best understood in terms of Antonio Gramsci's concept of "trasformismo" which, in an historically open-ended process, created the Federal Reserve and a U.S. variant of "social imperialism" as a result of the "law of unintended consequences" of historical social movements. In other words, the American Empire was not the result of a devious plan by an all-powerful American or transnational ruling class, but rather its Making was the consequence of a political process in which subaltern social forces, unable to fundamentally challenge the existing power structure as such, are co-opted, absorbed and inscribe themselves into that very structure.

In this chapter, I develop a pragmatic defense of critical patriotism, one that recognizes the many personal and social benefits of patriotic sentiment yet which is also infused with a passion for justice. Though the argument is pragmatic given the ubiquity of patriotic sentiment, I argue that critical patriotism
is able to reconcile a love of one’s country with an ardent determination to reform and improve it.

Film & Making Other History studies the ideas informing the creation of a potential counterhegemonic cinema. With a special emphasis on the contributions of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the role of narrative in shaping history appears here as seminal to elaborating an alternative proposal in the fields of historical and biographical film practices.

The work covers a series of questions related to the historical representation of the subaltern and the usage of biographical forms for counterhegemonic purposes. Can alternative approaches to history make use of hegemonic forms for representing the subaltern without being absorbed by hegemony itself? This book rethinks the strategies that could be pursued to achieve this aim through the examination of cultural practices that have faced these inquiries before, such as Latin American testimonial literature and Third Cinema, and an analysis of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X.

Film & Making Other History has been carried out using a practice-led methodology whereby reflections accompany the research and writing process of the film script They Call me Rodolfo Walsh (Me Llaman Rodolfo Walsh), based on the life and work of Argentine desaparecido writer and journalist Rodolfo Walsh, one of the foundational figures of Latin American testimonial literature.
A work of great breadth that includes the relationship between history and film, as well as the problems of representation in these fields, inquiries about memory and trauma, marginalized communities, Latin American cinema, testimonio literature and history, critical theory, subaltern and colonial studies, this work explores the relevant creative challenges confronted in trying to formulate histories about individuals that themselves were involved in questioning official narratives.

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Alejandro Pedregal was born in Spain and is the film director and screenwriter of several award-winning fiction and documentary works that have been shown in festivals around the world. He has taught film analysis at the Academy of Fine Arts of Helsinki and the Department of Film, Television and Scenography of Aalto University as well as in other institutions in Finland, Spain and Latin America.
Alejandro founded the Lens Politica Film and Art Festival in Helsinki in 2005. The purpose was to establish a platform for debating and discussing socially critical and challenging cultural expressions. He was the director of Lens Politica until 2011 and currently continues his collaboration with the festival. He is a founding member of the artistic group La Strategia Corp. (LSC), where he shares duties with Alberto Cubas, and has composed music for several films. Alejandro writes regularly about cinema and politics for magazines and publications in Spain.

Narodna povijest SAD-a doživjela je brojna izdanja i prijevode na mnoge svjetske jezike, izdane su inačice knjige u stripu, tekst je prilagođen najmlađim čitateljima, snimljeni su i dokumentarni filmovi po Zinnovom predlošku, a za pretpostaviti je da će se taj trend nastaviti. Iako je Zinn do smrti napisao dvadesetak knjiga, Narodna povijest ostaje njegovo kapitalno djelo, rad s tendencijom odvažne dekonstrukcije američke povijesti.

Dr Eqbal Ahmad's  'Selected Writings' (Columbia University Press) launched at Harvard University 2006, where I was privileged to be on the panel talking about Dr Ahmad and the causes he championed, with Noam Chomsky, Stuart Schaar, Margaret Cerullo.

My report on the event published in weekly The News on Sunday, Pakistan.

Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon both published contributions to postmodern theory and especially on cultural production and references to history within them. Fredric Jameson postulates a loss of historicity in the Postmodern and references to the past only in form of "pastiche" while Linda Hutcheon arguments that elements of the past used in a context of contemporaneity do indeed generate new expression. Both apply their theories to litterature, architecture and film. In this paper I tried to resume both theories about references to the present and analized this kind of references in the film "También la lluvia" (2010) to confirm or disprove one or both.

American prevailing perceptions of the Cold War serve current US national foreign policy process goals that emphasize the expansion of US global influence. The prevailing view in the American polity remains that the Soviet Union was an aggressive, imperialist threat that the US defeated through its containment strategy. The validity of this ultimately self-serving assumption requires critique because Communist state postwar foreign and public policy behavior patterns did not conform with this prevailing position. Failure of the academy generally to predict the remarkably peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union is further evidence that this politically prevailing viewpoint was fundamentally flawed. Current dissent is in effect tied to the New Left that emerged partly as a critique to Cold War assumptions that produced the Vietnam debacle. This article analyzes the political interests that support the prevailing belief that the US nevertheless won the Cold War despite this left dissent. These interests overwhelm current critique of US global dominance that continues to rely on Cold War-era formulated hard power containment prescriptions. By accepting the validity of this assumption that the US won the Cold War, the academy weakens its ability to critique US foreign policy behavior in the so-called war on terror.

Dos ejemplos de lo que sería la historia no oficial, que no quiere decir que no sea real, sería el documental de Oliver Stone “La historia oculta de los Estados Unidos” y el comic “Una historia popular del imperio americano”, adaptación gráfica del libro de Howard Zinn, “La otra historia de los Estados Unidos”.

Chapter from "Agitation With a Smile: Howard Zinn's Legacies and the Future of Activism" (Routledge 2016, eds. Bird, Silver & Yesnowitz)
Abstract: This article explores the political thought of American historian and political scientist Howard Zinn (1922–2010). In the first part, we argue that Zinn anticipated the emergence of “post-ideological anarchism” that is adopting ideas and principles from classical anarchism flexibly and non-doctrinally, and simultaneously rejecting its traditional forms to construct genuinely new autonomous politics. Intrinsic to this aim is an attempt to show that in Zinn’s explicit interventions in anarchist theory, e.g. Zinn’s syllabi and personal notes, interviews conducted with Zinn over the years, and Zinn’s texts on anarchism, we can find a conceptualization of anarchism as a methodology that without doubt speaks to anarchists in the age of Occupy. In the second part of the article we examine how Zinn’s ‘anarchist’ political theory informs social movement scholarship and reveals the need for a wider epistemological and methodological transformation. According to Zinn, many theoretical concepts and political praxes invented by the newest social movements are too elusive for traditional disciplines, theories and epistemologies and therefore their analysis must be founded on a new, more flexible epistemology and methodology.

Paper was written for class during academic studies.

First Paragraph:

In his work A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn created a controversial narrative utilizing a historiographical approach that continues to challenge the accepted norms and observations of traditional historical scholarly research. By gathering intimate, personal accounts and testimonies of historical events and individuals, as well as utilizing perspectives not normally considered and/or utilized within the historical discipline; Zinn attempted to illuminate facets of American history which (in his opinion) might have been ignored, overlooked, and/or treated with bias, indifference, or even dismissal in previous works by other scholars. More importantly, Zinn attempted to provide a unique perspective – one of normal every-day individuals - to his work attempting to provide a glimpse into the daily lives of people as they were affected by the events happening around them. To say that this work continues to be controversial would be an understatement, however Zinn’s impact on historical research cannot be denied.

This paper offers a critical on one of the article that he wrote entitled Speaking Truth to Power with Book. There are some points that I agree and disagree with Howard Zinn’s perspective in his writing, especially in his article entitled Speaking Truth to Power with Book.  Nevertheless, you may as well know before you going on, that in this paper I will not only focus with his article, but also with Howard Zinn as whole and his powerful thought and-of course- his works.  Well, I just try to clearly exposed my preview from the very beginning as well as Zinn’s did on his phenomenal book entitled A People’s History of The United States.

Traducción del discurso de Howard Zinn contra la guerra de Vietnam. Boston Common, Boston, Massachusetts el 5 de mayo de 1971. Publicada en la revista "Huellas de los Estados Unidos. Estudios, Perspectivas y Debates desde América Latina" Nº 18, mayo 2020.

Quand un film montre une photographie, une carte postale, une publicité, la réalité représentée fait alors l’objet d’une médiation seconde. L’effet recherché peut être de faciliter la réception de ce que l’œuvre première donne à percevoir ou d’appuyer son message, comme c’est le cas dans Le Sel de la Terre où le dispositif filmique avec les commentaires de Salgado sur ses propres photographies améliore les conditions de réception de ses œuvres. La temporalité imposée par le film sur ces images au regard des spectateurs travaille à maintenir l’attention de ceux-là suffisamment pour qu’ils puissent accueillir leur histoire et l’intention – plus ou moins consciente au moment d’appuyer sur le déclic – qui a déterminé le geste du photographe.
Ce dispositif a un effet anti-idéologique au sens où il tend à neutraliser les idéologies qui pourraient parasiter la relation entre l’œuvre première et le récepteur telle que l’auteur de celle-ci la conçoit. Inversement, il existe des œuvres cinématographiques qui construisent des dispositifs favorisant une compréhension de la réalité présentée dans l’œuvre première contraire à celle qu’elle promouvait. On peut prendre à titre d’exemples pour illustrer deux manières de le faire, d’une part le générique de Rue Cases-Nègres et d’autre part de nombreuses séquences d’Howard Zinn, une histoire populaire américaine. Le premier, avec sa série de cartes postales de la Martinique des années 1930, exemplifie un art de la critique tacite ; les secondes, s’attaquant au discours de propagande militaire et de réclame publicitaire, exemplifient un style explicitement ironique.
Nous analyserons de courts extraits et proposerons une typologie de ces dispositifs anti-idéologiques.

Over forty years ago, Howard Zinn identified the problem as not one of civil disobedience, but of civil "obedience". He confronted the problem of remaining obedient to laws and rules even "in the face of the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty." Framed in an early childhood context, this article explores the value of events of young children's classroom disobediences (civil and not), layered upon elements of Zinn's body of work that examines the role disobedience plays in the human potential to contribute to the common good. It is apparent that children find ways to function as "good"-as in kind, generous, contributing, skeptical, thoughtful, and courageous members of society even in the face of narrow, stingy, and mindless schooled notions of goodness as compliance to prevailing rules of order. In the spirit of the hopefulness that Zinn never abandoned-the lens on these children's moments of disobedience is directed away from a viewpoint that presumes the "good" child is the one who obeys. The snapshots of children in this article, viewed with a wide aperture, bring light to the possibilities inherent in these small acts of kindness, awareness, curiosity, justice--and disobedience. In his work, Zinn shone necessary light on pictures of history that showed the cruel reality of human behavior; but more profoundly, he offered "hope" through a concurrent human history of "compassion, sacrifice, courage [and] kindness." Zinn asked us to remember the times when people "behaved magnificently," and within this paper are descriptions of moments of disobedience in which children are behaving "magnificently"--moments that Howard Zinn would, perhaps, have celebrated.

"„Ludowa historia Stanów Zjednoczonych…” swoim zakresem obejmuje okres od udanej wyprawy Krzysztofa Kolumba do Ameryki. Wielka historia chwalebnego podboju nie jest jednak częścią tej narracji. Od początku znajdujemy się w innym ujęciu tej samej historii – przesadą byłoby powiedzieć, że widzimy ją oczami rdzennej ludności kontynentu. To jednak, na co decyduje się autor w tym i pozostałych rozdziałach, to radykalnie przesunięcie akcentów. Przepisanie wątków doskonale znanych (nie tylko z amerykańskich) z podręczników historii, oficjalnej historii, utrwalonych schematów. Kolumb jest tu jednym z pierwszych podejrzanych, rozpoczynających wieki podboju, dominacji i przepaści dzielących ludzi o różnych kolorach skóry. Historia ta skupia się na tym, do jakiego świata wdarli się kolonizatorzy i czego ten świat pozbawili na dobre. Zdarza się, że autor marginalizuje pewne kwestie (np. wojny toczone przez plemiona zanim pojawili się kolonizatorzy i przemoc przez nich stosowaną) i czasami idealizuje relacje panujące wewnątrz tych grup (jak w części rozdziału poświęconej Irokezom). Cel tego działania jest jednak oczywisty i w dużej mierze przekonujący – spojrzenie na tę historię nie jak na opis wspaniałego podboju, ale masowej eksterminacji i segregacji". http://eczaskultury.pl/czytanka/literatura/2204-ludowa-historia-usa

"Imperialism is the factor in American policy, not just since 1898, but in fact long before it when we were expanding across this continent and taking away Indian lands in order to enlarge the territory of the United States. We have been an imperial power and an expansionist power for a very long time. It will continue regardless of whether we have Republican or Democratic administrations in power. In fact, it's hard to tell who would be more likely to further the ends of imperialism."