By Ian Jobling • 9/12/08
Since one of the goals of White America is to encourage pro-white activism, I would like to recommend an activist project that anyone with children in school can undertake: protesting anti-white, or leukophobic, bias in history textbooks. A friend of mine is currently doing just that. He is complaining about the use of Howard Zinn’s egregious A People’s History of the United States in an Advanced Placement history class at his local school. Such protests are likely to prove fruitful, as school materials are perhaps the most powerful evidence of the anti-white bias that pervades our society.
Susan Sontag’s charge that “the white race is the cancer of human history” perfectly sums up the spirit of A People’s History. Zinn presents American history as one long series of outrages committed by whites against non-whites and by the rich against the poor. White Americans do not have a single thing to be proud of, as all of our supposed accomplishments turn out to have been mere pretexts for the heartless persecution of the have-nots. In case you think my view is radical right hyperbole, consider that the liberal New York Times Book Review’s assessment of the book is quite similar to my own.
So inherently evil is Zinn’s America that the only appropriate response to it is revolution. Zinn expresses keen disappointment that neither the socialist movement of the early 20th century, nor the radical leftism of the 1960s led to a revolution against the capitalist system. In a chapter called “The Coming Revolt of the Guards,” he hopes that in the future “a new kind of revolution” will take place in which “demonstrations, marches, civil disobedience; strikes and boycotts and general strikes; direct action to redistribute wealth” and so forth will lead to the overthrow of “the giant corporations, the military, and their politician collaborators” who currently control America.1
The degree to which this epic of bile has become ensconced in the American education establishment is proof of a society gone mad. It is commonly used as a textbook in high school and college history courses. The College Board recommends A People’s History for use in AP courses in American history. The book is among the most popular histories of America ever, selling more than 100,000 copies per year. The Hollywood elite loves the book, and a star-studded cast is working on a documentary version right now.
Zinn’s take on American history is rooted in the myth of the Noble Savage. Western culture is an unnatural aberration that has made whites into greedy, capitalistic, authoritarian monsters. Primitive societies, by contrast, are Utopian communes, where people live in harmony with each other and with nature. Zinn says, for example, that America before the arrival of Columbus was a place where “human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.” Zinn emphasizes the Indians’ propensity for “hospitality,” “sharing,” and their “mild and pacific temperament.”2
Western settlers, by contrast, were inspired by:
the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil… These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.3
Western greed led to the intentional “annihilation” of the Indians as well as the establishment of an exploitative and violent society.4 Modern history and anthropology have, however, discredited Zinn’s simple-minded fable of good versus evil. Lawrence Keeley’s overview of warfare in primitive societies, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, has established that Indian societies were extremely violent. Indian men were far more likely to die in intertribal warfare than white men ever were in European wars. Rape and cannibalism were also quite common.5 Far from living in peaceable harmony with nature, the Indians were well on their way to exterminating the buffalo herds of America before whites showed up and finished the job.6 The research of Guenter Lewy has debunked the claim that Americans intentionally annihilated the Indians.
In Zinn’s account, victorious Western culture in America has created nothing but misery, unrelieved by any positive accomplishment, up until the present day. If you think the establishment of the first modern democracy is an achievement Americans can be proud of, think again. Rather, the American Revolution was a mere pretext for the confiscation of British and Indian land by the wealthy and the unrestrained pursuit of their own class power.7 Zinn gives American capitalism no credit for the invention of electronic appliances and lighting, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the radio, and so forth. All Zinn sees in the history of American business is the exploitation of workers, whose poverty and misery he describes in endless detail.
We are not even to be proud of the defeat of the Nazis in World War II. Zinn asks at the beginning of his chapter on the war whether the United States represented something “significantly different” from Nazism.8 A quote from the contemporary radical leftist Dwight MacDonald, with whom Zinn is clearly in agreement, implies that the answer is no:
Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier or the battlelines…, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves.9
Similarly, Zinn’s portrait of race relations in America is one of unremitting persecution and exploitation. Whites are simply incapable of treating blacks generously, or even humanely. Zinn’s animus against white America is particularly evident in his description of the Civil Rights Era. One might have thought that a historian who so passionately desired to better the lot of black Americans would have regarded this period as a time of progress. But not Zinn: rather, he regards civil rights laws as a meaningless sop thrown to blacks to derail black revolution. Through civil rights legislation:
the federal government was trying—without making fundamental changes—to control an explosive situation, to channel anger into the traditional cooling mechanism of the ballot box, the polite petition, the officially endorsed quiet gathering.
Zinn thinks Martin Luther King betrayed black Americans by accepting the passage civil rights laws as victory. Rather, Zinn sides with Malcolm X. This “powerful,” “eloquent spokesman” was “closer to the mood of the black community” when he denounced King for “selling out” and called for “revolution.” Malcolm was not using the term revolution in some innocuous metaphorical sense. After all, he said elsewhere:
There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution… Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in the way.
Zinn’s veneration of Malcolm and his hostility towards white America causes him to lend credence to conspiracy theories surrounding the “martyr’s” death: “in a plan whose origins are still obscure, he became the martyr of [the Black Power] movement.”
Zinn’s treatment of the Black Panthers, who succeeded King as the “new heroes” of black America, is just as adulatory.10 Zinn conveniently ignores the intense racial hatred that motivated the Black Power movement and its bloody history. One would never know from A People’s History that the Black Panthers were responsible for shooting 15 law enforcement officers or that Malcolm X believed that whites were devils created by an evil sorcerer.
Zinn’s enthusiasm for figures who preached violent revolution against white society is profoundly irresponsible. Indeed, it is effectively an endorsement of violence against whites.
While most history textbooks used in American classrooms are not as over the top as A People’s History, they do reflect the same leukophobic biases, as we saw in The Inverted World. 48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School), a recently published book by Larry Schweikart, history professor at the University of Dayton, is a useful exposé of leftist bias in contemporary history textbooks, including Zinn’s. Schweikart debunks the cliché of the Indian “Noble Savage” and exaggerations of white racism. For example, he notes that the third most common photograph in textbooks’ presentation of 20th century American history is some depiction of the KKK, despite the fact that the group had little influence after the Reconstruction period.11
Protesting the use of leukophobic textbooks is likely to be one of the most effective forms of pro-white activism. Resources like this website, Schweikart’s book, and Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police, which was discussed in The Inverted World, make it easy to spot anti-white bias in textbooks. Moreover, you will find that mainstream America is on your side. A large section of the white public, probably even the majority, understands that textbooks present a far left perspective on history. In fact just today, the Fox News Channel aired a highly favorable interview with Dr. Schweikart (scroll down the page and click “Leaning Left”), accompanied by this article. In the future, I will post action alerts with advice on how to best go about getting Howard Zinn and his minions out of our schools.