CHART: The Howard Zinn Players — Those Targeting Your Child’s Classroom

The History Channel is “making history” by airing “The People Speak,” a film based on the book by historian – and Marxist – Howard Zinn. More on Zinn in a minute.

A number of actors who wish to be more than just pretty faces are behind this effort, including Wallace Shawn (“Inconceivable!“), Colin Firth and Marisa Tomei, all who serve on “The People Speak’s” board of advisers. Those enlightened thespians who are more active in bringing this project to life are:

Howard Zinn, Josh Brolin, Chris Moore and Matt Damon

Matt Damon: Serving  as producer, Damon is no stranger to political theatrics. An extremely vocal critic of former President George W. Bush and the Iraq war, he said that it’s “not fair that we have a fighting class in our country that’s comprised of people who have to go for…financial reasons” and suggested that the Bush twins should be shipped off to war because their daddy started it. Should we bring back the draft? Then actors like Damon, with cushy jobs and big salaries, could help out the poor suckers who have no choice. He also “let out a cheer” when Kanye West claimed that George Bush hates black people.

He proudly declared his support for John Kerry in 2004, and his stature as an actor means he knows more about running the country than some chick who “was the mayor of a really, really small town” and was “governor of Alaska for less than two years.” Surely Damon knows more than Sarah Palin. After all, he dropped out of Harvard, but then played a closet genius in his first big film (co-written by Ben Affleck) “Good Will Hunting.” Surprise, his “Good Will Hunting” character was a fan of Zinn’s book.

Look for Damon in the 2010 release of “The Green Zone,” an Iraq war movie based on a book, which is described thusly:

There the Halliburton-run (and Muslim-staffed) cafeteria served pork at every meal—a cultural misstep typical of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which had sidelined old Arab hands in favor of Bush loyalists. Not only did many of them have no previous exposure to the Middle East; more than half had never before applied for a passport. While Baghdad burned, American officials revamped the Iraqi tax code and mounted an anti-smoking campaign.

Can’t wait!

Josh Brolin: Also a producer, Brolin’s early career included roles in the ’80s cult classic “The Goonies” and the 1990s television series “The Young Riders,” a show about the Pony Express which also took liberties with history. Described as a “card-carrying Democrat,” he more recently played George W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s “W.,” a movie that intended to make Bush look bad but ended up making him more likable. Snap!

Brolin seemed somewhat shocked that he, a brilliant individual who makes his living acting out other people’s fantasies, portrayed the buffoon who somehow ended up leader of the free world:

“I just saw him on the news, before I came here, and he’s talking about the economy and $700 billion, and he’s (messing) up the words. And I was like, ‘Man, I can’t believe I played this guy.’ That’s the zeitgeist.”

No, that’s the cha-ching.

Chris Moore: Moore is not an actor, but a veteran Hollywood producer, and here he serves as executive producer along with Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove (listed below). Among his successes is the “American Pie” series and “Good Will Hunting,” which explains his relationship with Matt Damon. He was also a part of Project Greenlight, another one of Damon’s pet projects. Of the movie “The People Speak,” Moore said, “It is definitely from the point of view of people fighting injustice; it’s definitely from the point of view from people who were not in power.” Coming from a powerful guy in Hollywood who made big bucks exploiting teen sex, this is pretty funny. Obviously, he’s not concerned either with the fact that the book the movie is based on is “history serving a ’social aim’ other than the interpretation of a[n] historical record.” After all, with a few exceptions, Hollywood isn’t exactly the first place most people to turn for historical accuracy.

But what about the real movers and shakers behind this project, the idea of which is to take on a celebrity-studded pop culture status in order to draw in the public? What follows is a breakdown of select members the group of people behind the scenes trying to bring “The People Speak” to college and schools campuses nationwide, and the ideologies that drive them.

“Before there was Michael Moore, there was Howard Zinn” – Boston Herald. Are they sure that’s how they want to promote this?

BOARD OF DIRECTORS – VOICES OF A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE U.S.

Professor Howard Zinn: Zinn is the author of A People’s History of the United States, which is the basis of  ”Voices of a People’s History.” He is one of the film’s executive producers. According to DiscoverTheNetworks.org, Zinn describes the founding of the American Republic as an exercise in tyrannical control of the many by the few for greed and profit:

“The American Revolution … was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers … created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.”

Also according to Zinn, the Declaration of Independence was not so much a revolutionary statement of rights as a cynical means of manipulating popular groups into overthrowing the King to benefit the rich. The rights which the Declaration appeared to guarantee were “limited to life, liberty and happiness for white males” — and actually for wealthy white males — because they excluded black slaves and “ignored the existing inequalities in property” (in other words, they were not socialist rights).

And it seems that greed is the cause of every major event in American history – if you believe A People’s History:

*Regarding America’s separation from Great Britain, Zinn writes: “Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies … found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire.“

*Zinn describes antebellum America as a uniquely cruel slaveholding society whose goal was subjugating man for profit. On the other hand, the war of the Union against the slaveholding system is portrayed in exactly the same terms: “It is money and profit, not the movement against slavery that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country.”

*The same explanation is given for America’s entry into World War I: “American capitalism needed international rivalry — and periodic war — to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor.”

*According to Zinn, it was America and not Japan that was to blame for Pearl Harbor. The fight against fascism, he says, was a manipulated illusion to conceal America’s real goals, which were empire and money: “Quietly, behind the headlines in battles and bombings, American diplomats and businessmen worked hard to make sure that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none in the world. United States business would penetrate areas that up to this time had been dominated by England. The Open Door Policy of equal access would be extended from Asia to Europe, meaning that the United States intended to push England aside and move in.“

Zinn, however, has high praise for fellow Marxists around the world: Maoist China is “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control”; Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression”; and the Marxist dictators of Nicaragua were “welcomed” by the people, while the opposition Contras, whose candidate triumphed when free elections were held as a result of U.S. pressure, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Read more at DiscoverTheNetworks.org.

Dr. Anthony Arnove

Dr. Anthony Arnove: Arnove is not on the board of directors, but plays a very important role in this project. An executive producer of the film, he co-authored A People’s History of the United States with Zinn. According to DiscoverTheNetworks.org, Arnove is a member of the Internationalist Socialist Organization, an anti-American, anti-capitalist, Communist organization that is active on many college campuses.  He sits on the editorial board of that organization’s bimonthly magazine, the International Socialist Review.

Arnove is well-known for his virulent opposition to the Iraq war, and was a signatory to a “Letter from United States Citizens to Friends in Europe,” which denounced America’s foreign policy and condemned the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan. He also publicly condemned Israel’s military action against the terrorist organization Hezbollah, and was a supporter of the infamous multiple murderer Stanley “Tookie” Williams.

This interview with Arnove on YouTube is an eye opener. Not surprisingly, his parents were involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement, and Arnove says he “grew up around social justice concerns.” According to Arnove, socialism is “international cooperation, international sharing of resources, production based on need rather than on profit.” He also says that “Marx is central to the socialist tradition, and his views have been completely distorted.” He also claims that “capitalism…is leading to ecological destruction” and, more tellingly, “the economic competition which is inherent in capitalism, built into capitalism, glorified by capitalism, inevitably leads to military competition. So that kind of military competition, once you factor in the fact that we take the technology that could be used to help feed people, clothe people, house people, give people meaningful lives…instead, we’ve taken that technology and used it to develop weapons of mass destruction – biological, chemical and nuclear weapons – that could destroy the planet many, many times over.”

He also firmly believes that “since 1989, the United States has been looking for a new external threat to replace the communist threat…needed a new rationale for projecting its power globally, for sending troops abroad, for maintaining military bases, for maintaining the North Atlantic Treaty Association alliance (NATO), because the rationales for many of those things were that they were needed to contain the Soviet Union. Well, the Soviet Union is gone – how do you maintain those foreign bases, keep up the military spending, how do you keep up the right for the United States to just go in and march into other countries and topple their governments or to rain down missiles upon them? You need a new rationale.” That “rationale,” according to Arnove, is a series of “imperial adventures.” Apparently, we have taken over the colonial mantle from the British and the French.

Isn’t freedom of speech a grand thing? You can see and hear more for yourself at the YouTube link above.

According to my sources, Arnove has been credited with convincing many of the artistic folks who are involved in “The People Speak” into joining the project.

Dan Coughlin: Currently the director of the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Coughlin used to work with Pacifica Radio and Democracy Now!, which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. (The main anchor and founder of Democracy Now! is Amy Goodman, a far left radical whom former President Bill Clinton, after being interviewed by her in 2000, declared as “hostile,” “combative” and sometimes even “disrespectful.”) Democracy Now! receives funding, both directly and indirectly, from George Soros and his foundation the Open Society Institute, as well as other leftwing groups like the Tides Foundation. See more here. Coughlin is concerned that the Internet and satellite television do not meet their “social responsibility” to provide a “public interest component.” One wonders whom Coughlin thinks should decide of what the “public interest component” is comprised.

Michael Ratner: Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, an organization founded in 1966 by pro-Castro radical lawyers. It “uses litigation proactively to advance the law in a positive direction, to guarantee the rights of those with the fewest protections and least access to legal resources.” Among its client list are Tom Hayden, the Black Liberation Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, Women’s Strike for Peace, the Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, the Catonsville Nine, and the Chicago Seven. The organization also took up the cause of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian rights activist who was convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975, a crime for which he is currently serving a life sentence in prison. Illegal detention and Guantanamo, as well as “Corporate Human Rights Abuse” are among its chief causes, and the group is also a core member of the open borders lobby.

See more here.

Brian Jones

Brian Jones: An actor and New York schoolteacher, Jones  is also a hardcore Marxist. A member of the International Socialist Organization, his bio as a speaker at Socialism 2009 notes his writings at outlets like Socialist Worker and International Socialist Review. In this video, he extols the virtues of the Dutch welfare state and bemoans the American “pioneer spirit” that means we’d rather “go completely bankrupt than…pay for the things that people are getting for free in other countries.” Free except, of course, for the 50 percent tax rate.

Charlotte Sheedy: Sheedy is a literary agent. Could she have a radical feminist bent? She was a featured speaker, along with Gloria Steinem and others, at CUNY’s Center for the Study of Women in Society’s celebration of writer Marilyn French, an author whose work critics say is anti-male. A character in her first novel, The Women’s Room, declares after another character is raped: “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.” And in The War Against Women, French wrote, “Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.”

SOME MEMBERS OF THE ADVISORY BOARD:

Julian Bond: Current chair of the NAACP, he’s a former member of the Georgia State Assembly and Georgia State Senate, where he was not only endorsed by the Communist Party, but also participated in Communist political forums, and campaigned for Communist and leftwing politicians, in addition to urging blacks to resist the draft during the Vietnam War. He also took part in radical anti-war activities toward the end of the 1960s. Bond is a proponent for slavery reparations, seeing America as a hopelessly racist nation. In 1999 he said claimed, “Everywhere we see clear racial fault lines, which divide American society as much now as at any time in our past.” He also has no use for black conservatives, calling them “black hustlers and hucksters” and implied that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were token black appointees that the Bush Administration was using as “human shields against any criticism of [its] record on civil rights.” See more at DiscoverTheNetworks.org.

Allan Buchman: Buchman is the artistic director for the Culture Project, whose mission is to address “critical human rights issues by creating and supporting artistic work that amplifies marginalized voices. By fostering innovative collaboration between human rights organizations and artists, we aim to inspire and impact public dialogue and policy, encouraging democratic participation in the most urgent matters of our time.” Their current season includes a tribute to the corrupt UN peacekeepers and Blueprint for Accountability, a monthly series that asks “How can we empower ourselves to hold our leaders – in government, education and corporate institutions – accountable for the events of the past and the conditions of the future?” One film shown during this series in August was “The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court,” a documentary which is obvious in its support of an international court that would, if it could, supersede American security and sovereignty.

Eve Ensler: Feminist activist Ensler is probably best known for her play The Vagina Monologues, in which she encourages women to celebrate their sexuality and strength – by becoming obsessed with their vaginas. This classic includes a scene in which a 13-year-old girl is seduced by an older woman. Let’s celebrate! Her V-Day organization is dedicated to “envisioning a planet in which women and girls will be free to thrive, rather than merely survive.” No word yet on whether she has opened a branch office in the Middle East. Ensler has been involved with the radical feminist anti-war group CodePINK, and is also listed as a contributor to their book Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism.

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy: An Indian novelist who won the Booker prize for her first novel, The God of Small Things, Roy is an activist for social causes, and is a vocal opponent of India’s nuclear weapon program and hydroelectric dam projects. She is also a harsh critic of America, who has said, among other things: “The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another [American] act of terror against the people of the world,” and “…What freedoms does [the U.S.] uphold? … Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and subjugate ­ usually in the service of America’s real religion, the ‘free market,’” and “Killing people to save them from dictatorship or ideological corruption is … an old U.S. government sport.”

SOME MEMBERS OF THE TEACHER ADVISORY BOARD

Sarah Knopp: A schoolteacher active in United Teachers Los Angeles, Knopp is is a frequent contributor to Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review, the latter featuring her article Charter schools and the attack on public education, which discusses how to combat these “excellent teachers of free-market, ‘personal responsibility’ ideology. The American Dream is promised to all those who strive to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” Only for the evil rich, of course.

Jesse Sharkey: This Chicago schoolteacher  is a contributor to the Socialist Worker. Not exactly a fan of the U.S. military or U.S. foreign policy, he describes in this article in Counterpunch how the military is “preying” on students: “At the exact time when the U.S. military is running short of troops for its bloody occupation for oil and empire in Iraq, they are targeting students at home – not, of course, students in the wealthy, predominantly white suburban schools outside Chicago, but inner city students at schools like Senn.”

Elizabeth Terzakis: Terzakis is an English and reading instructor at Canada College. When it comes to capitalism, she says, “It seems to me that a system whoses mouthpiece can say ”3 million people living on less than a dollar a day, cheap food is over, and that one person, quote, earned $3.7 billion in one year’ is a system that is failed and broken and must be replaced.” By what? Socialism, naturally. One wonders what she makes of someone like Robert Mugabe, who turned Zimbabwe from “the breadbasket of Africa” into a nation full of starving people in just a few short years. Would she blame that upon the “rich” nations? Or upon a dictator who, in the name of “social justice,” kicked out all of the white farmers and gave the land to his cronies, who then let the land lay fallow?

MODERATORS FOR THE ZINN/DAMON COLLEGE TOUR:

Ellen Carol DuBois, UCLA: A professor of women’s studies, DuBois has a definite radical bent. According to this website, she joined the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union in 1975, a group that “grew out of the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the other social movements of the time.” As “a group of Windy City women determined to challenge the suffocating male supremacy of the time,” the CWLU “dedicated themselves to developing programs for women while working toward a long term revolution in American society.”

Eric Foner, NYU: Foner is a history professor. DiscoverTheNetworks.org lists Foner as a 1960s anti-American radical and communist apologist. Of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, Foner stated, “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” Also, at a 2003 anti-war “teach in,” Foner declared, “I refuse to cede the definition of American patriotism to George W. Bush. I have a different definition of patriotism, which comes from Paul Robeson: ‘The patriot is the person who is never satisfied with his country.’” And in reviewing Foner’s work, liberal intellectual historian John Diggins wrote, “Foner … is both an unabashed apologist for the Soviet system and an unforgiving historian of America.”

Virginia Sapiro, Boston U: A professor of political science and the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Sapiro’s areas of expertise include Political Psychology, Political Behavior and Public Opinion, Gender Politics, Feminist and Democratic Theory, Higher Education. In addition to several books, she has also written many research articles on topics such as political socialization; social capital; the role of gender in perceptions of political candidates, leaders, and political events; the recruitment of political leaders; electoral politics; the history of the relationship of gender to democratization and public policy; and gender and race politics in relation to the Clinton presidency. Her most recent major research projects have been on the history of political action in the United States and gender in television advertisements for congressional candidates.

Frank Sesno

Frank Sesno, George Washington U. School of Media and Public Affairs Director: According to Newsbusters, Sesno has different standards for different news networks. He “scolded Fox News for its coverage of last week’s Tea Parties while defending the disgraceful behavior of Keith Olbermann and Susan Roesgen…the responsibility of a CNN ‘journalist’ is to challenge and call people out for their opinions. BUT, a Fox News ‘journalist’ should not use his or her podium, platform, and television camera to tell people what they should be thinking and doing.” Interesting. Click here for details.

Rudolph P. Byrd, Emory U.: Professor of Americna Studies, ILA and the Department of African American Studies, Byrd’s research interests are in American and African American literature, folklore, philosophy, gender studies, sexuality, photography, and the modern civil rights movement. He’s the author and editor of a number of books, including Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, the first anthology of writings by 19th- and 20th-century African American men on the overlapping categories of race, gender, and sexuality. Monolithic constructions of gender and sexuality, reinforced by sexism and historical sanctioned homophobia, are the “traps” that give this book its focus and its title.

Nancy MacLean, Northwestern U. Center for Student Involvement and NU history professor: Author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, MacLean accused Supreme Court Justice John Roberts of “hijack[ing] civil rights rhetoric to roll back advances toward substantive equality.” She also claims that “the Republican Party is now home to those who lionize the antebellum South and romanticize the Jim Crow South.”

Tufuku Zuberi, U. Pennsylvania: Zuberi is professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations. Among Zuberi’s writings are Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: The Mortality Cost of Colonizing Liberia in the Nineteenth-Century, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1995; and Thicker than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2001. He has said that, “You cannot understand American culture without understanding many experiences, many cultures and many kinds of histories. In fact, to understand America, one must be able to situate it in world history. Part of the problem is that in America, people are illiterate of the experience of the world. The fact that we are citizens of a global world is becoming increasingly obvious to everyone. For African Americans, it has been obvious since the slave trade. We should recognize that you have to have a global education in order to appreciate a global reality.”

Kenneth P. Montiero, San Francisco State U.: Dean of SFSU’s College of Ethnic Studies, which back in October co-hosted a 40th anniversary conference and gala which focused on the following questions:

1. Where is Ethnic Studies in the world today, and what are the similarities and differences between our contemporary goals and those that led to the creation of the field?

2. How are social justice pedagogies relevant to the field of Ethnic Studies? (Note: “social justice” is code for “communism.”)

3. What strategies allow for inclusion of a full range of ethnic experiences, philosophical perspectives, and methods, analytical frameworks within the field?

4. How might recent events such as restrictions of civil liberties domestically and internationally, the election of Barack Obama, ongoing wars, and the international economic crisis affect the field of Ethnic Studies and the centering of race relations?

The conference was hosted by The College of Ethnic Studies as well as the departments of Africana, American Indian, Asian American and Raza Studies; Race and Resistance Studies Initiative (RRS) and Arab Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Initiative (AMED); and the Cesar Chavez Institute.

Many thanks to Patrick Courrielche, Adam Baldwin and John Nolte for their invaluable assistance in compiling this report.