Don’t expect Matt Damon or Josh Brolin or any of the other celebrities and Hollywood producers behind the History Channel’s The People Speak to issue apologies for their celebration of leftist professor and author Howard Zinn in light of the release last week of file 100-369217 – the FBI’s decades long investigation into Zinn’s alleged communist activities.

Already, Zinn’s far-left sympathizers are poking holes, some more credibly than others, in the 430 pages of documents, and trying to draw focus away from Zinn’s alleged membership in the Kremlin-controlled Communist Party USA and onto the fact that a Boston University administrator turned FBI informant once plotted to have him fired in the 1970s.

To the radical left, trying to interfere with an extremist professor as he dutifully decries his country as a police state is a far more egregious crime than belonging to a political organization allied with and controlled by the sworn enemy of the United States.

It’s all about perspective… (more…)

Howard Zinn wants teachers to bring in whatever materials they want to your child’s class room. He wants them to use their own judgement to teach whatever they think is appropriate. He wants them to subvert the rules regarding the approved curriculum at the school you are paying for. Of course, if Zinn’s advice is followed, there is nothing keeping a teacher from bringing materials related to Holocaust denial, or 9/11 conspiracies or creationism into the class room, as well. Unless Zinn is recommending only HIS enlightened view of history should be secretly brought into the classroom.

There are some very important people in our country who have aligned themselves with Zinn. With his philosophy. With his view of history. With his view of the United States. And, with his strategy for getting his message into the public schools outside of the legal construct of School Boards and State Departments of Education.

They made a film of his book.  They walked the red carpet and they posed with the man they admired.  He was the inspiration for their film and they spoke of him glowingly, almost like he was a hero.  They began their film with him striding out alone onto a stage in a theatre full of admirers.  It was his way of taking a curtain call (a standing ovation, by the way) before the show even began. (more…)

“[Howard Zinn] was a treasure and an inspiration. That he was considered radical says way more about this society than it does about him.” -  Bob Herbert 

Public school children are innocent victims of a radical “guerrilla warfare” being waged by the late professor Howard Zinn’s Zinn Education Project (ZEP), Rethinking Schools Magazine, and Teaching for Change. 

These anti-establishment educators’ mission includes curriculum-subversion in order to radically transform schools into centers of social justice wherein  students are trained to become global citizen change agents. 

Perpetuating Zinn’s revolutionary mission, his surviving business partners proclaimed: 

Howard Zinn, in honor of the marvelous victory of your life, we will act in defiance of all that is bad around us and attempt to spin the world towards justice. 

With the national spotlight on History Channel’s “The People Speak” and its ZEP curriculum — parents, teachers, school boards and administrators should beware of the celebrity-opiate being dealt to their schoolchildren by way of Zinn-doctrination.  (more…)

Last week, Howard Zinn passed away. It was only a few weeks after the History Channel had premiered the film “The People Speak” honoring his controversial book “A People’s History of the United States.”

Prof. Zinn never hid the fact that he wrote “A People’s History” not as a reference book to collect dust on the shelf but as a field guide for the re-making of our society.  In a 1988 interview with the University of Georgia, he summed up the legacy of his work better than anyone.

A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. It would be a democratic socialism.

In the wake of his death, conservative commentators who had been critical of Zinn’s lifework were accused of “spitting on his grave” when responding to interview requests about Zinn’s legacy.  At Big Hollywood we have less interest in trashing Howard Zinn, the man, as we have in shining a light on what his actual beliefs and agenda were, and still are. (more…)

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Is there anything left to say other than…. (more…)

You can see the possibility that small acts multiplied by the millions can merge into great movements of social change. — So speaketh Howard Zinn in summing up the theme of last night’s two hour History Channel telecast of “The People Speak.” But like all Leftists, Zinn’s using a t-shirt ready face, focus group-tested platitudes, and cherry-picked bits of American history to further a monstrous ideology that will ensure all but a few Matt Damon-esque elites lose their liberties to Big Government overseers.

If you think about it, taken at face value, that Zinn quote personifies the Tea Party movement, doesn’t it? But what do you think Zinn and his fellow celebucrats think of those everyday people? That question can be answered in two words: Sarah and Palin:

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A large portion of “The People Speak” celebrates “everyday” women who came from nowhere to fight the establishment and have their voices heard … and yet here’s Matt Damon trashing the self-made reformer from Alaska who took on her own party.

It’s important to keep in mind that in Zinn’s poseur-infested world, some who believe democracy is not a spectator sport are more equal than others. (more…)

In a classic episode of the Sopranos, Tony tries to excite his two children about their Italian-American ancestry and the upcoming Columbus Day parade.  Tony’s son A.J., eager to show up his fuddy-duddy dad, invokes Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as proof that Christopher Columbus was bad.  “My teacher told us that.  It must be true,” he says.  “You finally read a book,” Tony fires back, “and it’s all [baloney].”  Only he didn’t say “baloney.”

What Tony Soprano knows the History Channel doesn’t.   Howard Zinn isn’t a great historian.  He’s not even a good one.

How, then, to explain his widespread popularity, and the History Channel’s willingness this weekend to give Zinn an even larger megaphone?  After having visited scores of K-12 schools and working with thousands of history and social studies teachers in national civic education programs, one of which I direct for Hillsdale College, I have concluded that Zinn is popular because he tells a great story.  The only problem is that his story is not true.  This inconvenience has not stopped school administrators from commending Zinn to their teachers.

Several years ago, in a meeting of the Ann Arbor public school system, home to Michigan’s largest high school, the superintendent, distressed at his district’s lack of progress in closing the racial “achievement gap,” held up a copy of A People’s History.  “Have you heard of Howard Zinn?” he asked the throng of thousands of district teachers and employees, gathered for a large “in-service” assembly.  In fact, they had, and many teachers already taught from the text the administrator prescribed as the cure for what ailed the district. Instead of helping, many teachers told me, the book had contributed to the malady, for Zinn’s basic message is one of division, not unity. (more…)

So anyway, last week I was asked to review the accompanying CD for tonight’s upcoming The People Speak documentary. Mindful of my journalistic duty, I immediately emailed the good folks at Verve Music Group asking for a review copy. Alas, they never got back to me. Thus as I certainly wasn’t going to spend any of my own ca$h on something that featured knuckle-headed dullard Eddie Vedder (the Sean Penn of the rock music world) covering Dylan, I was forced to review the 25 second previews on Amazon instead. So here goes:

Track 1: Do Re Mi by Bob Dylan: I used to have the Woody Guthrie version of this song on my iPod. After about three years I noticed I had played it twice, so I swiftly deleted it along with the rest of the incredibly tedious ‘Pastures of Plenty’ CD. From the brief snatch I heard of Dylan’s version he’s rasping away as usual, but it still sounds better than the original, which is rotten.

Q: Didn’t Dylan explicitly distance himself from this whole protest thing in his memoir published a few years back?

A: Yes he did. (more…)

A from the New York Times, September 9, 2008:

The actor Viggo Mortensen has apologized to Canada after inadvertently accusing the country of policy misdeeds for which he meant to chastise political leaders of the United States. The go-round occurred Sunday night at a Toronto International Film Festival panel discussion introducing ”The People Speak,” a documentary about dissent and resistance to power based on the book ”A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. Mr. Mortensen wore a T-shirt that read: ”Impeach Remove Jail.” By way of explanation Mr. Mortensen, in Toronto to promote the movie ”Appaloosa,” began a plaint about things ”that have been happening in the last eight years in this country.” He was checked by the moderator, Tom Powers, the festival’s documentary programmer, who asked if Mr. Mortensen was referring to Canada. ”Ladies and gentlemen, the angry left,” said a laughing Matt Damon, who was joined on the panel by Josh Brolin and Marisa Tomei, among others. Mr. Mortensen allowed that Canada may have committed misdeeds of its own, without leveling a specific charge against either country. ”My apologies,” he concluded. (more…)

“Objectivity is impossible,” self-styled “peoples’ historian” Howard Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Admitting some human rights abuses, Zinn writes that Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression.”

(more…)

In a publicity event for the new History Channel film “The People Speak” held at UCLA last week, actor/producer Josh Brolin was charming, self-effacing, funny, and down-right likeable.  And, that was the whole reason he was there.  We live in a culture obsessed with celebrity and in full adoration of movie stars in particular.  In short, we are a nation of Star-F%*#ers.  And people like Howard Zinn know it.

Part of the discussion at Friday’s Q & A event centered on the appearance of hypocrisy by the filmmakers for using big-name stars in their film, considering the overall thesis of Zinn’s world view is that REAL history is made by the individual struggling against the elite in power.  Producers Chris Moore and Brolin agreed with the criticism but lamented that the only way to get the History Channel to air this movie would be if stars were connected to it.  Understandable.  But, the inclusion of big name, likable Hollywood stars like Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Morgan Freeman, Marisa Tomei and Brolin serve a greater purpose than just aiding the pitch meeting at the network. (more…)

Twelve years ago in his breakout performance as an arrogant young genius in Good Will Hunting, struggling fresh-faced actor Matt Damon sneered at his Boston psychiatrist for “surrounding yourself with all the wrong f__kin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f__kin’ knock you on your ass.”

The political left loves shout-outs, and this was a direct one to Zinn himself, whom Damon actually lived next-door to as a child, and whose book apparently knocked the actor on his own behind. “Ben (co-screenwriter Affleck) and I were laughing our asses off writing that,” he recalls. (What is it with Damon and the word “ass”?) ”We liked it that the smartest guy in Boston was reading Howard Zinn.”

Self-proclaimed radical historian Howard Zinn, 87, is arguably the most popular proponent of the “history from below” school of historiography, which explores past events from the perspective of everyday people as opposed to the so-called “Great Men” theory, which actor Josh Brolin, another Zinn devotee, calls mere “propaganda.” The Boston University professor wasn’t the first academic to pioneer this approach, but he is no doubt the first to dispense with tedious scholarly ballast like footnotes and citations, and to have pop culture powerhouses like Damon, Brolin and Pearl Jam running interference for his openly politicized agenda. His 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, one of the best-selling history books of all time thanks partly to Damon’s shout-out, is a litany of oppression and exploitation on the part of America’s white ruling class, a “raggedly conceived Marxist caricature” of American history, as David Horowitz calls it in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. (more…)

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. (more…)

“The People Speak” College Tour concluded with a standing-room-only crowd in UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall last Friday afternoon.

After the video presentation, host professor Ellen DuBois facilitated an audience question-and-answer session with her guests, actor Josh Brolin and producer Chris Moore, while Howard Zinn’s partner Anthony Arnove (whom Brolin credits for his own participation) paced the back of the theater.

Asked about his project’s intended use in K-12 public school settings, Mr. Moore answered:

We have a whole educational program. There’s a curriculum, there’s a whole educational thing. There’ll be a website that has tools, that’s searchable… There is definitely a plan.

That plan includes “The Zinn Education Project” which:

…promotes and supports the use of Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States and other materials for teaching a people’s history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. The Zinn Education Project is coordinated by two non-profit organizations, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

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Children are uniquely malleable beings, readily convinced of magically colorful tales – Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are the first that come to mind. This innocence is beautiful, but it is a quality that can easily fall victim to radically foreign ideas if taught consistently and pervasively at an early age. One need only look at the birth of fascism or socialism to see a recipe for how radical ideas become ubiquitous among a nation’s youth.

Enter Howard Zinn – an author, professor and American historian – who, with the help of Hollywood and the History Channel, intends to change the way our pre-K through high school children learn American history. His current curriculum suggestions, like introducing three-year-olds to the lynching of African-Americans, or quizzing seven-year-olds on which Presidents owned slaves, should be a red flag to parents.

Zinn has spent a lifetime teaching college students about the evils of capitalism, the promise of Marxism, and his version of American history – a history that has, in his view, been kept from students. His controversial 1980-book The People’s History of the United States paints traditional American history as a façade – one that has grotesquely immortalized flawed leaders and is based on principles that victimize the common man. In 2004, Zinn wrote a companion book entitled Voices Of A People’s History Of The United States, which includes speeches and writings from many of the people featured in The People’s History.

These two books have now become the basis for a new documentary, entitled The People Speak, to be aired December 13th at 8pm on the History Channel. The trailer portrays the documentary as a collage of compelling one-person readings, told through the words of “ordinary” people who have struggled throughout American history against oppression. Produced by Zinn, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Chris Moore, the documentary appears to be cloaked, ironically (given Zinn’s admitted socialist agenda), in many of the traditional ideas that were behind our founding. The verdict is still out on the doc, but it is not for the books that inspired the film as well as the educational initiative associated with it. (more…)