ZTz"L Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” radical, truth-teller, and challenger of mediocrity, died yesterday at the age of 87.
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Zinn, unsurprisingly, kept his hand in the rabble-rousing business right up until the end. Having been recently featured prominently in The Nation’s “Obama at One” issue, in which he pointed out that Obama has been a fairly traditional Democrat in his seeking of “compromise,” he, as always, encouraged us, the American people, to get off our duffs and push hard for more change, and reminded us that it won’t happen without a lot of back-breaking work on the part of us, we, the people.
He will be missed.
If you still don’t know who he was, try out his website.
It always seems defensive when people point out that a prominent person is Jewish, as if we need to justify our worth to other people. Yet I feel the same kind of urge here, to point out that Howard Zinn rejected war, absolutely.
“I have moved away from my own rather orthodox view that there are just and unjust wars, to a universal rejection of war as a solution to any human problems. Of all the positions I have taken over the years on questions of history and politics, this has undoubtedly aroused the most controversy.” – from the introduction to his essay “Just and Unjust Wars” published in the Zinn Reader, 1997, in which he presents his viewpoint using WWII as an example.