Re: [blind-democracy] Bill Introduced to Ban Howard Zinn Books From Arkansas Public Schools

When the long entrenched Ruling Class is threatened, regardless of
when or where in Time, one of the first Defensive Acts is the
Offensive Act of destroying any literature or materials which disagree
with the Ruling Class. From the burning of the Alexandria
Library...and probably far earlier examples, to the Nazi Purge of non
Aryan people, declared inferior to the Master Race, and the burning of
any books that taught, or suggested a different belief, to the more
recent times when Christian groups burn the Koran, the practice has
been an effort to protect the Ruling Class, and for the most part it
has been a total failure.
But here we go again. One of the truly great historical works, A
Peoples History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, is seen as a
threat to the White Supremacists Ruling Class in Arkansas. Clear
minded people understand that the effort to remove Zinn's book from
circulation is simply an admission by these White Racists, that they
have no rational defense for their long established control over the
People of Arkansas.
As an Agnostic, I disagree with books such as the Holy Bible or the
Koran. And yet, there is great value in these books. If my best
argument against the belief that there is some Intelligent Creator
directing our lives, is to rush about burning their books, then I, and
my beliefs, are failures.
But beyond all of this, what people need to watch out for, is that
once the books have been removed, the next step is to begin removing
those people who subscribe to the teachings in the newly banned books.
First from their jobs. Next, from their communities. Prison. And
even execution.
Are we witnessing the res erection of the Witch Hunts of early
America? Are we going to purge our People of whatever the Ruling
Class finds undesirable? Will we wind up with everybody looking and
acting like Donald Trump?

Carl Jarvis



Sent on 3/5/17:
> Howard Zinn. (photo: The Progressive)
> Howard Zinn. (photo: The Progressive)
>
>
>
>
> Bill Introduced to Ban Howard Zinn Books From Arkansas Public Schools
>
> By Max Brantley, Arkansas Times
>
> 04 March 17
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> he deadline for new legislation is fast approaching and it can't come too
> soon. Just in from Sen. Rep. Kim Hendren: Legislation to prohibit any
> publicly supported schools (you, too, charters) from including in
> curriculum or course materials any books or other material authored by
> Howard Zinn.
>
> (Actually, anything Zinn wrote before 1959 is not covered.)
> > Zinn, who died in 2010, was a Ph.D. historian, social activist and more who
> wrote the best-selling "A People's History of the United States." A version
> for young readers came out in 2007.
>
> His New York Times obituary probably gives you a taste of the danger Kim
> Hendren sees in Howard Zinn:
>
>
> Proudly, unabashedly radical, with a mop of white hair and bushy eyebrows
> and an impish smile, Mr. Zinn, who retired from the history faculty at
> Boston University two decades ago, delighted in debating ideological foes,
> not the least his own college president, and in lancing what he considered
> platitudes, not the least that American history was a heroic march toward
> democracy.
>
> Almost an oddity at first, with a printing of just 4,000 in 1980, "A
> People's History of the United States" has sold nearly two million copies.
> To describe it as a revisionist account is to risk understatement. A
> conventional historical account held no allure; he concentrated on what he
> saw as the genocidal depredations of Christopher Columbus, the blood lust
> of
> Theodore Roosevelt and the racial failings of Abraham Lincoln. He also
> shined an insistent light on the revolutionary struggles of impoverished
> farmers, feminists, laborers and resisters of slavery and war.
>
> Such stories are more often recounted in textbooks today; they were not at
> the time.
>
> "Our nation had gone through an awful lot - the Vietnam War, civil rights,
> Watergate - yet the textbooks offered the same fundamental nationalist
> glorification of country," Mr. Zinn recalled in a recent interview with The
> New York Times. "I got the sense that people were hungry for a different,
> more honest take."
>
> Even some on the liberal side thought Zinn's revisionism went too far.
>
> That criticism barely raised a hair on Mr. Zinn's neck. "It's not an
> unbiased account; so what?" he said in the Times interview. "If you look at
> history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it's a
> different story."
>
> He inspired a movie, documentaries and song. Dangerous stuff for the
> Arkansas student in one legislator's
>
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>