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The Heroes Around Us

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. May 7, 2000.
Recently, meeting with a group of high school students, I was asked by one of them: "I read in your book, A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, about the massacres of Indians, the long history of racism, the persistence of poverty in the richest country in the world, the senseless wars. How can I keep from being thoroughly alienated and depressed?" That same question has been put to me many times, in different forms, one of them being: "How come you are not depressed?" Who says I'm not? At least briefly.
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Sender Garlin

Article by Howard Zinn. ZCommunications. March 2000. Also in The Progressive as "One Radical Who Did It All," April 2000.
"As the twentieth century came to an end last December, an extraordinary man, whose life spanned the century, died at the age of ninety-seven. His name was Sender Garlin. I first met Sender, ten years before his death, when he was only eighty-seven years old. It was the fall of 1989, and I had traveled to Boulder to give a talk at the University of Colorado. One of the chief organizers of my stay was a man named Sender Garlin, a longtime radical journalist and pamphleteer. I did not know him, and so I was not prepared for the excitement of my encounter with him."
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Notes for a Gathering

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. December 16, 2000.
I have been asked to imagine this situation: "The progressive third party movement has captured the White House, 60% of Congress and 30 Governorships. What do we do now?" First, we have a party, maybe three, with the third party being special. Then, we have Congress pass, and the President sign, the following legislation…
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A Flash of the Possible

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Progressive. January 2000.
"What happened in Seattle recently was not as large an event as the general strike of 1919. But it showed how apparently powerless people—if they unite in large numbers—can stop the machinery of government and commerce. In an era when the power of government, and of multinational corporations, is overwhelming, it is instructive to get even a hint of how fragile that power is when confronted by organized, determined citizens."
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Beyond the Soviet Union

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. December 22, 1999.
I offer as my Commentary a response I just made to a letter by a retired professor in California, who wrote: “As a great admirer of Howard Zinn, I was profoundly disappointed by some of his comments made during his interview with David Barsamian in the March issue of Z Magazine.” Without reproducing my correspondent's letter I think the gist of his comments are clear from my responses. Fundamentally, he did not like my saying I was “very glad” the rule of the Soviet government ended. He took issue with my skepticism about violent revolutions. He made interesting, provocative, thoughtful arguments.
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A Larger Consciousness

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. December 22, 1999. The Progressive, November 1999 as "Respecting the Holocaust."
"Some years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University, I was asked by a Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust. I spoke that evening, but not about the Holocaust of World War II, not about the genocide of six million Jews. It was the mid-Eighties, and the United States government was supporting death squad governments in Central America, so I spoke of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El Salvador, victims of American policy. My point was that the memory of the Jewish Holocaust should not be encircled by barbed wire, morally ghettoized, kept isolated from other genocides in history."
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Seattle

Article by Howard Zinn. ZCommunications, December 22, 1999, The Progressive as "A Flash of Possibility," January 2000.
"…it suggested…how apparently powerless people, if they unite in large numbers, can bring the machinery of government and commerce to a halt."
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On Rewarding People for Talents and Hard Work

By Howard Zinn. Article. ZCommunications. November 25, 1999.
The president of Boston University makes $300,000 a year. Does he work harder than the man who cleans the offices of the university? Talent and hard work are qualitative factors which cannot be measured quantitatively. Since there is no way of measuring them quantitatively we accept the measure given us by the very people who benefit from that measuring!
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‘Inspire Please…’

By Howard Zinn. ZCommunications. July 16, 1999. The Progressive, September 1999,  as "Words in Encouragement."
"For those not in the know, let me explain that we who write for the progressive-radical movement have our specialties. Some specialize in writing depressing stuff. Others write humorous pieces. Some concentrate on trashing other Left writers. It seems that there was an opening this month for someone to inspire, and I was chosen. Not an easy job, when the United States government has just finished dropping thousands of cluster bombs on Yugoslavia…"
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Their Atrocities—and Ours

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. July 1999.
"Official terrorism, whether used abroad or at home, by jet bombers or by the police, always receives an opportunity to explain itself in the press, as ordinary terrorism does not."
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