Source or Publisher: The Progressive

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. May 2009.
"We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too—he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician. If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you—the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it."

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Progressive. November 2008.
"Reading Edward Rothstein’s sour commentary on Studs Terkel in the New York Times on November 2, I was surprised that Rothstein, presumably a sophisticated thinker, seems to believe one can separate one’s political views from a historical narrative, even from oral history. 'It is, in fact, impossible to separate Mr. Terkel’s political vision from the contours of his oral history,' he wrote."

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. October 2008.
"It seems that Barack Obama and John McCain are arguing over which war to fight. McCain says: Keep the troops in Iraq until we 'win.' Obama says: Withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and 'win' in Afghanistan. As someone who has fought in a war (World War II) and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one 'wins' in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of human beings die, most of them civilians, many of them children?"

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. March 2008.
"The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held—security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure 'life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness' for working people."

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. March 2008.
"We have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two candidates who have already been chosen for us. Now I’m not saying elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the 1930s, for instance, or right now) even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death. I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness."

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. December 2001.
"I believe two moral judgments can be made about the present 'war': The September 11 attack constitutes a crime against humanity and cannot be justified, and the bombing of Afghanistan is also a crime, which cannot be justified. And yet, voices across the political spectrum, including many on the left, have described this as a 'just war.'"

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Progressive. May 2007.
"When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them. As I write this, Congress is debating timetables for withdrawal from Iraq. In response to the Bush Administration’s 'surge' of troops, and the Republicans’ refusal to limit our occupation, the Democrats are behaving with their customary timidity, proposing withdrawal, but only after a year, or eighteen months. And it seems they expect the anti-war movement to support them."

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. February 2007.
"Courage is in short supply in Washington, D.C. The realities of the Iraq War cry out for the overthrow of a government that is criminally responsible for death, mutilation, torture, humiliation, chaos. But all we hear in the nation’s capital, which is the source of those catastrophes, is a whimper from the Democratic Party, muttering and nattering about 'unity' and 'bipartisanship,' in a situation that calls for bold action to immediately reverse the present course."

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. July 2006.
"On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism – that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder – one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?"