Source or Publisher: The Progressive

A Break-in for Peace

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. July 2002.
"In the film Ocean's 11, eleven skillful crooks embark on an ingenious plan, meticulously worked out, to break into an impossibly secure vault and make off with more than $100 million in Las Vegas casino loot. Hardly a crime of passion.... No, money was the motive, with as little moral fervor attending the crime as went into the making of the movie, which had the same motive. I was reminded of this recently when I sat in a courtroom in Camden, New Jersey, and participated in the recollection of another break-in, carried out by the Camden 28, where the motive was to protest the war in Vietnam."
Read More »

Operation Enduring War

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. March 2002.
"We are 'winning the war on terror.' I learn this from George Bush's State of the Union Address. 'Our progress," he said, 'is a tribute to the might of the United States military.' My hometown newspaper, The Boston Globe, is congratulatory: 'On the war front, the Administration has much to take pride in.' But the president also tells us that 'tens of thousands of trained terrorists are still at large.' That hardly suggests we are 'winning the war.'"
Read More »

The Old Way of Thinking

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. September 2001. Also published as "Violence Doesn't Work" At IndyMedia and Common Dreams.
"The images on television have been heartbreaking. ...We knew that there must be thousands of human beings buried alive, but soon dead under a mountain of debris. We can only imagine the terror among the passengers of the hijacked planes as they contemplated the crash, the fire, the end. Those scenes horrified and sickened me. Then our political leaders came on television, and I was horrified and sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment."
Read More »

The Greatest Generation?

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. August 2001.
"They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation. That's because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War II, and we (I almost said 'I') won the war against fascism. ...That idea is perpetuated by an artillery barrage of books and films about World War II.. ...I wrote from my air base in England to my friend Joe Perry, who was flying B-24s out of Italy, kidding him about his big clunk of a plane, but the humor was extinguished when my last letter to him came back with the notation 'Deceased.'"
Read More »

Tennis on the Titanic

Article by Howard Zinn. ZCommunications. December 16, 2000. The Progressive as "Disputed Elections, Concealed Facts," February 2001.
"As the prize of the presidency lurched wildly back and forth in the last days of the year, with the entire nation hypnotized by the spectacle, I had a vision. I saw the Titanic churning through the waters of the North Atlantic toward an iceberg looming in the distance, while passengers and crew were totally concentrated on a tennis game taking place on deck."
Read More »

A Campaign Without Class

Article by Howard Zinn. ZCommunications, September 29, 2000 and The Progressive, November 2000.
"There came a rare amusing moment in this election campaign when George Bush (who has $220 million dollars for his campaign) accused Al Gore (who has only $170 million dollars) of appealing to 'class warfare'.… I noticed that neither of the accused responded with a defiant 'Yes, we have classes in this country.' Only Ralph Nader has dared to suggest that this country is divided among the rich, the poor, and the nervous in between. This kind of talk is unpardonably rude, and would be enough to bar him from the televised debates."
Read More »
Portraits of Unsung Heroes by Robert Shetterly

Unsung Heroes

Article by Howard Zinn. The Progressive. June 2000.
"Another question often put to me by students is: Don't we need our national idols? You are taking down all our national heroes — the Founding Fathers, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy. Granted, it is good to have historical figures we can admire and emulate. But why hold up as models the fifty-five rich white men who drafted the Constitution as a way of establishing a government that would protect the interests of their class-slaveholders, merchants, bondholders, land speculators?"
Read More »

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."
Read More »

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."
Read More »

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."
Read More »
Read, Learn, & Make History
Check out the Howard Zinn Digital Collection to search Zinn’s bibliography by books, articles, audio, video, and more.
Share This Page:
Like on Facebook
FOLLOW ON TWITTER
SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTER