The People's Historian Is History...

I keep a short list of people whose obituaries I intend to enjoy thoroughly when available.

Tommorrow, I will enjoy Howard Zinn's.

A People's History of the United States is a piece of shit. It is badly written, intellectually dishonest and insultingly shallow Marxist propaganda. Needless to say, it served as a college textbook for many years. That anyone would use it in a classroom tells you just about all you need to know about academic historians these days.

Someday I'll make the trek to Zinn's grave, and on it will leave these three books:

• Paul Johson's A History of the American People
• Stéphane Courtois' (editor) The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
• John Earl Haynes' and Harvey Klehr's In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage

It's more than he deserves. Howard Zinn was fool and a hypocrite; yet another armchair communist preaching the evils of capitalism and democracy while living fat off of both.

Comments

[ThomasD]

Short of driving those texts six feet deep into the sod perhaps you could settle for irrigating the grass?

[richard mcenroe]

Don't forget Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence"...

[Dan from Madison]

I started reading the Black Book about three years ago. It is the most depressing, awful thing I have ever read. I am about halfway through now. There is only so much I can take and I have to put it back on the shelf for a while. So breathtakingly sad.

Pick any random page and you can usually find atrocities beyond the realm of typical thought.

Sadly, I am not even up to China yet.

[Tim Worstall]

Black book....yes, horrifying.

But if you really want appalling try reading Gulag Archipelago. The full three volume version (yes, I know, sorry, but the precis versions just don't work as well).

Then try doing it for the first time in Moscow. While holed up in an apartment as a coup d'etat is fought outside (yes, we could hear the gunfire and the tanks). And realise half way through the three days that the guys fighting outside want to *reimpose* that system described in the book....

[Eric Blair]

Heh.

[Dennis The Peasant]

I've read the three volume version of Gulag and, now that you mention it, it would make a fine fourth book for Zinn's grave.

[Dan from Madison]

I would also recommend "Gulag" by Anne Applebaum if you need yet another dose of misery and a very interesting description of how the work camps operated. So sad.

[Joe Redfield]

If J.D.Salinger was on your list you just hit the Daily Double.

[dfwmtx]

Yes, the Black Book is truly a clue-by-four to be used upside the heads of commies, both for its factual content and for its mass.

....and here I was, hoping Zinn and Chomsky would go out in a lover's murder/suicide.

[V the K]

You write the bestest obits, DTP.

[Jau jau]

Damn, but I haven't been able to find the book called Life in the Red Army. It was also depressing, but written so caustically funny that I didn't know whether to laugh or cry...I did a lot of both. One chapter stood out: The unit NIkolai was with had to plant corn in Siberia, because Khruschev saw corn in Iowa and thought Siberia would be great corn country, but they did, only after tearing up all the wheat fields, and the corn died. Once, when Brezhnev was visiting some base, they went out and painted the dead trees green, because Brezhnev needed some greenery....stupid pricks.