Why the Feds Fear Thinkers Like Howard Zinn
by Chris Hedges
Truthdig: Augusat 2, 2010
Today I will teach my final American history class of the semester to prison
inmates. We have spent five weeks reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History
of the United States." The class is taught in a small room in the basement
of the prison. I pass through a metal detector, am patted down by a guard
and walk through three pairs of iron gates to get to my students. We have
covered Spain's genocide of the native inhabitants in the Caribbean and the
Americas, the war for independence in the United States and the disgraceful
slaughter of Native Americans. We have examined slavery, the
Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the occupations of Cuba and the
Philippines, the New Deal, two world wars and the legacy of racism,
capitalist exploitation and imperialism that continue to infect American
society.
We have looked at these issues, as Zinn did, through the eyes of Native
Americans, immigrants, slaves, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists,
anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights
leaders and the poor. As I was reading out loud a passage by Sojourner
Truth, Chief Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois,
Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, I have heard students
mutter "Damn" or "We been lied to."
The power of Zinn's scholarship-which I have watched over the past few weeks
open the eyes of young, mostly African-Americans to their own history and
the structures that perpetuate misery for the poor and gluttony and
privilege for the elite-explains why the FBI, which released its 423-page
file on Zinn on July 30, saw him as a threat.
Zinn, who died in January at the age of 87, did not advocate violence or
support the overthrow of the government, something he told FBI interrogators
on several occasions. He was rather an example of how genuine intellectual
thought is always subversive. It always challenges prevailing assumptions as
well as political and economic structures. It is based on a fierce moral
autonomy and personal courage and it is uniformly branded by the power elite
as "political." Zinn was a threat not because he was a violent revolutionary
or a communist but because he was fearless and told the truth.
The cold, dead pages of the FBI file stretch from 1948 to 1974. At one point
five agents are assigned to follow Zinn. Agents make repeated phone calls to
employers, colleagues and landlords seeking information. The FBI, although
Zinn is never suspected of carrying out a crime, eventually labels Zinn a
high security risk. J. Edgar Hoover, who took a personal interest in Zinn's
activities, on Jan. 10, 1964, drew up a memo to include Zinn "in Reserve
Index, Section A," a classification that permitted agents to immediately
arrest and detain Zinn if there was a national emergency. Muslim activists,
from Dr. Sami Al-Arian to Fahad Hashmi, can tell you that nothing has
changed.
The file exposes the absurdity, waste and pettiness of our national security
state. And it seems to indicate that our security agencies prefer to hire
those with mediocre or stunted intelligence, dubious morality and little
common sense. Take for example this gem of a letter, complete with
misspellings, mailed by an informant to then FBI Director Hoover about
something Zinn wrote.
"While I was visiting my dentist in Michigan City, Indiana," the informant
wrote. "This pamphlet was left in my car, and I am mailing it to you, I
know is a DOVE call, and not a HOCK call. We have had a number of ethnic
groups move into our area in the last few years. We are in a war! And it
doesn't look like this pamphlet will help our Government objectives."
Or how about the meeting between an agent and someone identified as Doris
Zinn. Doris Zinn, who the agent says is Zinn's sister, is interviewed "under
a suitable pretext." She admits that her brother is "employed at the
American Labor Party Headquarters in Brooklyn." That is all the useful
information that is reported. The fact that Zinn did not have a sister gives
a window into the quality of the investigations and the caliber of the
agents who carried them out.
FBI agents in November 1953 wrote up an account of a clumsy attempt to
recruit Zinn as an informant, an attempt in which they admitted that Zinn
"would not volunteer information" and that "additional interviews with ZINN
would not turn him from his current attitude." A year later, after another
interrogation, an agent wrote that Zinn "concluded the interview by stating
he would not under any circumstances testify or furnish information
concerning the political opinions of others."
While Zinn steadfastly refused to cooperate in the anti-communist witch
hunts in the 1950s, principals and college administrators were busy purging
classrooms of those who, like Zinn, exhibited intellectual and moral
independence. The widespread dismissals of professors, elementary and high
school teachers and public employees-especially social workers whose unions
had advocated on behalf of their clients-were carried out quietly. The names
of suspected "Reds" were handed to administrators and school officials under
the FBI's "Responsibilities Program." It was up to the institutions, nearly
all of which complied, to see that those singled out lost their jobs. There
rarely were hearings. The victims did not see any purported evidence. They
were usually abruptly terminated. Those on the blacklist were effectively
locked out of their professions. The historian Ellen Schrecker estimates
that between 10,000 and 12,000 people were blackballed through this process.
For More:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_the_feds_fear_thinkers_like_howard_zinn_20100801/
No comments:
Post a Comment