Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Monday, August 2, 2010

Why Do People Belief Bold Lies Over Obvious Truth- Case in Point Howard Zinn

The acclaimed and most unwatchable, boring film from 1997, Good Will Hunting, was full of Zinn in attitude and open huckstering of Zinn's A People's History of the United States. This is now a popular text used on Campuses and sited by leftist luminaries without investigation into its accuracy.
This suspension of disbelief is common to us all. A major example of this followed the publication of Alex Haley's (proven to be much plagiarized) NOVEL, Roots and the subsequent mini-series based on the novel. Roots devolved from the novel, The African, by Harold Courlander*, re-written by Haley, became a big TV hit, and open fiction suddenly morphed to being 'fact'. From 'fact' it became Gospel as the spoken word for black history (or pre-history).
Twisted truth to overt lies are handed to us through news with a point of view, films, like JFK, books as noted, and now from the ether around us.
We need to check and not just believe what we want to believe. This post and following expert is an example of some checking.

The American Spectator : The Case Against Howard Zinn

[Zinn was an out and out America-Hating Communists from the Stalinist Era. His goal was discrediting and causing revolution within the USA. 'Zinn] -- author of A People's History of the United States, widely used as a textbook or supplement in many of our nation's high schools and universities -- was a card-carrying Communist at a time when the Soviet Union was America's most dreaded enemy.

Zinn was still a relatively obscure academic in 1964, but he gained national prominence for his subsequent anti-Vietnam War activism, leading "teach-ins" at Harvard, MIT, and other campuses, and traveling to Hanoi in 1968 with radical priest Daniel Berrigan. It was not until 1980 that Zinn published A People's History of the United States, which gained pop-culture fame after Ben Affleck and Matt Damon featured it in their 1997 film Good Will Hunting. Zinn later became a prominent critic of the Bush administration's foreign policy and, not long before his death in January, was lionized in a documentary called The People Speak, co-produced by Damon and starring Danny Glover, Sean Penn, and other luminaries of the Hollywood Left.

Zinn's 21st-century influence takes on a new aspect in light of the FBI's revelation of his Communist Party activities. Anyone might have innocently joined a Communist "front" group -- indeed, during his New Deal years as a self-described "hemophiliac liberal," Ronald Reagan had naively joined two such groups. But Zinn was implicated as a member of multiple Communist fronts and, tellingly, was a local officer of the American Veterans Committee at the very time when that group was identified as having been taken over by Communists. Given the preponderance of evidence, it is difficult to dispute J. Edgar Hoover's conclusion that Zinn was no mere sympathizer or "fellow traveler," but was indeed an active CPUSA member in the late 1940s and early '50s.

The timing of Zinn's Communist involvement is also important. Many well-meaning liberals had been drawn into the CPUSA during the "Popular Front" era of the 1930s, when America was menaced by the Great Depression at home and the rising specter of fascism abroad. Misleading press accounts of the Soviet Union's "progress" during those years helped convinced many idealists that the Bolshevik Revolution represented a hopeful future.

By the late 1940s, however, those illusions had been shattered by the reality of Josef Stalin's brutal totalitarianism. Stalin's cynical 1939 treaty with Hitler -- the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact -- had sacrificed Poland to the Nazis, and the Red Army's post-war occupation of Eastern Europe had crushed all democratic resistance. Even as Zinn's wife was collecting signatures on Communist petitions in New York, Winston Churchill was decrying the "Iron Curtain" that had descended across Europe. The Communist Party that Zinn joined was already widely recognized as the agent of an aggressive tyranny, in thrall to the paranoid dictator Stalin. Zinn evidently pursued his CPUSA activism even after the Soviets exploded their first atomic weapon in 1949 and after the Cold War turned hot with the June 1950 outbreak of the Korean War.

Revelation of Zinn's support for Stalinism is unlikely to affect his standing with liberals, whose main response to the FBI disclosures was to express shock that an official of Boston University tried to get Zinn fired in 1970. Zinn's liberal admirers obviously share his anti-American perspective, in which the FBI poses a greater danger than any foreign enemy. It was that view Zinn meant to express when, in 1986, he condemned the U.S. bombing of Libya in response to a Libyan-sponsored terrorist attack in West Berlin. "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable," Zinn wrote.

That such a condemnation could be applied more truthfully to Zinn's communist heroes, who slaughtered millions of innocents in pursuit of an unattainable socialist paradise, is an irony the professor apparently never contemplated.

Robert Stacy McCain is co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party (Nelson Current). He blogs at The Other McCain.


*from Askville by AMAZON

Details:

It's well-established that much of Alex Haley's "Roots" was plagiarized. In fact, he settled out of court to author Harold Courlander for $650,000. Courlander sued Haley. Prior to the trial Haley stated he had never read Courlander's book "The African". The following is a cut and pasted section from an article I googled:

After a five-week trial in federal district court, Courlander and Haley settled the case, with Haley making a financial settlement and a statement that "Alex Haley acknowledges and regrets that various materials from The African by Harold Courlander found their way into his book Roots."

There is an excellent editorial piece at

http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/alex.htm

but if you google "Alex Haley plagiarism" you will get numerous hits confirming this, including Wikipedia. There is compelling evidence that he did not do the research he claimed, was not able to trace his roots back to a town in Africa....continued in DB


also-

THE CELEBRATED 'ROOTS' OF A LIE

http://www.martinlutherking.org/roots.html



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