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.
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