I missed that Howard Zinn was honored by the UW Madison Havens Center. The Professor accepts an award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship from our flagship campus of higher education. A transcript of his talk is online and if you have any doubts the socialists hate America, then read the entire presentation.
Howard Zinn: Madison is a very special place. I always have a special feeling when I come here. I have a feeling I am in a different country. And I’m glad, you know. Some people get disgusted of the American policy, and they go to live in some other country. No. Go to Madison.
Whether you call yourself a totalitarian state or you call yourself a democracy, it works the same way, and that is, the leaders of the country are able to cajole or coerce and entice the people into war by scaring them, telling them they’re in danger, and threatening them and coercing them, that if they don’t go along, they will be considered unpatriotic. And this is what really happened in this country right after 9/11. And this is happened right after Bush raised the specter of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and got for a while the American people to go along with this.
When you know history, you know that governments lie, as I.F. Stone said. Governments lie all the time. Well, not just the American government. It’s just in the nature of governments. Well, they have to lie. I mean, governments in general do not represent the people of the societies that they govern. And since they don’t represent the people and since they act against the interest of the people, the only way they can hold power is if they lie to the people.
It’s very important to know this, because the culture tries very hard to persuade us that we all have a common interest. If they use the language “national interest” -- there’s no national interest. There’s their interest and our interest. National security -- now, whose security? National defense, whose defense? All these words and phrases are used to try to encircle us all into a nice big bond, so that we will assume that the people who are the leaders of our country have our interests at heart. Very important to understand: no, they do not have our interests at heart.
It is fair to say that Howard Zinn is at the extreme of leftist beliefs, but this is only to say he believes the truth of his principles with more passion and detail than the bulk of the left. It is much the same way Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believe the tenets of Islam with more fervor than the average Muslim shopkeeper. For his lifetime of zealotry the UW Madison Sociology Department buys him lunch with our collected money. Thanks U dub.
