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The American right’s Howard Zinn problem
Plenty of alternative takes on history circulate on the American right today. How did World War II really begin? Who were America’s true allies, and who were the enemies — foreign and domestic? These are serious questions, and some counter-narratives raise valuable points. But many of them belong in the advanced section. Before you dive into them, you need a grasp of the basics.The left has long had this problem. For its adherents and especially its new recruits, woke history is the only history. Nothing fuels leftists’ superiority complex more than tossing around facts that appear to shatter common assumptions — if you don’t know the rest of the story. The right is only just beginning to learn that game.You need to read these histories that challenge the national narrative as interesting, with real and uncomfortable truths — but not as definitive texts.On the left, historians like Howard Zinn, William Blum, and Noam Chomsky absolutely excel. Did you even know that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves?! Did you even know that the founding fathers were a bunch of rich white guys?! Did you even know we worked with former fascists against the communists when we rebuilt Europe?!?All that is true! And these realities should inform a proper understanding of history. Held in a vacuum, however, they obscure the real story.It’s tempting to hear things that pierce the basic histories we’ve learned and that question the proud narratives all countries build around their histories. But that special feeling of knowing something you weren’t taught in school can inflate the ego well beyond where it should go.How many woke scholars “know” Christopher Columbus was a tyrannical rapist, but don’t know that entire counter-narrative is based on the writings of one man who wanted his job, which were not taken seriously in their day and are corroborated nowhere else?How many woke scholars know enough about the lives of Jefferson and Washington, the realities of the world they lived in, and their substantial contributions to a society in which no man is a slave? How many of them know what the communists were doing in Europe, the realities of functioning governance on the ground, and why communist terrorists had to be fought? You’re not going to find that context in “A People’s History of the United States.”Today, the American right is experiencing its own reckoning with history. For the first time, many patriotic Americans are open to dissident accounts that challenge the United States’ “hero story.” Younger conservatives in particular grew up under elites who dismissed that story outright, replacing it with the Zinn-Chomsky narrative taught as unquestioned truth.They were told that whiteness is wicked, men are oppressors, masculinity is toxic, Christianity is tyrannical, and America itself is evil. At the same time, they were fed lie after lie about COVID, the deep state, and more. They are angry, and the internet now supplies them with historical alternatives that reinforce a conspiratorial worldview.Some of this is healthy. My grandfather remembered when World War II propaganda dubbed Josef Stalin “Uncle Joe,” even as Soviet sympathizers burrowed into the State Department and the White House. They funneled Stalin aid while forcing Britain to bankrupt itself to pay for its own defense, hastening the empire’s collapse.The trick is that you need to read these histories that challenge the national narrative as interesting, with real and uncomfortable truths — but not as definitive texts. Did we choose bad allies in the 20th century? Yes. Did we choose correct foes? That’s a mixed record. Did we make mistakes that ended up with half of Europe under Soviet domination? Absolutely. Could we have prevented that? Maybe, but only at incredible costs.Could we have prevented the original destruction of Europe that resulted from World War I? Certainly not. Could we have gone back farther and stopped it all by staying out of that war? Probably not. Could we have made the French be nicer to the kaiser? Very unlikely. Should we have gotten involved at all? Depends on where and when.Did we target the only Catholic cities in Japan for nuclear attack? Yes. Did we also kill vastly more people in Tokyo than either of those outlier cities? Yes. And on and on and on.The punk band NOFX mocked their radical fans in the early 2000s with the lyrics: “I never looked around, never second-guessed / Then I read some Howard Zinn, now I'm always depressed / And now I can't sleep from years of apathy, all because I read a little Noam Chomsky.”The young conservatives of the day scoffed at these preening “academics” at a time when the American right bought the old narrative more fully than it should have. That day has passed. The regime, the left, and the internet all combined to blast our shared history to pieces — and there’s so much left to question.Just don’t be stupid about it. Investigate the alternative takes, then place them into the broader context. And never stop learning.Sign up for Bedford’s newsletterSign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford’s newsletter.
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