Howard Zinn: August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010
Rónán Burtenshaw
Staff Writer
Howard Zinn, one of Twentieth Century America’s most important political activists died on January 27th, aged eighty-seven. An author, academic, historian, playwright, political thinker and general pain-in-the-ass to the Establishment in the US, Zinn wrote the hugely successful book A People’s History of the United States, first published 1980. Described by his friend Noam Chomsky as the “most powerful and benign influence” on revisionist, some might say revolutionary, history of his day, Zinn laid down the gauntlet to younger generations to challenge the abuse of power. In amongst his determined campaigns for greater equality of opportunity, education standards, understanding of history and scepticism of modern power structures, Howard Zinn was also a fierce advocate of independent and objective media sources.
“If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.”
Howard Zinn understood very well the importance of media in the modern society. As a boy he had left Brooklyn to fight in the US air force during the Second World War. After coming home from service, Zinn often wondered about the effects he had, had on the people of the areas he bombed, particularly those of Bayonne in southern France. As a pilot, Zinn had dropped napalm on that town towards the very end of the war and his later discovery of the sheer horror this had caused to both innocent bystanders and surrendered soldiers had led him to question the narrative of “The Good War”.
Zinn became a firm believer in the need to have a media that was investigative. He understood that state propaganda in the fascist and authoritarian regimes around the world had been able to radically alter the mind-set of whole populations. But Zinn also saw a danger in monopolised media sources of other kinds. The corporate-owned and -dominated media that he saw developing in many Western countries caused him to question their capability for objectivity and the bona fides of their desire to act in the public interest. “Most of what we get from mainstream media” he said, “is ideological – biased not in favour of the people, but towards the commercial and political interests of the men and corporations at the top.”
The increasing desire for owners of media and politically-appointed editors to want an input into the articles their journalists write is of particular concern. He noted the effective use of media to engender public support for wars in the US in every conflict from the Spanish-American War and its fabricated attacks, to Vietnam and its Gulf of Tonkin incident, to the Iraq War and its nonexistent “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. He saw media as a rising but unrecognised fourth branch of government, as a medium that could be used by those with power to influence the mind-set and opinion of the rest of society with ever more frequent success. A fervent advocate of a democratic system that received its power solely from the mandate of the people, Zinn worried that the rise of a media controlled too much by corporate powers or one particular class grouping could rob the people of the ability to make an informed decision on polling day.
Worried also about the effect current media would have on tomorrow’s version of history, Zinn began to call for and work for a more effective independent media. This media, he argued, would need to be motivated not by profit, which had led to increased sensationalism and the exodus of unpopular stories from the news, but by the public interest. If the Irish people, say, did not want to hear the warnings about their economic train approaching a cliff, loaded with unsustainable levels of debt, worryingly close alliances between government and the construction industry and record levels of social inequality, then you would have to give them the warning anyway. Simply placating them with the tranquillising drugs of superficiality and reassurance would not do.
If Howard Zinn were still alive and in Trinity College today, as either a student pestering the Senior Dean about censorship issues or a lecturer urging his class to remember that all great change starts from the bottom not the top, he would be reading The University Times, as well as Trinity News, while listening to Trinity FM. He would be listening to community radio and berating the people in his community for not standing for a more objective, more investigative media after our corporate and state-run mainstream sources had, by and large, missed the biggest economic crash to ever hit the country.
George Orwell once wrote that “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” It was one of Zinn’s favourite quotes and he used it regularly when referring to the media. Zinn believed that when the law is controlled by the branches of government and the economy is controlled by the corporations, the media should be the power of the people. It must also give voice to the sections of society that the other structures of power had left voiceless, because “by letting these voices speak, the alternative media preserve crucial parts of today’s history—and challenge powerful institutions’ right to control the future.”
Howard Zinn, August 24th, 1922 – January 27th, 2010. His most famous book, “A People’s History of the United States” is still in print in a revised edition.
