Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian. Howard Boone's Zinn
community newspapers, speaking here and there, Noam Chomsky speaking seventeen times a day in a hundred cities, it’s possible by doing these things to actually change the culture in a very important way. When the New York Times had a story saying that this year the Columbus quincentennial is marked by protests, it became clear that the challenge was noticed. In Denver they called off a parade because of the protest that they expected. This has happened in a number of other places. Berkeley changed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.
Barsamian: So in this doom and gloom atmosphere that the left loves to wash itself in at times there are glimpses of light?
Traveling around the country I am encouraged by what I see. Not just about Columbus, but that as soon as you give people information that they didn’t have before, they are ready to accept it. When I went around the country speaking about Columbus, I was worried that suddenly, as I started telling about these atrocities that Columbus committed, people in the audience would start yelling and shouting and throwing things at me, threatening my life. That hasn’t happened at all. Maybe the worst that happened is that one Italian-American said to me in a low voice, plaintively, “What are Italians going to do? Who are we going to celebrate?” I said, “Joe DiMaggio, Arturo Tos-canini, Pavarotti, Fiorello LaGuardia, a whole bunch of wonderful Italians that we can celebrate.”
It’s been very encouraging. I believe that all over this country there are people who really want change. I don’t mean the miniscule change that Clinton represents. I suppose a miniscule change is better than no change that we’ve been having. But there are people around this country who want much more change than the parties are offering.
Barsamian: Are you encouraged also by the development of new media, community radio stations, cable TV, Z, Common Courage Press, South End Press and the Open Magazine pamphlet series?
Oh, yes.
Barsamian: Is there anything in American history that parallels this burst of independent media in the last ten or fifteen years?
There have been periods in American history when pamphlets and newspapers have had an important effect in arousing and organizing a movement. In the period leading up to the Revolutionary War there was a lot of pamphleteering that was not under the control of the colonial governors. In the time of the antislavery movement, the abolitionists, the antislavery people spread literature all over the country. So much so that Andrew Jackson ordered the Postmaster General to bar abolitionist literature from the Southern states. That’s Andrew Jackson, our great hero. We’ve had labor newspapers, the populist movement put out an enormous number of pamphlets.
But in this era of television and radio, where they soon became dominated by these monstrous, fabulously wealthy networks crowding critical voices off the air, it’s been very refreshing just in the past few years to see these new media. I could see this in the Gulf War. I was invited to a gathering of several hundred community broadcasters in Boston. I didn’t know so many existed. During the Gulf War they were about the only place where you could hear critical voices, Noam Chomsky and other people who would give you an analysis of the war in a critical way. You weren’t getting that on public television, certainly not on the major media. Now there are satellite dishes. It’s amazing that people in the progressive movement are able to use these satellite dishes to beam broadcasts all over. Wherever I go there are community newspapers. That’s what we have to depend on, and we should make the most of it.
Barsamian: In the popular culture, ideology and propaganda are attributes of our adversaries. It’s not something that we have here in our democracy. How do you persuade people in your talks and writings that in fact there is a good deal of propaganda and a great amount of ideology right here in the United States?
The best way I can persuade them that what we get mostly from the media and the textbooks and the histories is ideological, biased not in the humanist direction but towards wealth and power, expansion, militarism, and conquest, is to give them examples from history and to show how the government has manipulated our information. You can go back to the Spanish-American War and talk about how the history textbooks all said that the reason we got into that war was that popular opinion demanded it. Therefore the president went along. There were no public opinion polls then, no mass rallies on behalf of going into Cuba. By public opinion they meant a few powerful newspapers. So when I get to the Vietnam War I talk about how the government manipulated the information, not only the general public, but the newspapers, Congress, how they fabricated incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in the summer of 1964 to give Lyndon Johnson an excuse to go before Congress and get them to pass a resolution giving him carte blanche to start the war full-scale. I talk about the history books and how they omit what the United States has done in Latin America, and how when they get to the Spanish-American War they will talk about what we did in Cuba but not much about what we did in the Philippines. The war in Cuba lasted three months, while the war in the Philippines lasted for years. A big, bloody, Vietnam-type war. So I try to give historical examples to show how that ideology manifests itself.
Barsamian: Speaking of the Vietnam War, it seems it never ends, never will end. You saw examples of that in the 1992 presidential campaign, about draft status, who fought and who didn’t. And the ongoing MIA/POW issue. Why is that? Why does it persist?
The administrations, the powers that be, the people who got us into the Vietnam War and kept us in it, didn’t like the way it ended. They’re trying to change the ending, to rewrite history. They’re saying, the reason we lost is because of the media, the antiwar movement. Or we fought with one hand behind our back. We dropped seven million tons of bombs, twice as much as we dropped in World War II, and that was “one hand tied behind our back.” Incredible. They were very unhappy not just that we lost the war, but that people became aware of what happened in the war, became aware of the carnage. The My Lai massacre. The destruction of the Vietnamese countryside. The deaths of a million people in Vietnam and of 55,000 Americans. They worry that those events made the American people leery of military intervention. All the surveys taken after the Vietnam War in the late 1970s showed that the American people did not want military intervention anywhere in the world, for any reason. The establishment has been trying desperately—the military-industrial-political establishment—to change that view and to try to get the American people to accept military intervention as once more the basic American policy. Grenada was a probe, Panama another, the war in the Middle East a bigger one.
Barsamian: They were all short and fast.
Exactly. They learned a number of things from Vietnam. If you’re going to have a war, do it quickly. Don’t give the public a chance to know what’s happening. Control the information, so the war will be over before anybody really knows the truth about what happened. Here it is now, a year or two years later, and only now we’re finding out that the Bush Administration was arming Saddam Hussein right up to just before the war. So keep the war short. And try to have very few casualties, and don’t mention the casualties on the other side. Then you can call it a “costless war.” Even if 100,000 Iraqis die, even if tens of thousands of children die in Iraq, they don’t count as people. So you can say it was an easy war.
Barsamian: You’re fond also of quoting Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent. They observe that it’s hard to make a case about the manipulation of the media when they find that they’re so willing to go along.
I like that quote because so many people fall in with the media when the media say the government is controlling the information. They say, we want desperately to tell the truth to the public. But of course they don’t. In the Iraqi war they showed themselves to be such weak, pathetic, absolutely obsequious yea-sayers to the briefers in Washington. They kept putting generals and ex-Joint Chiefs of Staff personnel on the air, military experts, to make us all exult in the smart bombs that were being dropped. The media did not use anybody who would give any historical background, or who would criticize the war on the air.
Barsamian: One of your intellectual favorites is Alan Dershowitz. In a recent column he was writing about the atrocities in the Balkans and decrying