Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian. Howard Boone's Zinn
invoked and as a result nearly bereft of cognitive content.” What do you think of that?
Analogies have to be used carefully. They can be misused, and sometimes they are not used as analogies but as identities, and if you say something is like something, people will say, Oh, you’re saying it is that. It is possible to overuse the Nazi analogy until it loses its force. I was speaking to a group of high school students in Boston the other day. One of them asked, Who was worse, Hitler or Columbus? There’s a nice analogy. They are two different situations, two different forms of genocide. In fact, in that situation it was not an exaggeration. In terms of the numbers of people who died, the Hitler killing was smaller than the number of people who died in the genocide not committed directly by Columbus, but as a result of the work of the conquistadores, Columbus, and the others, when they got through with the Caribbean and Latin America. Perhaps fifty million people or more died, the indigenous population, as a result of enslavement, overwork, direct execution, disease, a much higher toll even than the genocide of Hitler.
I think it’s all right to invoke analogies, so long as you invoke them carefully and make clear what the differences are and the similarities.
Barsamian: In addition to wiping out the indigenous population, the Europeans had to initiate the slave trade and bring over the Africans to work the land.
When the Indians were gone as workers, that’s when the slave trade began, and another genocide took place, tens of millions of black slaves brought over, dying by the millions on the way and then dying in great numbers when they got here.
Barsamian: In that same Dershowitz column, he talks about the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust in terms of genocide, that it stands by itself. Would you accept that?
It depends on what you mean by “unique.” Every genocide obviously stands by itself in that every genocide has its own peculiar historical characteristics. But I think it is wrong, and we should understand that, to take any one genocide and concentrate on it to the neglect of others and act as if there has only been one great genocide in the world and nobody should bring up any other because it’s a poor analogy. The greatest gift the Jews could give to the world is not to remember Hitler’s genocide for exactly what it was, that is, the genocide of Jews, but to take what that horrible experience was for Jews and then to apply it to all the other things that are going on in the world, where huge numbers of people are dying for no reason at all. Apply it to the starvation in Somalia and the way people are treated by the advanced industrial countries in the Third World, where huge numbers of people die in wars or for economic reasons. I think in that sense what happened in the Holocaust is not unique. It should not be left alone. It should be applied everywhere it can, because that is past. The other genocides are present and future.
Barsamian: Let’s talk a little about Hollywood and history. Michael Parenti, in a book entitled Make-Believe Media, suggests that in an increasingly non-literate society, film has the “last frame,” the last chapter of history. I’d like you to connect that with a discussion about Oliver Stone’s docudrama JFK. He has said, “The American people deserve to have their history back.” What about the assumption that history was once ours and is now lost?
Of course, it was never ours. History has always belonged to the people who controlled whatever present there was. They control history. So it’s not a matter of taking it back. Very often people will say, Let us restore America to what it once was. To what? Slavery? Let us restore the good old days? The good old days lie ahead. Film is tremendously important. I don’t know whether it’s the last frame. I’m even dubious about whether films, as powerful as they are at the moment that they capture you, have the lasting effect that literature and writing have. I don’t know this for sure. We have fewer and fewer people reading books. Are the statistics on that clear? I know everybody says this. I know that students are not reading books the way they used to. I know there are millions of people in this country who read books, and obviously many more millions who don’t read books. In that sense it’s true. They are watching videos, watching television, and going to the movies. People who are not reached by books have only videos, movies, and television. Then they become especially important. I agree with the importance of the visual media. I love the movies. I’m very happy when I see a movie made that I think does something to advance people’s social consciousness. I have a special place in my heart for movies that have something important to say.
When I saw Oliver Stone’s movie Salvador I thought it was a very powerful statement about the brutal American policy supporting the dictatorship and the death squads of El Salvador. When I saw Born on the Fourth of July, I thought, This is great. He’s bringing the antiwar movement before millions of people and showing that there’s no conflict between soldiers in Vietnam and the antiwar movement. Soldiers came back from Vietnam and joined the antiwar movement, as Ron Kovic did.
When I saw JFK I did not have the same feeling. I thought he was contradicting what he was doing in Born on the Fourth of July, where he was saying, We had an antiwar movement in this country. If the war came to an end, it was in good part because people like Ron Kovic and Vietnam veterans and all the other people who protested against the war showed us what a social movement was like. But in JFK he is telling us that the key to ending the war was the president of the United States. If Kennedy had lived he would have ended the war. That viewpoint perpetuates an elitist notion in history which I’ve been struggling against. I think that Oliver Stone in his better films is also struggling against it, the idea that history is made from the top, and if we want change to come about we must depend on our presidents, on the Supreme Court, on Congress. If history shows anything, to me, it shows that we cannot depend on those people on top to make the necessary changes towards justice and peace. It’s social movements we must depend on to do that.
The word “optimism,” used here, and in the subtitle of my book, makes me a little uneasy, because it suggests a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. But I use it anyway, not because I am totally confident that the world will get better, but because I am certain that only such confidence can prevent people from giving up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; it is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. I wrote this essay to show that there is some evidence in support of that possibility. I should mention that I first wrote about this in a much longer piece requested by John Tirman of the Winston Foundation.
1988
As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability.
This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon.
But who foresaw that, 24 years after the national Democratic Party Convention refused to seat blacks from Mississippi, a black militant would run for president, excite crowds, black and white, all over the country, and then dominate the Democratic Party Convention in Atlanta? Or (recalling Jesse Jackson’s presentation of Rosa Parks to the Convention) who, on that day in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to move from the front of the bus, could have predicted that this would lead to a mass protest of black working people, and then would follow a chain of events that would shake the nation, startle the world, and transform the South?
But let’s go back to the turn of the century. That a revolution should overthrow the Czar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd.
Who could have predicted, not just the Russian Revolution, but Stalin’s deformation of it, then Khrushchev’s astounding exposure of Stalin, and recently Gorbachev’s succession of surprises?
Or observe Germany after the