Howard Zinn

First, the FBI tried to nail him as a member of the Communist Party.

Then, they tried to recruit him as an informant.

Finally, they put him on a list to be arrested during an emergency.read more

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Remembering Howard Zinn on July 4.read more

“His greatest wish was that there be peace in the world,” said his daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn.read more

"Yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society."read more

Howard Zinn will never stop informing us on our ultimate responsibility of being human.read more

“Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens, ” wrote Howard Zinn back in March 2008. Zinn was a columnist for The Progressive and we are deeply saddened by the news of his death.read more

I want to talk about three holy wars. They aren’t religious wars, but they’re the three wars in American history that are sacrosanct, that you can’t say anything bad about: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II.read more

The American Revolution was not a simple affair of all of us against all of them. And who actually gained from it? Not the Indians.read more

Obama has to be pulled in the right direction.read more

I’ll be blunt: The Progressive magazine needs your support.
It’s one of our most important voices, and yet it is facing an acute cash-flow crisis right now.read more

Reading Edward Rothstein’s sour commentary on Studs Terkel in the New York Times on November 2 I was surprised that Rothstein, presumably a sophisticated thinker, seems to believe one can separate one’s political views from a historical narrative, even from oral history.

“It is, in fact, impossible to separate Mr. Terkel’s political vision from the contours of his oral history,” he wrote.read more

It seems that Barack Obama and John McCain are arguing over which war to fight. McCain says: Keep the troops in Iraq until we “win.” Obama says: Withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and “win” in Afghanistan.

As someone who has fought in a war (World War II) and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one “wins” in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of human beings die, most of them civilians, many of them children?read more

The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held—security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going.read more

Now that Ohio and Texas are over, can we take a deep breath and come to our senses?

Election fever has seized the country, as it does every four years.

We have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two candidates who have already been chosen for us.

Now I’m not saying elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity.read more