Government Had Threatened All Saints Church For Anti-War Activities
By Joe Piasecki
www.pasadenaweekly.com
To anyone who cares about history, 84-year-old Howard Zinn is a living legend.
Credited by fellow progressive icon Noam Chomsky with changing the consciousness of a generation, Zinn's “A People's History of the United States” is now widely regarded as the authoritative story of resistance to government and corporate power in The New World since 1492.
More than just an appendix to the stale version of history you learned in high school, it shatters it, retelling the story of America from the perspective of those who fought its biggest battles: Native Americans struggling against the genocidal impulses of European settlers, visionaries who worked to end slavery and racial injustice, laborers who organized against rampant exploitation, soldiers of the anti-war movement and others who have stood up against the established order of their times.
In 2004, the now-retired Boston University professor collaborated with writer Anthony Arnove to compile “Voices of a People's History of the United States,” a collection of speeches and writings outside the mainstream — from accounts of slave revolts in the 1700s to a letter by student activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed during an Israeli-Palestinian skirmish by an American-built military bulldozer — that take the telling of history out of the mouths of those in power.
The criteria for a piece making the book: “A voice not of the establishment, but a voice of opposition and a voice that didn't just represent victimization, but a voice that represented defiance, resistance, rebellion,” said Zinn, who spoke to the Weekly by telephone from his home in Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife of more than 60 years, Roslyn.
On Thursday, Feb. 1, Pasadena-based anti-war organizers Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace (ICUJP) will host a dramatic reading of excerpts from “Voices,” as well as other pieces selected by Zinn and Arnove, at All Saints Church.
It was at All Saints that ICUJP founder George Regas gave his now famous anti-war sermon on the eve of the 2004 presidential election that resulted in the IRS threatening to take away the church's tax exempt status.
The event is a fundraiser to help launch the Los Angeles Voices Project, designed to bring readings and other educational events into schools and libraries.
Anorve, 37 and author of “Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal,” met Zinn while working at a publishing house, and the two have since collaborated on the production of Zinn's play “Marx in Soho” and one other book, “Terrorism and War.”
“It opened up a whole new world to me,” he said of “A People's History.” “I grew up in Indiana and never even read about [labor leader and Socialist presidential candidate] Eugene Debs in my public school, and the Eugene Debs Museum is right there in Terre Haute.”
Featured readers for the ICUJP event include actors Josh Brolin, Alfre Woodard, Mark Ruffalo, Benjamin Bratt, Elizabeth Peña and Rosie Perez, members of the band Ozomatli, and Q'Orianka Kilcher — the teenage star of “The New World” who made headlines working to end environmental devastation and human rights abuses caused by American oil drilling in Peru.
Brolin, who was part of a similar event last year in Los Angeles, promised a lively evening.
“People are incredibly moved by it,” said the actor, a huge fan of “A People's History” who met Zinn at the home of “Crash” director Paul Haggis. “Audience involvement was really high. It brought out a lot of emotion. During a reading, you would have someone crying and another person standing up, shouting ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!'” he said.
Zinn has recently been promoting his latest book, “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress,” but says he doesn't travel as often as he used to and will not be attending the Pasadena event.
Both he and Arnove, however, are aware of All Saints troubles with the government. Thus they have selected Thoreau's famous essay on civil disobedience, in which he explains his refusal to pay taxes as a protest to pro-slavery expansionist plans for the pre-emptive invasion of Mexico, as one of the readings.
“There are some interesting ideas about your responsibility at a time when your government, with your tax dollars, is carrying out unjust and illegal actions in your name,” said Arnove, who will attend next week's event. “History is not just something on a library shelf. It's something we're part of today.”
Pasadena Weekly: What does the All Saints/IRS situation say about the state we're in today?
Howard Zinn: That's typical of this administration — doing everything it can to stifle free speech, opposition, constitutional rights, ignoring the fact that churches have historically been meeting places for people to air whatever views they want. The churches in the South during the Civil Rights Movement were places where people met and organized and held rallies against racial segregation. And so the administration is not just going against the constitution of the United States and the First Amendment, it's going against the historic tradition, and so I would argue it's something that should be resisted. In fact, the best way to resist it is to have more and more anti-war meetings at more and more churches around the country. I mean, if Bush were in power when King made his speech in 1967 at the Riverside Church, he would have taken away the tax exemption from the Riverside Church. So, it's really a shameful thing. Not unexpected, but something that should be resisted.
With the growth of the Christian Right movement, has religion been so twisted as an organizing tool that it's now doing, in many cases, more harm than good?
Well, it's doing a lot of harm when it comes to us in the form of Christian fundamentalism allied with the government and supporting whatever the government does. I mean, there is still a strong religious tradition in this country which of course doesn't get much play because it doesn't have the ear of the White House, it doesn't have the huge money that the Christian Right has, it doesn't have control over so many radio stations and television stations as the Christian Right has, but there is a religious tradition of pacifism, a religious tradition of social justice, which is still strong in this country and shouldn't be ignored.
Speaking of organizing, there's a major antiwar protest in Los Angeles on Saturday, but a lot of people — especially younger people and people from communities of color, it seems — have been choosing not to exercise their voices in this pretty traditional way. How effective are peace protests in today's political climate, and why do you think so many people who may feel strongly about issues still don't participate?
Of course we won't know until we see that rally how many young people participate, or how many people of color participate, but it may be that — it's easy to understand that people are discouraged from participation in mass meetings because they see mass meetings taking place, they see rallies taking place, and they see no results. But that's, I think, the effect of a loss of history and a failure to recognize that this is the way movements have always gone in the past. Protest actions and rallies have failed and failed and failed until they succeeded. We had a huge rally on the Boston Common in 1969 of 100,000 people — that's just in Boston, 100,000 people. The war didn't end as a result of that. The war went on for, well, at least four more years. If people had given up as a result of the failure of that one huge rally, then the war would have lasted even longer.
What kind of promise do you see in today's young people?
I don't see anything unique. I think young people in every generation have a capacity for idealism and the desire to change the world. But different generations face different conditions, different circumstances. The generation of the ‘60s, I think, first was schooled very well in a very obvious kind of issue, that is the issue of racism and racial segregation. Therefore it was easier to mobilize people on that, and that I think created a kind of apprenticeship for the anti-war movement, where also a very clear issue emerged. I think what has happened today is that the issue was not clear at the beginning. The domination of the press, the media, by the administration — the collaboration of the media with the Bush administration — I think mis-educated the younger generation about what was happening. And so they, like most of the population, supported the war when it began and supported the Bush administration. I think that has begun to change.
You've dedicated your career to sorting out and highlighting the voices of history that have been ignored or misrepresented. Yet we're living history right now, and when it comes to the press, which some describe as history written on a daily basis, it seems pretty clear that they are putting forward a distorted version of the truth. For one thing, they've painted a picture of Bush, who has done pretty horrific things, as a fairly decent guy. How do we prevent this from causing some sort of national amnesia continuing even decades from now?
Since we can't depend on the press to overcome this historical amnesia, it means that we must do everything we can to support alternative sources of information: Alternative radio stations, like Pacifica, like “Democracy Now!,” like David Bersamian's Alternative Radio. There's several hundred independent radio stations around the country which are the voices of dissidence and voices of information. Supporting alternative newspapers, community newspapers, and using the Internet. This is a very, very important tool.
The Internet has become a very, very important method of bypassing the corporate control of the media and getting two things out to very large numbers of people: One, actual organizing information. You can reach millions of people and tell them there's going to be a rally in Washington on Jan. 27, whereas if you didn't have the Internet you'd have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on newspaper ads, and you still wouldn't reach that many people. The other thing that the Internet can do is simply supply information that we don't get in the press.
Chapter 21 of “Voices” is titled the “Carter-Reagan-Bush Consensus,” having to do with mainstream America seeming to embrace über-capitalism and corporate culture. Do you think the development of a lapdog media at that time is to blame for us forgetting the poverty, militarism and other horrors of that time? If you saw Reagan's funeral, I mean, everybody forgot.
[Laughs] Yes, this has become a tradition in America. When a president dies, when a person of great importance dies, the hypocrisy shows up at the funeral dressed to the nines. People say what a wonderful person this was. And certainly the media have done their work. When Ford died, and Ford is not the worst of our presidents, but when Ford died all of the media were falling all over themselves about Ford, how he brought our nation together, and forgetting that Ford allowed our criminal president to go unscathed by pardoning him — that is, setting a tradition that the president is above the law. And Ford gave the go-ahead to Indonesia to invade East Timor, resulting in the deaths of several hundred thousand people. The media, again and again, have played lapdog to our administrations. It gives us a greater responsibility to do the job of teaching history ourselves.
A little earlier, in Chapter 19, the book talks about the cultural revolution of the 60s as a shedding of oppressive norms and changing the ways people lived their lives. But since that generation is in charge now, what the hell happened to people?
Is a generation in charge? I don't know if they're in charge. It's true that people from that generation have become imbedded in the establishment, but I think there are a lot of people from that generation who, while they're not doing the same things they were doing at that time, are doing good work. I know for myself that my protesting students of the 60s, today — because I'm in touch with them — many of them are lawyers working for civil liberties or for trade unions. Many of them are working for nonprofit organizations. Many of them are community organizers. There's this sort of quiet, I think quiet development, quiet, I guess, exodus from the cultural movements of the 60s into the various parts of American society where they're not as dramatically evident. But they are trying to do good things.
Do you worry at all about who is going to carry on your work years from now after you're gone?
I figure you will. [Laughs] There are lots of young people coming up; I meet them all the time. I do a lot of speaking around the country and wherever I go in the audience there are eager young people, some of them are in the academy, some of them are outside the academy, but they're there. I think that circumstances bring forth leadership and talent, and I read the progressive journals and I see young people in these journals writing things, and I see alternative newspapers around the country with young people editing and reporting, so there are these young people. I see young people coming back from Iraq and organizing — Iraq Veterans Against the War. So no, I'm not worried about that.
You published “Voices” in 2004. What are the most important documents or voices that have emerged since publishing the book?
I think since then probably the most important voices have been voices of opposition to the Iraq War, the voices of Cindy Sheehan, of Lt. Watada, the Marine officer who is now facing prison as a result of refusing to serve in Iraq. I think these are the voices that have emerged since our publication of the book, and in fact at these events like the one you're about to have in Pasadena, we're trying to use not just the voices that are in the book but some of the important voices that have spoken out since the book was published.
How do you see the latest developments, especially in Congress, about Iraq? I mean, a nonbinding resolution [against the war]?
Unfortunately this is typical of the behavior of what is supposed to be an opposition. The Democratic Party, historically, has always gone along with war.
Wars in general?
Yes, Woodrow Wilson got us into World War I and the administrations of both Republicans and Democrats expanded the war in Vietnam, and the Democrats went along and supported Bush's resolution on the war when they started the war. So I'm not surprised, but it's sad that the Democrats are responding so feebly. There is a small number of Democrats who are speaking out — John Conyers, Maxine Waters, there's a progressive caucus, and some leading members of the Congressional Black Caucus are speaking out, but so far the Democrats have been puny in their response. My hope is there will be a grassroots movement around the country to push the Democrats into action.
The cliché is ‘History repeats itself,' but it seems the War on Terror — in both foreign and domestic policy terms, and sociological terms as far as there being a climate of fear — is breaking new ground. Have we been here before, or are the challenges of these times unique?
It's unique in its specifics. The War on Terror — we've never had a war on an unidentifiable object, on some vague concept like terrorism. But we have had wars based on fear. In the Cold War period, communism was the forerunner of what is now terrorism as a way of mobilizing people for war, creating a great internal panic about what will happen to this country, communism will overtake us and now the terrorists will get us. That's repetition, that common denominator, even though, yes, this is different, this unidentifiable enemy which gives the possibility — and this is what's different about it — gives the possibility of endless war. When you have an identifiable enemy, like its Russia or Vietnam or whatever it is, there is something finite about that situation. But a War on Terror, it is infinite in its possibilities, and that makes it more dangerous.
Tickets for the “Voices” event, which begins at 7 p.m., are $100, and $500 to also attend a 6 p.m. reception. All Saints Church is located at 132 N. Euclid Ave. in Pasadena. Call (626) 683-9004 or visit www.icujp.org for ticket information.
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