Hollywood promoting the crazies

Not that the idea warrants a headline. Seriously. Most outspoken political Hollywoodcons are off their rocker and running through the streets naked screaming, "Would you be mind? Could you be mine? Won't you be my neighbor?"
In fact, don't most of them get arrested for doing that very thing?

This time, dressed and showered and illuminated by the most pleasing stage lights, stars like Matt Damon (who brilliantly reads lines like no other line reader, except those other several thousand line readers), Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Tim Robbins, Josh Brolin (didn't he try making a movie against George W. and it bombed? Yes. I think I remember that), Kerry Washington, Viggo Mortensen (he's obviously no Aragorn), and Bruce Springsteen will be pushing history rewriter Howard Zinn during a History Channel special.

Next week Matt Damon, still fresh-faced but now a $10 million-a-movie anti-capitalist, will use his stardom and boyish smile to promote Zinn’s work again. On Sunday The History Channel will serve as a delivery system for Zinn’s subversive anti-American agenda: a documentary co-produced by Damon entitled “The People Speak,” based on A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which Zinn co-edited with anti-war-on-terror socialist Anthony Arnove.

Who is Howard Zinn?

Here's a little introduction. This is Zinn on Iranian television (where women wrap their head in scarfs because they're more free to be fashionable) to blame America for the 9/11 attacks.



I can't rehearse all of Zinn's twisted dementia. Mark Tapson at BigHollywood.com has an excellent piece giving you a clear introduction of Zinn, his mark on Matt Damon, and even his book and theories being the sole foundation of the movie, Good Will Hunting. Excellent read.
But here's the crux of it. Zinn is an anti-capitalist, anti-American. He believes America's past should be used against us by picking and choosing what and how to report it. Leaving out all the many successes and actions of valor. Then teaching it to America's school children.
Truth is subjective. And even if it isn't, it's unimportant when weighed against his idea of worthwhile propaganda. In other words, he lies.

Zinn twists the past to create his own Utopian idea of America's future. The only problem? He's a historian who won't teach accurate history. Doesn't that make him pretty much useless?

Along with objectivity, Zinn jettisons some historical highlights that might actually give young Americans reason to feel proud of and more knowledgeable about their country. A Conservative History of the American Left’s author and Big Hollywood contributor Daniel J. Flynn notes some of the significant omissions in the People’s History (Zinn's book plugged on Good Will Hunting):

Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate all fail to merit a mention. Nowhere do we learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are entirely absent. Valley Forge rates a single fleeting reference, while D-Day’s Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other important military battles are skipped over. In their place, we get several pages on the My Lai massacre and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during the Gulf War of the early 1990s.

Harvard historian Oscar Handlin not only exposed the book’s flaws long ago and shredded Zinn’s “deranged fairy tale”; he also expressed a keen insight: “Brendan Behan once observed that whoever hated America hated mankind, and hatred of humanity is the dominant tone of Zinn’s book.”

And now, because he makes my distaste for him so easy and fluid, I'll leave you with a few Zinn quotes:

- “If you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”

- “I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power.”

Let's wrap this up with Zinn, a 9/11 truther, telling us how the terrorists who attacked America are no different than our own military. Such a likable guy. Think I'll send him a fruitcake.

This perverse worldview lands Zinn on the wrong side of every issue he addresses: he expressed solidarity with vile academic fraud Ward Churchill, who dismissed the 3,000 victims of the 9/11 attacks as “little Eichmanns”; he placed the blame for those attacks squarely on the shoulders of American foreign policy, completely ignoring the underlying religious motivation; he endorsed the 9/11 truther movement; he offered support for former professor Sami al-Arian, who was jailed for his key role in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as “a victim of a cruel system, in which the rights of anyone who dissents from government policy are in danger”; he denounced “the so-called ‘war on terror’” as “an act of terrorism” itself (”This is not the behavior of a democracy but of a totalitarian state”); and he espoused the moral equivalence of suicide bombing (“The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent”) as well as the moral equivalence of the terrorists themselves (“the U.S. was reacting to the horrors perpetrated by the terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan”).

Zinn. You're a freak, one to be pitied and ignored. One day very soon, as we all will, you will come face-to-face with truth and in the awesomeness of it's power, the overwhelming rightness of it's very existence, your very knees will knock together in trembles and your tongue will be silenced. Or you could start now.

Question for Thought: Why do so many people who loathe America live here? Why not move to Afghanistan and be simpatico with their fellow comrades? I hear the price of cave-dwelling is quite affordable this time of year.