[Peace-discuss] Howard Zinn speaks

[Morton K. Brussel]

 From ZNet:  http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/ 
16498#Comments

Zinn sounds a little less buoyant than usual.

…Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a  
commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t  
talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison,  
“Father of the Constitution,” said, thirty years before Marx was born  
that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who  
had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases  
like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense”  
as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or  
white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the  
same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same  
interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the  
biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American  
people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with  
different interests in this country. To ignore that—not to know that  
the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave,  
landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor 
—is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by  
people in power. …

--mkb

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