Click on the title to link a January 28, 2010 "The Boston Globe" obituary for Professor Howard Zinn who passed away at 87.
DVD REVIEW
Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train, Howard and Roz Zinn and others, Moving Train Productions, 2004
In a lifetime of leftist political work I have run into precious few professors or other intellectual workers who have been committed to a long term radical perspective on American society, much less a call for radical change. The subject of this documentary, Boston University's Professor Emeritus Howard Zinn, is an exception. Although there has been for a long time a vast political gulf between the good professor and this reviewer in terms of how we see the organization of political change occurring we both share fundamentally the same radical critique of American imperialism.
This short documentary flushes out Professor Zinn's early New York City working class upbringing, his military service as a pilot in World War II and his later reflections on his part in that experience that began to lead him to a more radical perspective. The film also details his political perspectives over a lifetime of activism beginning with the early civil rights movement down in the South, where he taught at historically black Spelman College, in the 1950's and early 1960's, centrally around the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, which he wrote an important and informative book about). Much time is spent on Zinn's very visible role as an active oppositional voice in the central experience of my generation, Vietnam. Then, fast forward, onto the struggles in Central America in the 1980's in defense of the Sandinistas and others and then to the most recent fight against the war in Iraq started by President Bush and his coterie in 2003 and that continues to this day.
Just listing the fights Zinn has participated in tells something about our society as well as about the tenacity of the professor. Additionally, Zinn's highly literate historical works are considered here, especially the very useful "People's History of The United States" (which deserves a separate review of its own that I will do in the future in this space) that is a bible of sorts for identifying a progressive alternative interpretation of the development of American capitalist society and is something of Zinn's crowning glory.
Howard Zinn is clearly the star of this documentary, as he should be (with cameos by wife and companion Roz, and other academic leftists such as Francis Fox Piven and Staughton Lynd). However, I got the distinct feeling while viewing this film that he was presented as something of an old radical gadfly spurring everyone on to "keep up the good fight". And that is fine, as we certainly need those radical academic voices to spur on the youth. I also note that Zinn's influence seems to be far greater on my generation than on latter ones. That is hardly his fault. Each generation needs to come to a progressive social perspective in its own way. As a son of the very poorest layer of the working class from the generation after Zinn's I could relate to his upbringing but that compelling life story, as the current usage goes, might not be so to the Obama generation.
What is brother Zinn's "fault" is, however, except for that very strong sense of personal witness on his part against the injustices of the world, that he has no idea about how one would effectively organize the resistance to the American state. That in the final analysis was the weakness of one of his heroines, the fiery anarchist Emma Goldman, and it is his as well. One hardly needs to be a Leninist, although that might help, to know that moral suasion is not enough to go up against the monsters that run this society. And win.
We can fight that question out at another time. But here let me go back to that first sentence of the last paragraph about the strong sense of social justice and the need to bare the inequities of this society. For that, Professor Zinn, all honor to you.
No comments:
Post a Comment