{"id":778,"date":"2026-08-05T14:11:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T14:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=778"},"modified":"2026-08-05T14:11:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T14:11:29","slug":"liberals-are-shaming-howard-zinns-memory-yet-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=778","title":{"rendered":"Liberals Are Shaming Howard Zinn\u2019s Memory Yet Again"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Donald Trump, rather infamously, was mentored by the notorious Roy Cohn, once the attorney for the fascistic, anti-communist, and anti\u2013civil libertarian Senator Joseph McCarthy. Now, as he flails from crisis to crisis, Trump is turning to Cohn\u2019s greatest hits for relief: Red Scare McCarthyite slander. Trump is using accusations of communism to distract from all the competing scandals and failures that are closing in on his administration.<\/p>\n

Read more This Was the Decade of Feminist Uprisings in Latin America<\/a><\/p>\n

He\u2019s had the perfect opportunity to do so with the success of Democratic Party candidates who ally with or are members of the Democratic Socialists of America: Here\u2019s another group he can offer up for his base to hate. In addition to immigrants or Muslims, they must now worry about reds under the bed.<\/p>\n

While one could be forgiven for wondering if the president is aware that the Cold War ended 35 years ago, this crude name-calling serves a political purpose beyond scaring the Boomer and Gen-X voters glued to Fox News. It\u2019s about the chilling of free speech, free assembly and the right to organize. How fitting that a president whose corrupt renovations have bulldozed the White House and ruined the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool\u2014belching algae as if disgusted with its guardians\u2014is also taking the occasion of the 250th anniversary of this country to weaponize the politics of fear and trample the Bill of Rights.<\/p>\n

In response to Trump\u2019s poisonous rhetoric, centrist and liberal democrats have sprinted off to reporters\u2014not to condemn Trump, but to decry their own party\u2019s electoral victories by democratic socialists or candidates with socialists working in their campaigns. We\u2019ve seen before what the cancer of anti-communism brings to the country, and we would do well to remember what happened then. If we knew our history, then we\u2019d know that these liberals that show more energy to fight their left than fight the right are cutting their own throats.<\/p>\n

Howard Zinn knew his history, which is perhaps why not only right-wingers but do-nothing liberals decry his work. The longtime Boston University historian and esteemed author of the classic A People\u2019s History of the United States <\/em>was 26 years old, a decorated WWII Army vet, a husband, a father, and a prominent New York City activist when McCarthyism, in the form of J. Edgar Hoover\u2019s FBI, came calling. FBI agents accosted Zinn, took him in more than once for questioning, and threatened his family. They targeted him not because he was a member of the Communist Party\u2014although they had their hysterical suspicions\u2014but because he was a leading voice against communists\u2019 being expelled from the powerful social movements that gripped the city.<\/p>\n

After coming home from World War II, Zinn threw himself into an organization called the American Veterans Committee (AVC). It quickly became one of the largest multiracial organizations in the United States, with over 100,000 members at its height and more than a thousand chapters, including throughout the Jim Crow South. The Red Scare hearings were dominated by white Southern Dixiecrat politicians. To them, the AVC\u2019s existence must have seemed like an abomination, a hotbed of something far more enraging than communism and far more of a threat to their grip on power: solidarity and \u201crace-mixing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The AVC, had it been able to endure as an open organization, could have been a critical bridge to Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s civil rights movement of the 1950s: an infrastructure of politically driven Black and white vets throughout the South ready to lend a hand. Instead, it was destroyed by the Red Scare\u2019s success in coercing its members to betray one another.<\/p>\n

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Under pressure from the FBI, Hollywood, and liberal anti-communists (including California AVC member Ronald Reagan), the AVC tore itself to pieces. In this maelstrom, the Cold War liberals attempted to expel anyone suspected of Communism. But Howard Zinn\u2014a young, working-class history student and head of the Brooklyn chapter\u2014became the leading voice against expelling members for political thought crimes. He and his compatriots took this position on political principle, but also because they knew the AVC would disintegrate if they engaged in mass expulsions.<\/p>\n

As Zinn said at a national committee meeting of the AVC: \u201cWe will wholeheartedly endorse the expulsion of any member who discredits AVC or acts in a manner detrimental to its welfare, whether that member be a Communist, a Socialist, a Democrat or a Republican. But we deplore wholesale categorization as unscientific, irrational and unjust.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under Zinn\u2019s leadership, the endangered branches fought back. They organized while wearing their war medals. (Reagan, one of their chief opponents in the AVC, never actually fought in World War II; he was grounded stateside due to \u201cnear-sightenedness.\u201d So no medals for him.) They demanded that they not be Red Scare collateral damage. <\/p>\n

At the end of the day, the medals didn\u2019t protect them. The AVC National Planning Committee suspended Zinn\u2019s chapter and the entire AVC New York Metropolitan Area Council. The liberals also eventually suspended Zinn himself for fighting the expulsions, though this didn\u2019t become official until the following year. The results were exactly as Zinn predicted. The AVC proceeded to limp along as a rump of an organization. They were never a political force again for veterans or for civil rights.<\/p>\n

The lessons are quite clear. Trump is not only making wildly mendacious claims about his opponents. (In typical Trump verbiage, he mocks these new left electeds as \u201csick people\u201d who \u201cdon\u2019t believe in God\u201d and against whom he will use every mechanism at his disposal to \u201cstop.\u201d) Trump is attempting, successfully, to divide his opposition by building a wedge between the powerful but increasingly irrelevant centrist congressional Democrats and liberal commentariat and the upstarts who are inspiring voters and actually winning elections.<\/p>\n

I know what Howard Zinn would say\u2014because he said it to me: \u201cI don\u2019t study history just to learn about the past but to affect change in the present and future.\u201d The lessons of the past could not be clearer: United we stand, divided we fall. If the liberal establishment does not heed the warnings of history, they will either end up siding with Trumpism or reliving the famous words of Pastor Martin Niem\u00f6ller: \u201cFirst they came for the communists, but I didn\u2019t say anything because I wasn\u2019t a communist.\u2026 Then they came for me and there was no one left to say anything.\u201d The Trump agenda is to ensure there is \u201cno one left to say anything\u201d against his increasingly erratic and violent rule. Howard Zinn would have fought that agenda tooth and nail. In Zinn\u2019s memory\u2014and out of respect for history\u2014we should do the same.<\/p>\n

Read more The Real Story Behind the Human Wave That Entered Ceuta<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nLiberals Are Shaming Howard Zinn\u2019s Memory Yet Again - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=778\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Liberals Are Shaming Howard Zinn\u2019s Memory Yet Again - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=778\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-05T14:11:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=778#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=778\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"Liberals Are Shaming Howard Zinn\u2019s Memory Yet Again\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-05T14:11:29+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=778\"},\"wordCount\":1163,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=778#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/5db12884fca1ef74500e365f0ce07f40.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"News\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=778#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=778\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=778\",\"name\":\"Liberals Are Shaming Howard Zinn\u2019s Memory Yet Again - 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