The Zinn protocols

Howard Zinn’s infamous “A People’s History of the United States” is the great proto-text of today’s neo-antisemitism.

"Howard Zinn at lectern" by Jim from Stevens Point, WI, USA is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

With the exception of Noam Chomsky, perhaps no intellectual has been more influential on today’s American neo-communists and radical progressives than Howard Zinn. The far-left academic, who died in 2010, literally wrote the book on the left’s revisionist history of the United States.

With his A People’s History of the United States, a bestseller thanks to generations of academics forcing their students to buy it, Zinn outlined a comprehensive vision of this history—likely drawn from Stalinist propaganda—that portrays the United States as a conspiratorial fraud got up by white racists and rapacious capitalists.

The conspirators, Zinn claims again and again over hundreds of pages, brutally exploit the American people, who are too duped or stupid to realize the truth of their plight. Thankfully, Zinn is there to enlighten them.

It is impossible to overestimate the power this vision exercises over today’s radical left. They have effectively adopted Zinn’s claims wholesale without the slightest question. Zinn’s influence is palpable in the tearing down of statues, demonization of the US as a racist and genocidal entity, and even “mainstream” efforts like the New York Times’ 1619 Project. If the radical left has a vision of what the US is, it is Zinn’s vision.

Among fans, A People’s History is something like a bible. They view it as a fearless act of speaking truth to power, in which the secret knowledge of the real history of the US is finally revealed. In turn, this revelation gives their lives purpose, meaning, and an ultimate goal: the overthrow of the conspiracy of Zinn’s imaginings.

One must feel a pang of sympathy for people so lost that such a book is enough to give them a sense of personal redemption. Nonetheless, A People’s History is very far from what they imagine.

If Zinn’s book is anything, it is a debased conspiracy theory based on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Its historical method and distortions have been much criticized, for good reason. More important is its cumulative effect, which is to foster a cult of hatred and, at times, outright treason.

It is also, though little noted, a profoundly sinister work. It is, ultimately and perhaps unknowingly, rooted in classic antisemitic themes of an omnipotent, all-pervasive, and malicious conspiracy by a shadowy “elite”—a word Zinn repeats ad nauseum—against the beleaguered “people.” It is a very short step indeed from Zinn’s American “elite” to the Elders of Zion.

In this, A People’s History may be viewed as one of the primary sources of the left’s current descent into genocidal neo-antisemitism. The book may replace the Jews with an American “elite” and an American conspiracy, but its overall worldview is a way in, an access point to the most ancient antisemitic myths. The radical left has now seized upon those myths with everything it has.

In this, Zinn’s work is execrable, but also worth exploring, if only for the sake of understanding how we got here.

The killer elite

The essence of Zinn’s conspiracy theory is a kind of vulgarization of “elite theory” as formulated by Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, James Burnham, and other 20th-century intellectuals.