Posted by alguna_rubia at 5:52pm Dec 3 '09I have been so enraged by this book that I have elected to write an essay about why I will not read the rest of this book rather than read the rest of this book. I do not care how awful my grade ends up because of this, though I do hope you read the following essay anyway.
It is my opinion that Mr. Zinn is so riddled with bias that the rest of this work is not worth reading. Mr. Zinn claims to be attempting to write the history through the view of the victims. His view of the human race, however, seems so cynical as to doubt that he could write history to anyoneâs credit at all. The common theme throughout the four chapters of his work, A Peopleâs History of the United States, is a supreme distaste not only for the upper classes whose history, he says, has been written many times over, but for the lower classes he wishes to represent.
He implies that rich people have no interest in life other than being rich and preventing other people from becoming rich. His descriptions of the âpoor whitesâ on the frontier being a âbufferâ for the rich on the coast are misleading in the extreme. The rich in the colonies were mostly on the eastern coast because that was the first available land. The indentured servants who came later were generally poorer and had to settle further out west to find land that was not already owned by someone with a deed who could take them to court for squatting on it. That rich whites already living on the coast were sending people inland as a buffer, as Mr. Zinn implies over and over again, is a preposterous notion. Contrary to popular belief among rich people, rich people mostly do not have the mental capacity to plot that much. The rich people could have sold their land on the coast to the newly indentured servants, but the rich would pay so much more for the land near other rich people than the formerly mentioned. It is the same principle that convinces people to buy tiny houses in Blackhawk rather than buying mansions in Nebraska: poor people are presumed dangerous by the rich, and so rich people wish to stay out of danger. To suggest that the rich had a plot to keep themselves buffered against the Natives by sending poor whites west is presumptuously ridiculous.
The reason it is presumptuous is that he assumes that the rich had such power as to send the poor wherever they would. Mr. Zinn believes that, although the rich are capable of coming up with grand conspiracies to control the poor and the slaves and those with inferior technology, the latter groups never had a single person intelligent enough to get a whiff of any of these conspiracies. Rather, he seems to be under the impression that only mobs can be right. He quotes John Adams on the idea that he could not stand too much democracy, showing this to be a fault to be condemned by all those to read his book; on the contrary, John Adams is condemning the idea that the majority should rule without any protections for minorities. The wealthy in America at the time were also the educated who studied history, and they knew about the terrors of majority rule without protections for minorities, as demonstrated by Oliver Cromwellâs New Model Army in England. The tendency of too much democracy is the censorship of minority opinions, which, in England, led to mass executions and tyranny by the leader of a mob. By the end of his âprotectorshipâ, the mob was no longer with him because it came to know regret over the insanity of its result- it ceased to be a mob because it managed to think.
The next idea I find to be a despicable twisting of the truth is the idea that the American Revolution was begun so that the rich could keep ever more money for themselves. This runs directly contrary to the interests of capitalists. Capitalists like to accumulate capital over time; while they make capital, they prefer for conditions to remain stable so that their rate of growth on the capital does not decrease. A revolution runs directly contrary to this interest. If government collapses and anarchy reigns, the currency will generally cease to have value and the mob will come after those whose interests run counter to those of the mob. Also, to say that those men of means who signed the Declaration of Independence did not support what they signed in truth, but instead thought that this language was excellent to garner the support of the masses is to say that these men were willing to sacrifice their lives and their money for the chance to have more of their capital. Several of these men lost their homes in the war; several others lost their lives, and a couple even lost their children. Even horrible rich people care more for their sons than for their money.
Mr. Zinn has an unfortunate habit of confusing effect with cause. He assumes that because often, in history, changes end up better for the rich, that the rich planned it that way. As most people have surely recognized by now, rich people are not inherently smarter than others, and thus cannot be so deviously uncaring about other humans that they can come up with such grandiose schemes and succeed at least nine times out of ten. Perhaps Mr. Zinn would do well to notice that there are not two types of people in the world, one type favored with material comforts, intelligence, and freedom from both conscience and empathy, and the other deprived of all three.
It is my opinion that Mr. Zinn is so riddled with bias that the rest of this work is not worth reading. Mr. Zinn claims to be attempting to write the history through the view of the victims. His view of the human race, however, seems so cynical as to doubt that he could write history to anyoneâs credit at all. The common theme throughout the four chapters of his work, A Peopleâs History of the United States, is a supreme distaste not only for the upper classes whose history, he says, has been written many times over, but for the lower classes he wishes to represent.
He implies that rich people have no interest in life other than being rich and preventing other people from becoming rich. His descriptions of the âpoor whitesâ on the frontier being a âbufferâ for the rich on the coast are misleading in the extreme. The rich in the colonies were mostly on the eastern coast because that was the first available land. The indentured servants who came later were generally poorer and had to settle further out west to find land that was not already owned by someone with a deed who could take them to court for squatting on it. That rich whites already living on the coast were sending people inland as a buffer, as Mr. Zinn implies over and over again, is a preposterous notion. Contrary to popular belief among rich people, rich people mostly do not have the mental capacity to plot that much. The rich people could have sold their land on the coast to the newly indentured servants, but the rich would pay so much more for the land near other rich people than the formerly mentioned. It is the same principle that convinces people to buy tiny houses in Blackhawk rather than buying mansions in Nebraska: poor people are presumed dangerous by the rich, and so rich people wish to stay out of danger. To suggest that the rich had a plot to keep themselves buffered against the Natives by sending poor whites west is presumptuously ridiculous.
The reason it is presumptuous is that he assumes that the rich had such power as to send the poor wherever they would. Mr. Zinn believes that, although the rich are capable of coming up with grand conspiracies to control the poor and the slaves and those with inferior technology, the latter groups never had a single person intelligent enough to get a whiff of any of these conspiracies. Rather, he seems to be under the impression that only mobs can be right. He quotes John Adams on the idea that he could not stand too much democracy, showing this to be a fault to be condemned by all those to read his book; on the contrary, John Adams is condemning the idea that the majority should rule without any protections for minorities. The wealthy in America at the time were also the educated who studied history, and they knew about the terrors of majority rule without protections for minorities, as demonstrated by Oliver Cromwellâs New Model Army in England. The tendency of too much democracy is the censorship of minority opinions, which, in England, led to mass executions and tyranny by the leader of a mob. By the end of his âprotectorshipâ, the mob was no longer with him because it came to know regret over the insanity of its result- it ceased to be a mob because it managed to think.
The next idea I find to be a despicable twisting of the truth is the idea that the American Revolution was begun so that the rich could keep ever more money for themselves. This runs directly contrary to the interests of capitalists. Capitalists like to accumulate capital over time; while they make capital, they prefer for conditions to remain stable so that their rate of growth on the capital does not decrease. A revolution runs directly contrary to this interest. If government collapses and anarchy reigns, the currency will generally cease to have value and the mob will come after those whose interests run counter to those of the mob. Also, to say that those men of means who signed the Declaration of Independence did not support what they signed in truth, but instead thought that this language was excellent to garner the support of the masses is to say that these men were willing to sacrifice their lives and their money for the chance to have more of their capital. Several of these men lost their homes in the war; several others lost their lives, and a couple even lost their children. Even horrible rich people care more for their sons than for their money.
Mr. Zinn has an unfortunate habit of confusing effect with cause. He assumes that because often, in history, changes end up better for the rich, that the rich planned it that way. As most people have surely recognized by now, rich people are not inherently smarter than others, and thus cannot be so deviously uncaring about other humans that they can come up with such grandiose schemes and succeed at least nine times out of ten. Perhaps Mr. Zinn would do well to notice that there are not two types of people in the world, one type favored with material comforts, intelligence, and freedom from both conscience and empathy, and the other deprived of all three.
My anti-Howard Zinn essay - alguna_rubia