Archive for the ‘Daily Activities & Observations’ Category
2010 in review
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
Crunchy numbers
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 7,300 times in 2010. That’s about 18 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 170 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 180 posts. There were 153 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 19mb. That’s about 3 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was November 23rd with 93 views. The most popular post that day was Interview with Slavoj Zizek: Capitalism is Driving the World to Total Destruction .
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were en.wordpress.com, facebook.com, WordPress Dashboard, obama-scandal-exposed.co.cc, and mail.yahoo.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for thanksgiving, palestine, denis diderot, malcolm x quotes on love, and diderot.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Interview with Slavoj Zizek: Capitalism is Driving the World to Total Destruction November 2010
Real Men Love Palestine: Malcolm X Quotes March 2010
3 comments
The Mayan Age of Transformation… April 2010
2 comments
US TOXIC WASTE DUMPING IN HAITI: Clinton, the Dems & Duvalier Dump on Haiti January 2010
Denis Diderot: Humanist, Avant-Lettrist, Philosopher, Polymath January 2010
Ten things you need (but don’t want) to know about the BP oil spill (via COTO Report)
via COTO Report
CarlosDCblog on Shakira and the Arizona Boycott
Recently discovered this excellent video deconstructing Shakira’s sudden burst of activism. Carlos has investigated her past affiliations and allegiances and found them quite troubling. Thanks to Carlos for his excellent videos and blog!
Carlos in DC blog
http://carlosqc.blogspot.com/
- CARLOS A. QUIROZ
- WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES
- Writer, video blogger, online activist, artist painter living in Washington, DC. I believe in equality, life, human rights, environmental and social justice. I’m a progressive thinker. I was born in Peru, I’m proud to be gay and Indigenous. I write three blogs: Carlos in DC, Peruanista and Two Spirits One. My articles have been posted in 11 countries. I love Peruvian food, sports, reading and traveling. / Escritor, bloguero de videos, activista de internet, artista pintor, vivo en Washington, DC. Creo en la igualdad, la vida, los derechos humanos, la justicia ambiental y social. Soy un pensador progresista. Nací en Perú, me siento orgulloso de ser gay e indígena. Escribo tres blogs: Carlos in DC, Peruanista y Two Spirits One. Mis artículos han sido publicados en 11 países. Me gusta la comida peruana, deportes, leer y viajar.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
BOYCOTT everything ARIZONA
Here is a partial list of Arizona based companies to boycott until they put pressure on the state to repeal their racist immigration bill.
Boycott: Ambient Weather; Boycott: Best Western International, Inc; Boycott: Cable ONE ; Boycott: Clear Channel Outdoor; Boycott: P. F. Chang’s China Bistro, Inc; Boycott: PetSmart, Inc; Boycott: Ramada; Boycott: Sky Mall; Boycott: TriWest Healthcare Alliance; Boycott: U-Haul International, Inc; Boycott:The Dial Corporation; Boycott: Discount Tire Company; Boycott: Fender Musical Instruments Corporation; Boycott: Kona Grill; Boycott: Samurai Sam’s Teriyaki Grill; Boycott: Surf City Squeeze; Boycott: Taco Time; Boycott: Circle K; Boycott: LifeLock, Inc; Boycott: US Airways Group Inc.
Even though Arizona Jeans (JC Penney) and Arizona Iced Tea aren’t based in the state, they should be boycotted also. Every company using Arizona in their product line needs to get the message: NO to RACISM, NO to RIGHT WING coups, NO to FASCIST POLICE STATES.
http://www.protestarizona.com
http://www.altoarizona.com
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
The End of the World? Perhaps October 21, 2011
…according to at least one Christian writer
Ecclesiastes 4:4, “And I saw that all labor and all achievement springs from man’s envy of his neighbor.”
The Bible Reveals WE CAN KNOW May 21, 2011 is Judgment Day!
Upon hearing the information that May 21, 2011 is Judgment Day, many in the churches immediately refer to a Bible verse such as:
Matthew 24:36 But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
“You see,” they say after quoting this verse, “the Bible tells us that no man can know.” They might even add, “Not even Jesus Himself knows the time; therefore, your date of May 21 is all wrong.” As is often the case after quickly making this statement and dismissing the information regarding the date of the end of the world, this individual will go on his or her way content that this will never happen. “After all,” they think, “the Bible says we cannot know the timing of the end.”
Of course, we do acknowledge that the Bible has this verse within it. However, the question is: does the rest of the Bible support the idea that we cannot know the timing of the end of the world? Or, is there more information in the Bible that would allow for God’s people to learn the date of the end of the world?
First of all, we need to quickly mention that Jesus Christ is God Almighty. And since Jesus is Almighty God, there can be no question that He knows when the end of the world will be.
Job 24:1 …times are not hidden from the Almighty…
The purpose of this pamphlet is to show from the Bible that since we have now reached the last days of earth’s history, it is (and always has been) God’s plan to reveal information from the Bible concerning the end of the world, including its exact timing. For instance, we see this idea in the following passage of Scripture:
Daniel 12:4 But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
According to this verse, God shut up the words and sealed the Book (the Bible) until the time of the end. Because the Bible’s information was sealed up, no man could know the timing of the end of the world. But the strong implication of Daniel 12:4 is that the seals would be taken off once the time period of the end is reached. Furthermore, once the end of time does come about, “knowledge shall be increased.” Matthew 24:36 declares that no one knows “but My Father only.” God has always known the timing of the end of the world. Since God Himself is the author of the Bible, it was no problem for Him to place this information and hide it within the Bible where it would lie dormant until the proper point in history was reached. Since we have now arrived at the end of the world, God is now revealing these things to His people.
WHY THE CHURCHES WILL NOT UNDERSTAND
If you speak with your pastor about this date of May 21, 2011 being Judgment Day, it is almost certain that he will be opposed to this fact. It is amazing how much in unison the churches are in declaring “no man knows the day or hour.” However, none should take comfort from their unified stand because, without question, the churches of our modern day have greatly fallen away from truth. The churches of the world disagree and teach contrary to one another on numerous points of the Bible’s teachings (which means that they must have errors in their conclusions). Therefore, it ought not to be particularly comforting for the churches to finally have unity of agreement on the point of “no man knows the day or hour.” Rather, it ought to be alarming, especially as we realize that in our day God’s judgment is upon the churches of the world due to their unfaithfulness:
1 Peter 4:17 For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God…
The horrible truth is that the Lord Himself has abandoned the churches of the world. The Bible teaches us that the church age is over (it ended in 1988 A.D.). The Lord has left the churches in spiritual darkness. They cannot see the awful truth that we are now at the very end of the world. The Lord vividly describes the spiritual leaders of the churches today in Isaiah:
Isaiah 56:10-11 His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark…they are shepherds that cannot understand…
God Himself indicates that many who profess to be His people will not see the warning signs of the coming end. The Lord uses Old Testament Israel/Judah as types and figures of the New Testament churches and congregations.
The Bible points out that God was angry with Old Testament Judah and forewarned them of His intent to judge them, but Judah dismissed and ignored these warnings until they were destroyed—much like the churches of today are doing:
Jeremiah 8:7 Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the LORD.
Now at the end, the New Testament churches are repeating the same errors that Old Testament Israel committed. They are dismissing the warnings of God (from the Bible), exactly as Israel dismissed the warnings of God through the prophets whom the Lord sent to them.
GOD ALWAYS FOREWARNS HIS PEOPLE
It is now time for us to look at other information in the Bible that your church or pastor probably would not want you to consider; but in order to prove that we can know the timing of the end, we must first see what the rest of the Bible has to say about it. For instance, God makes this statement in the book of Amos, chapter 3:
Amos 3:7 Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.
Spiritually speaking, a prophet is anyone who declares the Word of God. An individual believer therefore fulfills the role of a prophet as we share the Gospel with other people. The Lord is telling us in Amos 3:7 that He discloses information to His people. He says that He will indeed “do nothing” without first revealing “His secret unto His servants.” As we review the Bible’s history, we actually do see this important truth in evidence again and again.
Let us take a look at the flood of Noah’s day:
Genesis 6:3,5,7 And the LORD said…his days shall be an hundred and twenty years…And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually…And the LORD said, I will destroy man…
In this account, we find that God gave the world 120 years before He would destroy it. This time was necessary as the Lord selected Noah to build the ark and to accomplish the task of warning the world during those 120 years. The Bible identifies Noah as a “preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5). His work of constructing the ark all those long years would certainly not have gone unnoticed. The building of the ark was a great testimony of faith in God, and the ark’s existence and development also served as a constant condemnation of the world itself:
Hebrews 11:7 By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of…righteousness…
It was in this 120th year (4990 B.C.) that the Lord once again gave Noah more information concerning the timing of the flood. Only this time, God gave very specific information.
Incredibly, prior to the flood’s occurrence, God told Noah the precise year, month, and day of the coming deluge:
Genesis 7:1,4,10-11 And the LORD said unto Noah…For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights…And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month…
It is no coincidence that in our present day God’s people know that the end will come in the year 2011 (exactly 7,000 years after the flood), in the month of May, and on the 21st day. This parallels exactly what the Lord had told Noah. Remember also that May 21 in 2011 is the 17th day of the 2nd month of the Hebrew calendar, the equivalent date to when the flood began and when the Lord shut Noah and his family into the ark. Also, we should remember that Jesus refers to the flood as an example of His own coming:
Matthew 24:38-39 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
Christ’s coming will be as it was in the days of Noah. The question that anyone honestly seeking truth must now ask is: did anyone know anything about the approaching flood before it came? Or, did no man know the day or timing of the flood? The Bible’s answer is: yes, God’s people knew. Noah knew. Noah’s wife knew. Noah’s three sons and their wives knew. The world around them also knew about it since Noah was a preacher. However, without doubt, they wrote Noah off as a lunatic. As a result, they all perished in the flood. A key point that the Bible makes is that all kinds of people hear this warning that God sends out, but only His elect people respond to it and take action. Therefore, concerning the horrible death toll of the flood of Noah’s day, it is important that we take note of this verse:
2 Peter 2:5 And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly;
The Lord stresses that the flood of Noah’s day destroyed all of the people who were “ungodly.”
This is an extremely important fact. All of God’s (saved) people were informed of the flood and delivered from death. Each of the righteous knew that it was coming and were able to get into the ark, along with Noah. We can be sure that God also warned the rest of the people of the world of Noah’s day, but they did not believe the things that Noah was declaring to them. In other words, we see the Biblical principle stated in Amos 3:7 in view. The Lord forewarned His people. The rest of the people heard, but ultimately ignored God’s warnings. As a result, they were caught off-guard and perished. This is the reason why the Bible says that Christ will come like “a thief in the night.”
The fact that God forewarned Noah and his family, by itself, should cause us to pause and realize that the Lord will likewise reveal the timing of the end before Judgment Day comes. However, there is much more for us to consider with God’s workings in Biblical history.
Let us take a look at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Before destroying the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord visited Abraham and revealed His plan of judgment upon those cities. Significantly, we read:
Genesis 18:16-17 …the men…looked toward Sodom… And the LORD said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do;
God did not hide His plan to destroy Sodom from Abraham. The Lord thought it good to share this information with His servant. Once informed, Abraham began to intercede (pray) for the righteous within the city. Abraham’s nephew Lot lived in Sodom. The Bible tells us that Lot was a righteous man (that is, God had saved him and made him righteous through Christ—see 2 Peter 2:7-8).
God could not destroy the righteous with the wicked. So the Lord had to act. God warned Lot concerning the coming judgment:
Genesis 19:12-13 And the men said unto Lot, Hast thou here any besides? son in law, and thy sons, and thy daughters…bring them out of this place: For we will destroy this place…the LORD hath sent us to destroy it.
Lot and a few members of his family escaped the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah only because the Lord Himself gave him advance warning, information that Lot attempted to share with his sons-in-law but they did not take him seriously (Genesis 19:14). We also need to consider that Jesus says that His coming will be as it was in the days of Lot:
Luke 17:28-30 Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.
The truth is that in the days of Lot, God warned His people in advance of the awful judgment upon Sodom. Also, others being warned did not take action on the advance information that they had been given. The historical fact that God forewarned Abraham and Lot once again demonstrates that the Lord will likewise reveal the timing of the end before Judgment Day comes, and yet there is still more Scripture for us to consider.
A THIEF IN THE NIGHT
Many professing Christians wrongly think that Jesus will come “as a thief” to bless them and then give them their reward of eternal life. But where do people get the idea that a thief comes to bring blessings? The Bible tells us exactly what it is that a thief comes to do:
John 10:10 The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy…
Jesus does not come unexpectedly like a thief for His elect people (typified by Noah, Abraham, Lot, etc.), but He comes as a thief for all of the unsaved of the world:
1 Thessalonians 5:2-3 For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.
Since the Lord is describing “sudden destruction” coming upon them and declaring that “they shall not escape,” it is very clear that the “ungodly” are in view. It is for them that Christ comes “as a thief” to kill and destroy. But notice the next verse:
1 Thessalonians 5:4 But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief.
Obviously, we see that God’s people will not be taken by surprise. How could they be since the Lord does nothing without first warning His people? God warned Noah. God warned Abraham. God warned Lot. How could anyone think that God would warn His people in these lesser types of Judgment Day and not follow His own pattern and warn the world of about 7 billion souls living at the time of the actual Day of Judgment? Additionally, we find that Jesus commanded all to “watch” for they knew not what hour He might come. Christ comes as a thief only to those who are not watching:
Revelation 3:3 …If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.
That is, Christ commanded the true believers to keep looking (watching) in the Bible. His people were to keep studying the Word of God. This is because at the proper time He would open up our eyes to understand the words that were sealed. Since any keeping watch would understand these things, Christ would not come “as a thief in the night” for them. Jesus comes “as a thief” only for those who insist that we cannot know the time of Christ’s coming. By insisting that it is not possible to know the time, the churches are indicating that they are in darkness and have no intention of watching. It is deadly serious for anyone to stubbornly insist that we cannot know the timing of the end. This is because when Jesus does come upon them, it will be like “a thief” and they will be suddenly destroyed and not escape the awful judgment of God. This is all very sorrowful; however, the Lord gives each one of us strong encouragement through the Biblical example of the Ninevites. The people of Nineveh also heard God’s warning of an approaching judgment.
THE CASE OF THE NINEVITES
God sent the prophet Jonah to Nineveh in order to bring an incredible message containing one single sentence:
Jonah 3:4 Jonah…cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
It was only a few words! That was the entire message that Jonah was commanded by God to bring to the inhabitants of Nineveh. A message that basically contained two elements: time (40 days) and judgment (overthrown). Of course, this true historical account of the Lord sending Jonah to warn the Ninevites underscores, once again, God’s pattern in the Bible of forewarning people prior to bringing His wrath upon them. It is absolutely amazing what we find in the very next verse:
Jonah 3:5 So the people of Nineveh believed God…
Look at this from man’s perspective. The Ninevites were Assyrians. Jonah was not an Assyrian. He did not naturally speak their language. Not only was he from another nation, it was an enemy nation. Suddenly this strange man appeared proclaiming, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
Can you think of any other responses that the Ninevites might have had instead, such as mockery, or laughter, or total disbelief? In our modern world, we would think, “Only a gullible fool would believe such a message!” Yes, we can easily think of many reasons today why a person would not believe something so ridiculous, but the Ninevites believed. What could have possibly convinced the Ninevites that this horrible news was true and was really from God? Certainly, it was not the volume of evidence. Jonah did not come with an encyclopedia of studies of teachings from the Bible and lay them at the doorstep of the city of Nineveh. No! He only spoke a single sentence—the flimsiest of evidence—and yet they believed:
Matthew 12:41 The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas…
You have now heard about Saturday, May 21, 2011 being Judgment Day. Perhaps you have heard much Biblical evidence; and yet, still, you do not believe God. Do you require more and more proof? The Ninevites did not have the luxury of such an abundance of information that we have today. They only had one meager verse of Scripture to go on. Today we are able to give people quite a lot of information coming right out of the Bible. (For more information concerning Judgment Day coming on May 21, 2011, although not affiliated with Family Radio, EBF recommends their free book, “We Are Almost There!” Write: Family Radio, Oakland, CA 94621 USA or read online: www.familyradio.com ). However, mounds of information will never convince anyone. Jesus pointed this out when He said:
John 8:47 He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.
Please take note of the deadly seriousness in which the Ninevites believed God and urgently acted upon it:
Jonah 3:6-8 For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes…saying…let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way…
DISCERNING TIME AND JUDGMENT
As we have examined Biblical history, we have seen how the Lord has repeatedly informed His people of approaching times of judgment before the judgment actually occurred. This is so consistent throughout Biblical history that this certainly can be said to be a Biblical principle, as Amos 3:7 says, “The Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants.”
In the Bible, the Lord divides mankind into two groups. He refers to those He saves as “wise” and to those He does not save as “fools.” He also describes them as the “righteous” or the “wicked.” The distinction between the two has nothing to do with intelligence or human wisdom or human merit of any kind. Simply put, one is wise (and declared righteous) if God has saved them and given them the Spirit of Christ. Those who are not saved are as fools or wicked because they do not possess Christ’s Spirit (Wisdom). If we keep the Bible’s definition of wisdom in mind, it will greatly help us in understanding the following verses:
Daniel 12:9-10 …Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end…none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.
Most definitely, it was the Lord’s intention to seal up His Word (the Bible) until the time of the end. But then notice, God points out how “none of the wicked” will be able to understand. Understand what? Well, He is referring to understanding the Word of God that will be unsealed at the time of the end. None of the unsaved of the world will understand these things, just like the people of the world of Noah’s day did not regard the warning of the flood and just like Lot’s sons-in-law dismissed the warning given to them to flee the city. Likewise today, none of the unsaved understand; however, “the wise” will understand. The “wise” understand only because of God’s great mercy. The Lord expresses this truth once again in these wonderful verses:
Ecclesiastes 8:5 …and a wise man’s heart discerneth both time and judgment.
Proverbs 28:5 Evil men understand not judgment: but they that seek the LORD understand all things.
Finally, whether or not we know that May 21 in 2011 is Judgment Day rests on whether or not God has opened up our eyes to understand these things. If He has, we will know that May 21, 2011 is the Day of the Lord’s Wrath. If He has not opened our eyes, then we will not know. The Bible tells us that the majority of people in the world are not chosen to salvation. This is why Christ comes unexpectedly for billions of people. They do not understand spiritual things. Since they do not have God’s Spirit, they are not going to take warning and they are not going to understand. Sadly, they will surely perish:
Ezekiel 33:4-5 Then whosoever heareth the sound of the trumpet, and taketh not warning; if the sword come, and take him away, his blood shall be upon his own head…But he that taketh warning shall deliver his soul.
God’s people know (like the Ninevites) that these dates are true and trustworthy only because this information comes right out of the Bible. Many people are going to trust their churches or their pastors who will assuredly say that they do not have to worry about a date. But none of these things are trustworthy. The truth is that the only trustworthy thing in the world is the Bible. This is why as we get ever closer to this date of May 21 in 2011, the big question for each person is, “Do you trust the Bible or do you trust something else?”
Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
Psalm 119:42 …for I trust in thy word.
Sorrows of the City: Two Poems
PRELUDES – TS Eliot
I
THE WINTER evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps 5
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots, 10
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer 15
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes, 20
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited; 25
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back 30
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where 35
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block, 40
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties, 45
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle 50
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
You Belong to the City – Jack Tempchin & Glenn Frey
The sun goes down
The night rolls in
You can feel it starting all over again
The moon comes up
And the music calls
You’re getting tired of staring at the same four walls
You’re out of your room
And down on the street
You can feel the crowds through the midnight heat
The traffic roars
And the sirens scream
You look at the faces, its just like a dream
Nobody knows where you’re going
Nobody cares where you’ve been
‘Cause you belong to the city
You belong to the night
living in a river of darkness, beneath the neon light
You were born in the city
Concrete under your feet
Its in your moves, its in your blood
You’re a man of the street
When you said goodbye
You were on the run
Tryin’ to get away from the things you’d done
Now you’re back again
And you’re feeling strange
So much has happened, but nothing has changed
You still don’t know where you’re going
Your still just a face in the crowd
‘Cause you belong to the city…
You can feel it
You can taste it
You can see it
You can face it
You can hear it
You’re getting near it
You’re gonna make it
‘Cause you can take it.
You belong to the city
A Brilliant Assessment of “A People’s History” as Zinn’s Flawed Chef D’oeuvre
Apologies for the formatting problem with the article below. I’m looking into it!
This article helped to verify just what I felt were some of the weaknesses in “A People’s History”: 1) dualism (“us” vs “them”) that supposes that there are only 2 positions in every conflict in US history, the “Establishment” and the “resistors.” Though the resistors seem to lose repeatedly, we are exhorted to join them! This is overly simplistic, defeatist and sentimental. Ultimately it is the end result of a victim mentality. It is a means of pre-emptive helplessness and surrender that allows fascism to flourish and proceed apace while retaining one’s self-image as a noble, yet resigned crusader. Okay, activists, time to take your Don Quixote pill. The only problem is, Don Quixote, with all his intelligence and noble ideals was delusional. Why? His mind was inundated with fantastic notions of a romantic quest for truth.
2) Eley discusses the 1960’s New Left time machine that trapped Howard Zinn, a machine that was incredibly useful in its time for debunking Victorian morality, American pretensions and social straitjackets, but which become outdated beginning in the 1980’s when the Right coopted its methods of deconstruction and revisionism, and used them to smear everything proactive, progressive, cooperative and constructive in our culture. Where was Zinn when the think tanks rolled over and flattened the ideals of the New Left? Seeming stuck in the tire tracks: Eley finds that Zinn’s enduringly irrelevant New Left attitudes inform much of the weaker elements in A People’s History.
3) A People’s History’s limited treatment of economic issues. A historian cannot truly dissect or meaningfully oppose fascism without exploring its components: government, military, religious and corporate interests that incestuously feed off of each other. Zinn primarily dwells on the first two with little attention to the institutional religious sanctimony so necessary to further the cause of empire and, surprisingly, even less to the rise of corporatism and the economic system that underpins all of it. Got capitalism?
Howard Zinn, 1922-2010
An assessment of A People’s History of the United States
By Tom Eley
15 February 2010
Howard Zinn, historian, activist, and author of A People’s History of the United States, died on January 28 at the age of 87. Born in Brooklyn in 1922 to Jewish immigrant factory-worker parents, his father from Austria-Hungary and his mother from Siberia, Zinn came of age during the Great Depression in a sprawling working class neighborhood. The influence of socialism and the presence of the Communist Party were particularly pronounced in this time and place; Zinn recalled attending a CP rally as a youth where he was clubbed by a policeman. Books were few until his father purchased him a Charles Dickens compilation. Zinn served in
WWII as a bomber pilot. He was deeply troubled by his participation in a needless mission at the war’s end during which his plane dumped napalm — in its first-ever military use — on a target in France, killing both German soldiers and perhaps 1,000 French civilians. After the war he went back to the area of France he had bombed and dealt with the experience in his book, The Politics of History. Zinn was, by all accounts, humane.
His outspoken support of student civil rights activists and the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) led to Zinn’s dismissal from his first academic job,
at the all-black women’s school, Spelman, in Georgia, in 1963. He then secured a position at Boston University held until his retirement in 1988. Zinn was also a
notable Vietnam War protester. In 1968 he visited Hanoi with the Reverend Daniel Berrigan and secured the release of three US prisoners of war, and in 1971 Daniel
Ellsberg gave Zinn a copy of what came to be known as “the Pentagon Papers.” Zinn would edit and publish it with his longtime collaborator, Noam Chomsky.
Zinn’s work as an historian spanned five decades and resulted in the publication of numerous books, articles and essays, but it was his A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980, that brought him to a place of relative prominence. The book has sold more than 2 million copies in multiple editions. A television documentary based on it, “The People Speak,” was broadcast in 2009, and featured readings and performances by Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Bob Dylan, MarisaTomei, Bruce Springsteen and Danny Glover, among others. Given the book’s influence, any evaluation of Zinn requires serious consideration of his work as an
historian.
A People’s History is a much-loved book for good reason. In accessible, direct language, Zinn introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to aspects of US history written out of what was, in all but name, the official narrative, with its essentially uncritical presentation of the US political and economic elite. Zinn relentlessly
exposed the self-interest and savagery of “the Establishment,” as he called it, while at the same time bringing to life the hidden political and social struggles of
oppressed groups in US history — workers, the poor, Native Americans, African Americans, women and immigrants. Zinn did not hide his sympathies for the
oppressed in history. “[I]n such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners,” he wrote, “it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to
be on the side of the executioners.” A People’s History grew out of, and in turn contributed to, a growing skepticism of the democratic pretensions of the American ruling class — particularly among the youth. These characteristics of Zinn’s work earned him the hatred of those who wish to see college and high school curriculum more tightly controlled; after Zinn’s death, right-wing ex-radicals David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh penned columns attacking him for exposing truths about the US government to a mass audience. Indeed, no one who has read A People’s History could in honesty endorse President Obama’s recent claim that Washington does
“not seek to occupy other nations” and is heir “to a noble struggle for freedom,” or the right wing’s absurd mantra that the US military is “the greatest force for
good in world history.” The book’s 23 short chapters begin with Christopher Columbus’ landing in the Americas in 1492 and the brutal slaughter of Native
Americans. What follows is a chronological account of American history, focusing in particular on different social and political struggles, with Zinn providing a
varying degree of historical context depending on the period. This is, in the end, a limited method, a problem that we shall address presently. But the contributions of
Zinn’s essentially empirical approach — the inversion of the official narrative through the presentation of hidden or alternative facts — has much to teach.
This empirical strength runs through most of the book, but there are chapters where it combines with greater attention to context.
His treatment of WWII, “A People’s War,” is one of his better. As a rare honest accounting of what has been uncritically presented by most liberal and radical
historians as a “war against fascism,” it merits attention. The chapter lists Washington’s many imperialist interventions over the preceding decades, and points out its
indifference to fascist Italy’s rape of Ethiopia in 1935 and Germany’s and Italy’s intervention on behalf of the fascist forces of Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil
War. This was “the logical policy of a government whose main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing” its own imperialist interests. “For those interests,
in the thirties, an anti-Soviet policy seemed best,” Zinn concludes. “Later, when Japan and Germany threatened US world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy
became preferable.” This policy could be dressed up in anti-fascist guise, but “[b]ehind the headlines in battles and bombings, American diplomats and businessmen
worked hard to make sure that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none [and] business would penetrate areas that up to this time had
been dominated by England.” At home, the hypocrisy of a “war against fascism” was not lost on African-Americans, who remained subject to job and housing
discrimination in the North and Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement and terror in the South, nor on Japanese Americans, 110,000 of whom ere rounded up —
many of these second and third generation citizens — and placed in internment camps on the order of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Still more hidden from popular memory was the immense struggle of the working class during the war. “In spite of no-strike pledges of the AFL and CIO there were
14,000 strikes, involving 6,770,000 workers, more than in any comparable period in American history,” Zinn wrote. “In 1944 alone, a million workers were on strike,
in the mines, in the steel mills, in the auto and transportation equipment industries. When the war ended, the strikes continued in record numbers — 3 million on
strike in the first half of 1946.” In spite of the strike wave, “there was little organized opposition from any source,” he notes. “The Communist Party was
enthusiastically in support… Only one organized socialist group opposed the war unequivocally. This was the Socialist Workers Party. In Minneapolis in 1943,
eighteen members of the party were convicted for violating the Smith Act, which made it a crime to join any group that advocated ‘the overthrow of the government.’“
The Socialist Workers Party was the Trotskyist movement in the US at that time.
Zinn writes movingly in the chapter of the savage bombings by the US and Britain of German and Japanese population centers; doubtless his own experience as a
bomber pilot in Europe breathed feeling into these pages. Zinn also exposes the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which remain enshrined in the official
mythology as necessary military acts. In fact, the decision that incinerated and poisoned hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was made with an eye cast
toward the postwar order. By forcing a rapid Japanese surrender before the Red Army moved further into the Korean peninsula, the Truman administration hoped to
assert US dominance in East Asia. It is to Zinn’s credit that he concludes the chapter with a discussion of the early Cold War and the Red Scare, which were prepared
by US victory in “the Good War.” After the war, US liberalism quickly turned on its radical allies grouped around the Communist Party. The Truman administration
“established a climate of fear — a hysteria about Communism — which would steeply escalate the military budget and stimulate the economy with war-related orders.”
What was needed was a consensus that “could best be created by a liberal Democratic president, whose aggressive policy abroad would be supported by conservatives,
and whose welfare programs at home … would be attractive to liberals.”
Zinn’s chapter on Vietnam, “The Impossible Victory,” merits reading. In only 10 pages, he offers a good look at the history of Vietnam’s long struggle for
independence against France, Japan in WWII, then France again, and finally the US. With both statistics and vivid illustrations, he reveals the barbarity of US
imperialism. “By the end of the war, seven million tons of bombs had been dropped” on Southeast Asia, “more than twice the amount” used in both Europe and Asia in
WWII. Zinn’s presentation of the My Lai massacre, napalm, the US assassination program called Operation Phoenix, and other cruelties are damning of
Washington’s claim that the US military was there to defend the Vietnamese people. The second half of the chapter focuses on the growing popular opposition to the
Vietnam War within the US on the campuses, among working people, and in the army itself.
It is not possible here to consider all the book’s chapters, but in general, those that cover the century lasting from the end of Reconstruction in the post-Civil War to the
end of the Vietnam War are strong and empirically rich. Zinn writes effectively on WWI (“War is the Health of the State”), describing vividly the insanity of trench
warfare, and detailing the mass opposition to US entry and the strenuous efforts to overcome this. His chapter on the US embrace of imperialism in the Spanish-
American War correctly spots the underlying drive as a struggle for markets by US capitalism. Zinn consistently turns up useful quotes to illustrate his points, here
presenting Mark Twain’s comments on the US effort to subjugate the Philippines after Spain’s defeat: “We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried
them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors. And so, by these Providences of God — and the phrase is the
government’s, not mine — we are a World Power.”
Zinn correctly places socialism at the center of the Progressive Era, circa 1900 until 1917, entitling this chapter “The Socialist Challenge.” Progressivism “seemed to
understand it was fending off socialism,” as Zinn puts it. The chapter includes brief accounts of the great garment workers’ strike of New York City in 1909 — and the
Triangle garment factory fire in its aftermath — the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike, and the Ludlow massacre of coal
miners in Colorado in 1914.
Two chapters on workers’ and farmers’ struggles in the 19th century, “Robber Barons and Rebels” and “The Other Civil War,” demonstrate with examples the rich
history of egalitarianism that remains the patrimony of today’s working class. Zinn’s selection of an 1890 quote rom the Kansas populist Mary Ellen Lease seems
timely: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and
for Wall Street… The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.”
Yet while it is helpful in bringing to light facts written out of standard textbooks, Zinn’s work can only serve as a beginning to understanding US history. There is an
unmistakable anachronistic, even a-historical, thread in A People’s History. If it has a theme, it is an endless duel between “resistance” and “control,” two of Zinn’s preferred words. Populating his historical stage are, on the one side, a virtually unbroken line of “Establishment” villains who exercise this control and, on the
other, benighted groups who often struck out against their plight. The names and dates change; the story does not. Complexity and contradiction does not rest
comfortably in such a schema. The limitations of this approach are most evident in Zinn’s treatment of the American Revolution and the US Civil War, which he
presents as instances of the elite beguiling the population in order to strengthen its control. “Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a
discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years,” Zinn opens the first of his two chapters on the American Revolution. “They found that
by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire… They
created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times.” Zinn presents the Civil War in similar terms. Only a slave rebellion or a full-scale war
could end slavery, he wrote: “If a rebellion, it might get out of hand, and turn its ferocity beyond slavery to the most successful system of capitalist enrichment in the
world. If a war, those who made the war would organize its consequences.” (In fact, the Civil War became both a full-scale war and a slave rebellion.) “With slavery
abolished by order of government,” Zinn asserted, “its end could be orchestrated so as to set limits to emancipation,” a task that fell to none other than Abraham
Lincoln, who in Zinn’s presentation, was merely a shrewd political operative who “combined perfectly the needs of business, the new Republican party, and the
rhetoric of humanitarianism.” This deeply subjective rendering of the two most progressive events in US history calls to mind Frederick Engels’ comments on “old
materialist” philosophy, an approach that could not answer the question of what historical forces lay behind the motives of individuals and groups in history, the
“historical forces which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of the actors.” “The old materialism never put this question to itself,” Engels responds.
“Its conception of history, in so far as it has one at all, is therefore essentially pragmatic; it divides men who act in history into noble and ignoble and then finds that
as a rule the noble are defrauded and the ignoble are victorious.” Such, in short, was Howard Zinn’s operating thesis.
In his search for the origins of motives in history, Zinn at times lapsed into moralizing. He denied the characterization — writing on the American Revolution, Zinn
said he would not “lay impossible moral burdens on that time.” But this is precisely what he did, even in the case of the more progressive revolutionists. After
discussing the enormous circulation of Tom Paine’s writings in the colonies, Zinn concludes that Paine was too linked to the colonial elite. “[H]e was not for the
crowd action of lower-class people,” Zinn asserts, because Paine had “become an associate of one of the wealthiest men in Pennsylvania, Robert Morris, and a
supporter of Morris’s creation, the Bank of North America.” Paine “lent himself perfectly to the myth of the revolution — that it was on behalf of a united people,” is
Zinn’s verdict on one of the great revolutionists of the epoch. As for Thomas Jefferson, Zinn cited disapprovingly on two occasions that he owned slaves.
Thirty years ago, criticism of the mythology surrounding Lincoln or a Jefferson was perhaps useful. Such lines appear more wearisome today after decades of
moralistic attacks by well-heeled scholars like Lerone Bennett; if an historian does nothing else, he or she should concede that their subjects lived in a different time.
More importantly, in the cases of the Civil War and the American Revolution, Zinn’s anachronism distorted historical reality, minimizing the progressive character of
those struggles. It is worthwhile to note the work of historian Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood. Bailyn, in his Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution, demonstrated, through analysis of scores of commonly read political tracts in the colonies, that the thinking of the revolutionists was radical and
progressive and ultimately rooted in a century of Enlightenment thought. Wood, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), seems to address himself to Zinn’s sort of argument that the war for independence was “hardly a revolution at all.” It was, Wood writes, “one of the greatest revolutions the world has known” and
“the most radical and far-reaching event in American history.” Wood concedes that the Founding Fathers, having recognized the social forces unleashed by the
revolution, sought to contain democracy through the Constitution. But Wood shows that this effort did not undo the radicalism of the revolution, which had been
broadly transfused into social consciousness. The American Revolution, like the French Revolution it helped to inspire, marked a great historical advance. It
proclaimed in stirring language basic democratic rights, and laid these out in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. It repudiated the divine right of
kings to rule, and threw off restraints on economic development designed to benefit the crown. That the revolution raised up contradictions that it could not yet resolve
— the most obvious being its declarations of liberty while maintaining slavery — does not erase these achievements. The new ruling class, which Zinn tended to treat
as a monolithic whole, was in fact deeply divided over slavery and economic policy toward Great Britain. The Civil War would resolve these conflicts and put in place
new ones, bringing to the fore the struggle between the working and capitalist classes that has been the axis of US history ever since. Like other great progressive
causes, the American Revolution has in a certain sense transcended the limitations imposed upon it by its time by inspiring and animating the progressive struggles
that followed — including the struggle against slavery. To cite an example, Zinn himself noted that the Vietnamese anti-imperialists modeled their own declaration
of independence on that written by Jefferson.
It must be stated clearly that Zinn’s method had little to do with Marxism, which understands that history advances through the struggle of contending social classes,
a struggle rooted in the social relations of economic production. While this does not by itself negate the value of a scholarly work, Zinn’s limitations as an historian
require some attention be paid to his political views, which grew out of the traditions of American radicalism. The two were, as he himself declared, mutually
constitutive. Zinn drew his material not from his own research, but from a growing body of “revisionist” scholarship during a period when radicals made inroads on
US college campuses. Beginning in the late 1960s, new academic pursuits emerged: critical revisionist studies of political, diplomatic and labor history, and new fields
such as African-American history, women’s history, Native American history, and many more. This approach — the criticism of establishment history and the
presentation of the social history of the oppressed who had left behind little or no written record — was fresh and yielded, at least in its earlier stages, significant
results.
Later, beginning in the 1980s, revisionist history and campus radicalism became increasingly bogged down in the miasma created by identity politics and post-
modernism, with their generally reactionary agendas. At that point, the weaknesses and political confusion of the underlying approach, there from the start, became
much clearer. A People’s History, as a compilation of 1960s and 1970s revisionist scholarship, expressed its contributions as well its limitations. It is not
coincidental that the new studies developed concomitantly to the emergence of identity politics and the promotion of affirmative action on the campuses, as US
liberalism, trade unionism and the Democratic Party sought a new constituency for their policies outside of the working class. The new academic history served this
political development and has, in turn, been richly fed by it. Indeed, in the more facile historical studies, the oppressed groups of the past are presented as mere
transpositions of the various “interest groups” that emerged in the 1970s. It should not be surprising that the new history treated political economy and politics
superficially — or not at all — and tended to present the “agency” of oppressed groups as independent of the historical process, or as introduced to it by human will or
moral choice.
With this in mind, it is perhaps easier to confront the apparent contradiction between Zinn the historian and Zinn the political commentator, who wrote frequently for
the Nation and the Progressive and whose views were much sought-after in radical circles. As an historian, Zinn found nothing progressive in “the system.” Of the
two-party system, Zinn wrote, “to give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic
one was an ingenious mode of control.” Zinn wrote that elections are times “to consolidate the system after years of protest and rebellion.” And he invariably presented
reforms as means by which the elite bought off the loyalty of the masses. Yet the same Zinn, who (incorrectly) found few differences to parse over between the
Republican Party of Lincoln and the pro-slavery Democratic Party of Jefferson Davis, called for a vote for Barack Obama in 2008, arguing that Obama, while not mgood, was decidedly better than George W. Bush. Zinn qualified his endorsement by arguing that Democrats, once in office, could be pressured to enact reforms, evidently drawing no conclusions from the unrelenting rightward shift of the US political system from the 1970s on.His idolization of “resistance” in the pages of A People’s History masked a pessimistic outlook. In every case, resistance for Zinn was either co-opted or crushed by establishment control. Given this, surely the best that could be hoped for was co-option through reforms. There were no strategic lessons to be drawn; this was all to
repeat itself. Zinn’s general disinterest in A People’s History in politics and thought — the conscious element in history — becomes more pronounced in his last chapters. By the time he arrives in the 1970s, even Zinn’s resisters appear less heroic: angry farmers, trade unionists, Wobblies, and Socialists have given way to proponents of identity politics, environmental reform, and the pro-Democratic Party anti-war movement.
Zinn’s concluding chapter, “The Coming Revolt of the Guards,” in which he ponders how “the system of control” might ultimately be broken, brings into the clear the
link between his politics and his history. “The Guards” referenced in the chapter title, as it turns out, are workers. “[T]he Establishment cannot survive without the
obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and
social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen,”
according to Zinn. “These people — the employed, the somewhat privileged — are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers
between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.” “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history,” Zinn
writes. “With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit
discontent to a troublesome minority.” These words reflected the demoralized perspective of the “New Left” and the ideological influences of elements such as the
Frankfurt School, Marcuse and others who wrote off the revolutionary role of the working class, viewing it as a reactionary mass that had been bought off by the
capitalist system. Included in an updated version of the book in published in 2003, they now seem quite dated. These considerable theoretical and political limitations notwithstanding, Zinn’s contributions in A People’s History of the United States — its presentation of the crimes of the US ruling class and the resistance of oppressed groups — are significant. The book deserves its audience.
To contact the WSWS and the
Socialist Equality Party visit:
© World Socialist Web Site
The China Rose 