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this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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That is the book that is very critical and severe toward the United States. I think the problem is that that book was written as a counterpoint to the history of the United States we learn in secondary school. If you haven’t learned U.S. history from a U.S. high school history textbook, it is going to feel unbalanced, prejudiced, because you are not the target audience, who has grown up with an uncritical, unbalanced, prejudiced but in the other way, curriculum. I would imagine a book by a European scholar of U.S. history would have more potential to give a neutral outside but critical point of view.
That makes sense
Very much this. I was an exchange student in the US in 2005 and my US history teacher (yes, their history classes are commonly split between us and "rest of the world") exclusively worked with excerpts from Zinn.
I understood once I leafed through the official textbook. It was about as bad as you can imagine.
So yes, Zinn is far from "objective" or "neutral". It's a deliberate choice because
a) it's supposed to counterbalance the terribly whitewashed school books and b) there's a case to be made that no text, not even scientific ones, is ever truly objective or neutral because reality is a construct.
The latter is a more philosophical debate, but nonetheless an important one. Since there is no single objective truth, you'll usually dare better by considering varying interpretations of "truth" before making your mind up.
In other words: you'll never get the full picture, but if you assemble enough puzzle pieces you increase your chances of understanding the bigger picture, and, more importantly, you'll gain a sense for when somebody is just off their rocker.
Well, you don’t have to get to “reality is a construct” with a history textbook. No textbooks can include the entire past. History is made at a constant rate and you have to learn it faster than it is made. So history textbooks by definition have to omit some things, and bias can always creep in when you choose which things to include or omit.
That said, it’s really important that Americans read Howard Zinn. We still have people who don’t have a proper understanding of why the Civil War was fought. Or the Revolutionary War. Or the Iraq War.
If you average a lie with the truth do you get a more accurate truth or a less accurate one?
How did you jump from a discussion about opposing perspectives on a single, unknowable truth to "one must be right and everything else a lie"?
I didn't?
I mean, you're going back a to true/false dichotomy.
Good point I should embrace the only thing real is our outrage truth of our society. No wonder Zinn is so popular. Hey let's save some time. Whatever strawman you want me to make why don't you use the power of imagination and make it real? That way I say what you want me to say so you can deliver the counter-arguments you want to make.
Fuck truth, we don't need it. Go read People's History, use horse dewormer to cure Covid, only eat "organic", and deny that our planet is burning.