by Mary Grabar
Zinn can’t seem to muster any sympathy for the Black Panthers’ victims. But he has plenty to spare for those thugs themselves. He characterizes the investigation and prosecution of this violent gang as “a planned pattern of violence against militant black organizers, carried on by the police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation” and asks, “Was the government turning to murder and terror because the concessions—the legislation, the speeches, the intonation of the civil rights hymn ‘We Shall Overcome’ by President Lyndon Johnson—were not working?” He claims, “It was discovered later that the government in all the years of the civil rights, while making concessions through Congress, was acting through the FBI to harass and break up black militant groups.”120 Nothing, of course, about what the “militant” groups were up to, such as the crime and murder described by Horowitz. And no mention of the fact that FBI had been equally instrumental in investigating and prosecuting white “militant” groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Martin Luther King Jr. enjoys a sudden rise in Zinn’s esteem only on account of his quixotic, chaotic, and ineffective “Poor People’s Encampment” in Washington, undertaken without the “paternal approval of the President.” Zinn notes that the Encampment “went on,” after King’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. But in the context of his previous glorification of rioting, what follows is particularly perverse: “The killing of King brought new urban outbreaks all over the country, in which thirty-nine people were killed, thirty-five of them black.”121
As usual, blacks suffered the brunt of the violence that Zinn’s heroes—the “black militants” so useful to him as mascots for the socialist revolution—fomented. As we have already seen, most African Americans did not side with these violent troublemakers; they wanted them punished to protect their communities. George Schuyler railed against the white radicals who inspired black troublemakers to riot and then blamed police. Citing polls of blacks, he went so far as to quip, “They want more police brutality.”122 Professor Michael Fortner has pointed out that while “White reformers and law enforcement officials agitated for more rehabilitative resources for the ‘innocent victims’ of the drug trade and practical sentences for dealers who would seek to corrupt youngsters. . . . working and middle-class Harlemites pleaded with the police to expand their campaigns against pushers and other progenitors of vice.”123
Zinn clearly hoped to exacerbate class conflict by portraying blacks as poor victims ripe for revolt against the evil capitalist system. These are some of the “people” of his history. A Mrs. Unita Blackwell from Greenville, Mississippi, was one of seventy “poor black people” who in 1966 had “occupied an unused air force barracks” and then been evicted. Her thoughts were that “the federal government have proven that it don’t care about poor people.” Another “black woman, Patricia Robinson, in a pamphlet distributed in Boston in 1970 (Poor Black Woman) tied male supremacy to capitalism and said the black woman ‘allies herself with the have-nots in the wider world and their revolutionary struggles.’ She said the poor black woman did not in the past ‘question the social and economic system’ but now she must, and in fact, ‘she has begun to question aggressive male domination and the class society which enforces it, capitalism.’ ”124
But there are glimmers of hope, in Zinn’s opinion. For example, “whites and blacks were crossing racial lines in the South to unite as a class against employers. In 1971, two thousand woodworkers in Mississippi, black and white, joined together to protest a new method of measuring wood that led to lower wages. In the textile mills of J. P. Stevens where 44,000 workers were employed in eighty-five plants, mostly in the South, blacks and whites were working together in union activity. In Tifton, Georgia, and Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1977, blacks and whites served together on the union committee of their plants.”125
No more specific information is given in this “history,” so it is unclear about what message is conveyed other than a vague awareness of workers, “black and white,” uniting and fighting the bosses.
In Zinn’s estimation, the progress that came from the civil rights struggle included the fact that by the late sixties and early seventies, prisoners were referring to themselves as “revolutionaries” and opposing the Vietnam War. So the “explosions” of the Civil Rights Era were just preludes of more revolutionary action to come: “The events of those years underlined what prisoners already sensed—that whatever crimes they had committed, the greatest crimes were being committed by the authorities who maintained the prisons, by the government of the United States. The law was being broken daily by the President, sending bombers to kill, sending men to be killed, outside the Constitution. . . .”126
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! Howard Zinn and the Commies Win!
Chapter 18 of A People’s History of the United States is titled “The Impossible Victory: Vietnam.” Did Zinn call victory in Vietnam “impossible” because, like a lot of leftist anti-war protesters, he wanted everyone to believe that the American cause in that war was hopeless? Yes, but he also wanted students to be glad about America’s defeat and the “victory” of the plucky North Vietnamese Communists. Zinn claims, “From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country—and failed. When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.”1
What it boils down to is that Howard Zinn took the side of America’s Communist enemies—and, as we shall see, did his bit as an anti-war activist disseminating anti-American propaganda to help them beat us.
According to Howard Zinn, such events as the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe—during which the Communists blockaded Berlin and “ousted non-Communists from the government” (that’s Zinn’s description of a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and in a way it’s accurate: the Czech Foreign Minister was literally “ousted” from an upper-story window to die when his body hit the courtyard below)2—Mao’s conquest of China, Communist spies stealing the secret of the atom bomb for the Russians, and Communist North Korea’s unprovoked attack on the South were irrationally “portrayed to the public as signs of a world Communist conspiracy.” One wonders, what would the signs have been if there had been an international Communist plot?
Zinn has an explanation. It was simply an “upsurge all over the world of colonial people’s demanding independence,” which the U.S. government found “disturbing.” In Zinn’s telling of the story, “In fact, China, Korea, Indochina, the Philippines, represented local Communist movements, not Russian fomentation. It was a general wave of anti-imperialist insurrection. . . .”3 As was established earlier in the book, Zinn is wrong on China, Korea, and the Philippines. He is also—not surprisingly—wrong on Indochina. But Zinn maintains that the Vietnam War was due to the brutal suppression of the local nationalist movement in Indochina by the imperialistic United States. It was a modern-day David and Goliath story with the giant imperialistic power justly humiliated: America represented “technology,” while the Communist North Vietnamese were “human beings.”
Yes, America had lost her humanity, but Ho Chi Minh was Thomas Jefferson—only more human.
Led by a Communist named Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionists fought against the Japanese, and when they were gone held a spectacular celebration in Hanoi in late 1945, with a million people in the streets, and issued a Declaration of Independence. It borrowed from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, in the French Revolution, and from the American Declaration of Independence, and began: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Just as the Americans in 1776 had listed the grievances against the English King, the Vietnamese listed their complaints against French rule.4
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p; The valiant freedom fighters won Vietnam’s independence from France, but “Western powers were already at work to change” it back.5
Vietnam, though, was not much like the American colonies, and Ho Chi Minh was no Thomas Jefferson. One notable difference: the Vietnamese leader was a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary. According to Harvard professor Fredrik Logevall, Ho had joined the French Communist Party when he was living in Paris after World War I and was impressed by the connections Lenin drew “between capitalism and imperialism” and by the Communist dictator’s vision for “nationalist movements in Africa and Asia,” as well as his pledge of Soviet support “through the Comintern, for nationalist uprisings throughout the colonial world as a key first step in fomenting worldwide socialist revolution against the capitalist order.”6 In other words, Ho was hoping to join on to the very “world Communist conspiracy” that Zinn paints as a fiction dreamed up by American imperialists.
In June 1923, Ho had set out to Moscow in disguise hoping to meet Lenin, who, however, died in January 1924. So that month he paid his respects to the deceased Lenin, “participated in meetings of the Comintern,” and received training. That autumn he was sent by the Soviets to southern China, “ostensibly to act as an interpreter for the Comintern’s advisory mission to Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist government in Canton, but in reality to organize the first Marxist revolutionary organization in Indochina. To that end, he published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League. . . . and set up a training institute. . . .” Early in 1930, he “presided over the creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hong Kong,” which was later that year, “on Moscow’s instructions . . . renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP).” Its responsibility was to spur “revolutionary activity throughout French Indochina.”7
In contrast to the claims of his fans, Ho’s dedication to nationalism was limited to the “revolutionary nationalism” of Lenin—described by Stephen J. Morris in the Weekly Standard as “nationalism as a temporary expedient in the struggle against ‘imperialism.’ ” In fact, Vietnamese Communists adhered to “a Marxist-Leninist view of international affairs” and rejected nationalism “as an ideology of the feudal and capitalist social classes.”8 Ruth Fischer, a former Communist German revolutionary who knew Ho from their time in Moscow during the 1920s, described him as “the model of the disciplined Communist.’ ”9
Ho spent the 1930s in China and the USSR. Ho’s work “benefitted” from a new political mood, as “the Soviet Union and Western democracies cooperated against the common threat of global fascism.” From 1936-1939, “a Popular Front government in Paris allowed Communist parties in the colonies an increased measure of freedom.”10 Although “he witnessed the arrests and killings of his Bolshevik and Comintern comrades, including many fellow Vietnamese Communists,” by the Soviets, Ho remained a dedicated Stalinist.11
“By mid-June 1940,” Logevall explains, “France stood on the brink of defeat at the hands of invading Nazi German forces, Japan, on friendly terms with Germany and sensing an opportunity to expand southward, prepared to seize French Indochina, and Ho Chi Minh, meeting with associates in southern China, said he saw ‘a very favorable opportunity for the Vietnamese revolution. . . .’ ”12
In the spring of 1941, Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam, set up camp, and held a plenary meeting of the Indochinese Communist Party’s Central Committee. In July, Japanese bases were established in southern Indochina. On July 24, the White House learned that “Japanese warships had appeared off Cam Ranh Bay.” Soon thereafter came the U.S. embargo of Japan, and then Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. On December 8, Charles de Gaulle, under the presumption that the French colonies lent his Free French government legitimacy, “proclaimed common cause with Washington and declared war on Japan.”13
Although both de Gaulle and Winston Churchill wanted to keep their colonies, FDR, motivated by “smug[ness],” pressure by “Japanese anti-colonial propaganda,” and Wilsonian idealism, had put forward the Atlantic Charter in August 1941. It included a clause respecting “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” The lofty statement provided inspiration and justification to nationalist leaders in colonies around the globe.14 It also provided a pretext for those like Ho Chi Minh, who were using nationalism to further the spread of international Communism.
By 1944, the Communists’ designs were becoming apparent. In China, Chiang Kai-shek had to dedicate resources to fighting the Communists instead of the Japanese. Stalin’s ambitions in Europe and Asia involved a strategy of “weaken[ing] the European colonial powers,” including France.15 In that same year, Ho Chi Minh “helped put together a coalition known as the Vietnam Revolutionary League,” which included “several non-Communist groups operating from exile in southern China.” But as Logevall points out, “The ICP was from the start the central force in this coalition, and Ho the leading personality.” Ho downplayed “his background as an agent of the Comintern and talked up the need for nationalist unity, even telling a Chinese general, ‘I am a communist but what is important to me now is the independence and the freedom of my country, not communism.’ ” This was part of his pattern of lying. “By late 1944,” Ho was “back in Tonkin” and “could see the endgame. He predicted that Japan would lose the Pacific War, France would seek to regain Indochina, and before that Tokyo would overthrow the [Jean] Decoux regime. . . . the result would be a power vacuum the [Communist] Viet Minh could fill.”16 After the Japanese successfully ousted the French administration in a March 9 coup, the Viet Minh formed an army under the command of General Giap, Ho’s military man.17
Ho Chi Minh gained the support of the peasants and the Allies through more deception. Massive floods in 1944 helped cause a devastating famine. By February 1945, “Viet Minh operatives” were leading “ ‘rice struggles,’ breaking open warehouses and distributing food to the hungry. These efforts, though growing out of grassroots popular protest more than Viet Minh initiative per se,” left a positive impression about the Viet Minh.18 At that time the Viet Minh actually worked with the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA), helping to collect intelligence and rescue Allied soldiers whose planes had been shot down.19
After Japan surrendered on August 14, Ho Chi Minh assassinated non-Communist nationalist rivals and Trotskyites. He made his triumphant entry into Hanoi on August 26. Mark Moyar recounts in Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954–1965, “As he had hoped, he preempted the Allied powers as well as the Vietnamese nationalist leaders . . . many of whom were still in China. Vietnamese Communist guerrillas marched unopposed into Hanoi and other cities with the rifles and submachine guns that they had received from their Chinese and American benefactors.” Avoiding mention of their Communist ideology or plans, Ho’s followers appealed to anti-colonialist sentiment and “nullified the most hated French policies, including high taxes and the government monopolies on salt, alcohol, and opium.” Land was confiscated and given to peasants, landlords and village leaders were killed, nationalists were neutralized, and printing presses were seized. Exuding both modesty and power, Ho Chi Minh gained the confidence of the masses and future leaders of his movement.20
Ho Chi Minh’s charisma also captivated many Americans. Ho used a combination of lies, evasion, and flattery on OSS men, including officer Archimedes Patti, who was “charmed by Ho’s political sophistication,” his seeming modesty, and his apparent desire for American-style democracy, as evidenced by a draft of a speech that quoted from the Declaration of Independence.21 But Patti was not entirely taken in. On August 30, the OSS officer “forwarded” to President Truman a message from Ho asking that “the Viet Minh be involved in any Allied discussion regarding Vietnam’s postwar status.”22 In a cable the day before, though, Patti had warned Washington that “ ‘Red elements’ were leading the new Viet Minh regime astray. . . .”23
On September 2, “unaware that the A
mericans had already consented to France’s return” to Vietnam, Ho, wearing a borrowed khaki suit and pith helmet, was driven to the Place Puginier square in Hanoi in a black American car. Coincidentally, at the time, two American P-38 Lightening fighters flew “overhead.” Several American officers from the OSS, whom Ho had invited, stood near the platform. All this gave the impression that the United States government was endorsing him. Ho read from the Declaration of Independence, as well as from the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. He accused “the French colonialists of violating these American and French principles” and claimed that his objective was an independent Vietnam.24 The performance impressed Colonel Patti so much that that evening he sent a radio report to U.S. authorities advising them that “these people mean business.”25 The French, who were on their way, would soon find that out.
A People’s History of the United States is still pushing Ho’s propaganda. Zinn’s 1980 history follows the same line he had argued in his Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, a book he had written in 1967, when the War in Vietnam was still ongoing—before the Communist takeover of the South, before a million “Boat People” risked drowning to flee their tyranny, before another million human beings died in the Cambodian killing fields—when there was perhaps some excuse for naivety about the Communists’ intentions. In that book Zinn presented Ho’s Communism as an “indigenous” movement that was “a unique resultant of Marxist theory and local conditions.”26 Zinn was repeating the same lie that Ho Chi Minh told to American reporters when, shortly after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, he denied that the Viet Minh would be getting outside aid. But by the following year, a news report indicated that twenty thousand to thirty thousand of his troops were receiving food, arms, and training in China. A December 1954 article indicated a “continued influx from Red China.”27 By 1953, the Soviet Union was also supplying “trucks, anti-aircraft artillery, and heavy mortars.”28 Far from being a local movement, Ho Chi Minh benefited from “$670 million in military assistance before 1965” from China and then “approximately $2 billion over the following decade.” The Soviet Union provided “$705 million in aid in 1967 alone” and more support came from the Warsaw Pact nations.29 And yet, in 1967, Zinn wrote that Vietnam could expect to be as independent as Yugoslavia under Tito. Zinn presented Ho’s government as preferable to the “elitist dictatorship” of South Vietnam and lectured, “We need to get accustomed to the idea that there will be more Communist countries in the world, and that this is not necessarily bad.”30