Democracy Now has a great tribute to Howard Zinn, including Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, and Anthony Arnove.
Update: Daniel Ellsberg: A Memory of Howard Zinn.
I just learned that my friend Howard Zinn died today. Earlier this morning, I was being interviewed by the Boston Phoenix, in connection with the release in Boston February of a documentary in which he is featured prominently. The interviewer asked me who my own heroes were, and I had no hesitation in answering, first, “Howard Zinn.”
Just weeks ago after watching the film on December 7, I woke up the next morning thinking that I had never told him how much he meant to me. For once in my life, I acted on that thought in a timely way. I sent him an e-mail in which I said, among other things, what I had often told others about him: that he was,” in my opinion, the best human being I’ve ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life.”
Update II: It’s worth remembering that Howard Zinn was one of the first scholars to come out in support of Ward Churchill during our fair state’s latest round of neo-Stalinist witchhunts. This was his statement:
I have declared my support of Ward Churchill because to defend him is to defend the principle of academic freedom, the idea that no one should lose his or her job or status in education because of factors outside of teaching and scholarship. Those factors — political, ideological — are evident in his case, and they are joined by a mean-spiritedness which does not belong in an academic or any other environment. The attack on Ward Churchill comes at a time in our nation’s history when constitutional rights are under attack by the national government, when war threatens the lives and well-being of all, and therefore we need the marketplace of ideas to be as open as possible. If we want to live in a democracy we must protect that openness. That is why defending Ward Churchill has an importance far beyond his particular situation.
I don’t think I can overstate how refreshing it was to see academics like Zinn and Chomsky jump into the fray, while the vast majority of academics, especially locally, were scattering as quickly as they could.
One of my personal heroes, historian and author Howard Zinn, has died. Yeah, he was 87, but the world just seems a little less safe from horseshit without him.
As in any military conquest, women came in for especially brutal treatment. One Italian nobleman named Cuneo recorder an early sexual encounter. The “Admiral” he refers to is Columbus, who, as part of his agreement with Spanish monarchy, insisted he be made an Admiral. Cueno wrote:
“…I captured a very beautiful Carib women, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me and with whom…I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that, I took a rope and thrashed her well…. Finally we came to an agreement.”
There is other evidence which adds up to a picture of widespread rape of native women. Samuel Eliot Morison: “In the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola they found young beautiful women, who everywhere were naked, in most places accessible, and presumably complaisant.” Who presumes this? Morison, and so many others.
Morison saw the conquest as so many writers after him have done, as one of the great romantic adventures of world history. He seemed to get carries away by what appeared to him a masculine conquest. He wrote:
“Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492, when the new world gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.”
The language of Cueno (“we came to an agreement”), and of Morison (“gracefully yield”) written almost five hundred years apart, surely suggests how persistent through modern history has been the mythology that rationalizes sexual brutality but seeing it as “complaisant.”
The rest here.
