Failure to quit : reflections of an optimistic historian

133 Pages·2013·0.64 MB·English

by  Zinn

FAILURE TO QUIT
Reflections of an Optimistic Historian
Howard Zinn
Copyright © 1993 and 2002 by Howard Zinn.
“Perils of Plato,” “‘Je Ne Suis Pas un Marxiste’” (originally published as
“Nothing Human is Alien to Me”), “Objections to Objectivity, “The Optimism
of Uncertainty,” and “Failure to Quit” have appeared in Z Magazine; “The
Supreme Court is Not Supreme” appeared in Civil Liberties Review; “The
Problem is Civil Obedience” appeared in Violence: The Crisis of American
Confidence (Johns Hopkins Press, 1972); “How Free is Higher Education?”
appeared in the Gannett Center Journal; “Columbus, the Indians, and Human
Progress” appeared as an Open Magazine pamphlet.
Any properly footnoted quotation of up to 500 sequential words may be used
without permission, as long as the total number of words quoted does not exceed
2,000.
To Staughton and Alice Lynd,
who refuse to quit.
Contents

Preface
Introduction
“Who Controls the Past Controls the Future” Interview with David Barsamian
The Optimism of Uncertainty
Objections to Objectivity
The Problem is Civil Obedience
The Supreme Court is Not Supreme
The Bill of Rights
Second Thoughts on the First Amendment
How Free is Higher Education?
Just and Unjust Wars
Terrorism Over Tripoli
Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress: 1492–1992
“Je Ne Suis Pas un Marxiste”
The Perils of Plato
Failure to Quit
Preface

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan, in his continuing efforts—both legal and
illegal—to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua,
declared a blockade of that small Central American country. Tens of thousands
of Americans had signed a Pledge of Resistance to commit civil disobedience if
warlike measures were undertaken against the Sandinistas. In Boston, five
hundred and fifty people, I among them, occupied the federal building
downtown, and refused to leave. We were all arrested, held for a while, then
released. It proved too big a job, perhaps too embarrassing an undertaking, to
prosecute so many, and the charges were dropped. I received notice of that, and
for the first time learned what we were all being charge with: “Failure to quit the
premises”—an old Massachusetts statute to deal with trespassing. I thought that
phrase “failure to quit” perfecdy epitomized the determination of people all over
the country to protest government actions they saw as violations of human
rights, whether here or abroad. So when Common Courage Press put together a
group of my essays on various subjects, we decided to call the book Failure to
Quit.
Introduction

Introducing a bunch of writings (the word anthology, originally meaning a
collection of flowers, would be going too far) requires a certain amount of
ingenuity, finding a common thread in pieces that were written at different times,
in response to different situations.
The difficulty is compounded in this case, where some of the pieces are
transcripts of talks: ranging from a Vietnam-era debate at Johns Hopkins
University to more recent lectures at the University of Wisconsin and the
University of Minnesota, a talk for the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts,
and a lecture at the Wellfleet Public Library broadcast on WOMR, Cape Cod,
organized by those super-organizers, Robert and Ethel Levy.
Others are essays, written for the now-defunct (am I responsible?) Civil
Liberties Review, or the (also defunct; my record is getting worse by the minute)
Gannett Center Journal. Five of the shorter pieces were written for Z Magazine.
One was written for the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series.
One entry is an unpublished Op-Ed piece. And one is an interview with the
extraordinary radio persona David Barsamian.
The closest I can come to finding a common thread is that all the pieces
represent the thinking of someone who wants to address urgent issues of peace
and justice with the perspective (presumably long-range and very wise) of a
historian.
The stimulus for putting these together came from Greg Bates, who claims
to run Common Courage Press from someplace in Maine, but I have never laid
eyes on him or his locus of operations in Maine, so I am only assuming they
exist. All I can say is that he is very engaging on the telephone, good-humored,
easy to work with. Add those qualities to invisibility and you have the perfect
editor-publisher. The question now is whether we have matched such a publisher
with a proper writer. I leave that judgment to the reader.
Howard Zinn
March 1993
“Who Controls the Past
Controls the Future”

Interview with David Barsamian

This interview took place in Boulder, Colorado in 1992, and David Barsamian and I had a lot of fun
with it, which is hard to recapture in a transcript, so readers will have to content themselves with what is left
after the tape was scrupulously edited to remove the fun. I met David some years ago when I was invited to
speak in Boulder by a remarkable veteran journalist named Sender Garlin, now ninety and brimming with
energy. David has been a pioneer in what is mysteriously called “alternative radio,” and when I spoke a few
years ago to a national conference of several hundred “alternative radio” people, everyone seemed to know
him. He drew from me things about my life which I was saving for my own slightly shorter version of
Remembrance of Things Past.