Q: Historically, has there ever been a case in which the evidence of falsification was as quickly available to the public as it is now?
A: I can't think of any. It took seventy years for the lies about the explosion of the Maine in 1898 to be exposed. It took a few years for the Gulf of Tonkin to be exposed.
Q: Faced with a complicit press accelerating the rush to war and military technology that shortens the length of combat operations, will it be possible for future antiwar movements to develop quickly enough in order to effective?
A: Well, the acceleration of the rush to war was/is joined by the acceleration of communication through the Internet, which is why there were so many demonstrations, even before the war. It is a race between those two accelerations!
Q: I live a short distance from the home of Jessica Lynch. While none of us would diminish her anguish, we do question reports of her capture, rescue and "hero" status. How is it possible bring these inflated claims to light without criticizing a young woman who enlisted to gain access to a higher education and became a pawn of the media military machine?
A: A delicate problem, but it can be done, if we are sensitive to the feelings of GIs and make it clear we always support the GIs. Understand their situation and point out that the government uses them as pawns, or worse, human sacrifices in the interest of power and profit.
Q: With the recent FCC ruling, access to information is being consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer corporate powers. Historically, has the media been as undemocratic as it is today or is this a new phenomenon?
A: It's always been undemocratic. Upton Sinclair at the beginning of the 21st century and George Seldes in the 1940s were writing about that. And today it is much worse than ever. Read Ben Bagdikian's "The Media Monopoly."
Q: Your critics on the right often accuse you of being a "revisionist historian." How do you counter that charge?
A: Of course I'm a "revisionist," although I don't like the term, as it tells you nothing about the so-called revision.
Anyone who wants to give a new version of history different from the traditional one, escaping the orthodox point of view, is "revisionist."
To put it another way, we should always be revising history to escape outmoded accounts and to give fresh viewpoints and fresh information.
Q: Recently conservative writers, such as Ann Coulter, have tried to portray Senator Joseph McCarthy and the witchhunts of the 1950s in a positive light. What is the most effective rebuttal to that line of thinking?
A: Point out the effects of those witch hunts - to deprive people of jobs, to put hundreds on FBI lists, to create the anti-communist hysteria which led the U.S. to overthrow democratically-elected governments in Guatemala and Chile and support dictatorships all over the world and led the U.S. into Vietnam (international McCarthyism) leading to millions of deaths.
Q: Progressive movements tend to come and go in cycles. Are you optimistic that the country will swing back from the rightward drift of the past few decades?
A: I don't really believe we can depend on cycles, though there is some logic to the idea that when something swings too far one way it has to come back. I do think we will swing back from the extremism of the Bush people
--Originally published in Bejeezus, issue 3
- Part of the inspiration for Zinn's work came when he learned of the mine wars and Colorado's Ludlow Massacre of 1914:
