Celebrating the Disobedience of Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn, the venerable storyteller of the people's history and a leader in anti-war movements going all the way back to Vietnam, died today after 87 years of fighting the good fight for peace with justice. For Zinn, activism was less about following the status quo, and more about rocking the boat.

There might be no better example of this than Zinn's last day on the job as a professor at Boston University. What did he do? He cut his class 30 minutes early, so that he could join a picket line. He urged his students to follow him. Almost 100 did.

That matches well with a motto that seemed to guide Zinn's life, and ended up being one of his best quotes ever. "Historically, the most terrible things -- war, genocide and slavery -- have resulted from obedience, not disobedience," Zinn wrote. How relevant that quote remained, particularly today, as the U.S. wages two simultaneous wars.

It's a pretty safe bet that Zinn would want to be remembered for the disobedience he caused. And, of course, for the fact that he gave the people's voice to some of the biggest, baddest, most memorable events in history.

It's something Zinn never lost, even after his book, A People's History of the United States, went gangbusters (it has sold close to two millions copies). Case in point, his coverage of the Iraq War, which from day one focused on the costs that the war would have on innocent lives, and the costs it would have on the souls of the folks fighting it.

See, for Zinn, war and psychology were intricately linked.

"War, I decided, creates, insidiously, a common morality for all sides. It poisons everyone who is engaged in it, however different they are in many ways, turns them into killers and torturers, as we are seeing now," Zinn wrote in 2006. "It pretends to be concerned with toppling tyrants, and may in fact do so, but the people it kills are the victims of the tyrants. It appears to cleanse the world of evil, but that does not last, because its very nature spawns more evil. Wars, like violence in general, I concluded, is a drug. It gives a quick high, the thrill of victory, but that wears off and then comes despair."

Insight like that comes along once a generation, if we're lucky. Zinn not only wrote history, he made history.

Rest in peace? That's probably not quite what Zinn would want. Agitate for peace? Now that's more like it.

Photo credit: crujones79