By Cliff Kincaid
Right Side News
July 30, 2010
The prominent "progressive" historian Howard Zinn, whose books are force-fed to young people on many college campuses, was not only a member of the Moscow-controlled and Soviet-funded Communist Party USA (CPUSA) but lied about it, according to an FBI file released on Friday.
The file, consisting of three sections totaling 423 pages, was made available on the FBI's website and released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from this writer.
Zinn taught in the political science department of Boston University for 24 years, from 1964 to 1988, and has been a major influence on the modern-day "progressive" movement that backed Barack Obama for president.
Although Zinn denied being a member of the CPUSA, the FBI file discloses that several reliable informants in the party identified Zinn as a member who attended party meetings as many as five times a week.
What's more, one of the files reveals that a reliable informant provided a photograph of Zinn teaching a class on "Basic Marxism" at party headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951. A participant in the class said that Zinn taught that "the basic teaching of Marx and Lenin were sound and should be adhered to by those present."
The FBI file also includes information on Zinn's pro-Castro activism and support for radical groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Progressive Labor Party (PLP), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and Black Panther Party. Much of the latter was in connection with Zinn's support for a communist military victory in Vietnam. His dealings with the Communist regime in Hanoi included a visit to the communist capital.
Another related article by The Other McCain draws attention to the following:
What is important to note here is that Zinn evidently joined the Kremlin-controlled CPUSA not during the “Popular Front” era of the 1930s — when many idealists were seduced — but after the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in which Stalin cruelly and cynically sacrificed Poland to the Nazis. Zinn was a card-carrying Commie who advocated Marxism-Leninism after the Red Army’s “Iron Curtain” occupation of Eastern Europe, after the treachery of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss had been revealed, and even during the height of Stalin’s anti-Semitic “Doctors’ Plot” purge!
Zinn never made a secret of the fact that he "cut his political teeth" in the yeasty leftist environment of New York City, and after being demobilized from the military where he served as a decorated fighter bomber pilot in the European theater. This included participating in the debates and polemics between socialists, anarchists, CPers and Trotskyists. If you know anything about the US left you'd know that a CPer ("Stalinist/Moscow Line) could never, ever show support for the arch-enemy Trotskyists of the SWP!! Zinn always defined his politics while at BU as "anarchist" in the spirit of Emma Goldman. He was totally eclectic in giving his support to anyone victimized for opposing a social system he considered grossly unjust. If he had been a CPer, he had broken with "the party" quite soon after joining. It's to his shame IMO that he supported Obama, just as he had supported Kerry over Nader in 2004.
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