Howard Zinn - A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

A mericas future is linked to how we understand our past. For this reason, writing about history, for me, is never a neutral act. By writing, I hope to awaken a great consciousness of racial injustice, sexual bias, class inequality, and national hubris. I also want to bring into the light the unreported resistance of people against the power of the Establishment: the refusal of the indigenous to simply disappear; the rebellion of black people in the antislavery movement and in the more recent movement against racial segregation; the strikes carried out by working people all through American history in attempts to improve their lives.

To omit these acts of resistance is to support the official view that power only rests with those who have the guns and possess the wealth. I write in order to illustrate the creative power of people struggling for a better world. People, when organized, have enormous power, more than any government. Our history runs deep with the stories of people who stand up, speak out, dig in, organize, connect, form networks of resistance, and alter the course of history.

I dont want to invent victories for peoples movements. But to think that history writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, and occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the pasts fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

History can help our struggles, if not conclusively, then at least suggestively. History can disabuse us of the idea that the governments interests and the peoples interests are the same.

History can tell how often governments have lied to us, how they have ordered whole populations to be massacred, how they deny the existence of the poor, how they have led us to our current historical momentthe Long War, the war without end.

True, our government has the power to spend the countrys wealth as it wishes. It can send troops anywhere in the world. It can threaten indefinite detention and deportation of 20 million immigrant Americans who do not yet have green cards and have no constitutional rights. In the name of our national interest, the government can deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexican border, round up Muslim men from certain countries, secretly listen in on our conversations, open our e-mails, examine our bank transactions, and try to intimidate us into silence.

The government can control information with the collaboration of a timid mass media. Only this accounts for the popularitywaning by 2006 (33 percent of those polled), but still significantof George W. Bush. Still, this control is not absolute. The fact that the media are 95 percent in favor of continuing the occupation of Iraq (with only superficial criticism of how it is done), while more than 50 percent of the public are in favor of withdrawal, suggests a commonsense resistance to official explanations.