Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

Howard Zinn; you can't be neutral on a moving train is about the life of activist Howard Zinn who dedicated his life to educating people on their rights as human beings and as American citizens by becoming a history teacher. The axiom, those who ignore history are destined to repeat it, is absolutely true. And most Americans have no interest in real history. Rising out of poverty in NYC, Zinn tells of his life through the 30s to his death. He mentions many of the true American struggles like the Ludlow Massacre, where unarmed miners and their families working in company owned world could not get out from under the thumb of business and were massacred by the National Guard during a union strike. Something that most of today's so called American citizens don't seem to mind. An event that never made the news or the history books. In his heyday during the 60s with the racial strife, Zinn was targeted with so many other Americans to be pushed out of America. Something that is also an acceptable notion in the present – America, love it or leave it – an idiots axiom. There are very few people younger than I and very few people in general who can appreciate the life of American's without the rights we are squandering today. Ignorance is bliss. While I admire Zinn's zeal and agree with his impression of America and Americans lack of desire to know, I don't agree with all his attempts to humanize our enemies of the past. I would encourage everyone to admit their ignorance and choke down as much Zinn as they can handle to try and wake them up with another point of view and another set of possibilities.

The biggest mistake of the protesters of the 60s was that they assumed all Americans were educated about their right to engage in civil disobedience and that the cared about human life in general. Protesters assumed that the troops coming home from Viet Nam understood the wrongness of the war and chose to support it rather than engage in disobedience and risk the penalties. The average American, desiring a wave less and secure existence, had no real concept of any of the inconsistencies the war. They were quite content to kill the farmer that they were told threatened their way of life.

How many ignorant people today feel that democracy means the American way of life? How many ignorant people today forget – and to the REPUBLIC, for which it stands… not the democracy.

How many ignorant people today can't make the connection between crack use and war? The bottom line – if you don't have enough time to understand to another American's point of view, you don't have enough time to be an American. A country of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Howard Zinn has had a fascinating life, going from working-class soldier to civil rights activist to pioneering historian. The strengths of this documentary is, then, its remarkable subject matter and the inevitable power that comes with it. It's hard not to be moved, for instance, hearing Zinn recount his realization that he was test-dropping napalm in the dying days of WW2.

Unfortunately, the documentary takes a fairly standard hagiographical approach that you often see in documentaries about intellectuals, elevating the person above their ideas even when this seems to go directly against the "people's history" approach that Zinn so argued for. Moreover, it sticks to the same tired talking-heads/archival-clips-and-photos approach that you've seen in every documentary. Hell, you've probably even seen these specific talking heads and photos in many other movies.

Pick up a copy of A People's History of the US, or one of Zinn's other books, but you can skip this documentary. In the end understanding the man's ideas are more important than biographical worship of the man himself.

Traditional American History textbooks describe the American Revolution as a glorious revolt against tyranny, and the resulting government as a beacon of democracy for the rest of the world. In Zinn's A People's History of the United States, he provides evidence that the revolution served the interests of an elite ruling class, and the resulting government was in many ways as tyrannical as the government it replaced.

By telling history from the point of view of the oppressed, Zinn has transformed the way history is taught in American classrooms. In this cinematic exploration of his life, it becomes clear that he has lived his life in accordance with his principles.

The movie makes excellent use of interviews with important leaders -- Alice Walker, Marian Wright Edelman, Tom Hayden, Daniel Berrigan and others -- to tell about Zinn's influence as a leader against Jim Crow laws in Georgia, as a primary leader of the Peace Movement during the Vietnam War, as a union activist at Boston University, and as a leader in the anti-War movement during the Iraqi conflict.

If you're not familiar with Zinn's writings, you will be inspired to read about him after watching this movie.

Highly recommended.

This documentary travels deep inside leftist political circles and, perhaps, deep inside any group of true believes who have held the same beliefs for their entire life. The major issues are settled, and there is distrust and an assumption of hostility in the actions of anyone or anything which counters those settled beliefs.

For example, the story of when Dr. Zinn traveled to North Vietnam at the invitation of the NVA to bring 3 POWs home is a story of a peace-loving man traveling to a foreign land in order to bring home three countrymen. There is a blindness to the idea that, for the Soviets and NVA, the propaganda value of undermining US policy by 'negotiating' with a sympathetic leftist superseded any other consideration; this idea is not even given the consideration of a mention, nor are the potential consequences of Dr. Zinn's private diplomacy. Of course, Zinn marvels at the loveliness of the North Vietnamese culture, including having a grand time during a subterranean sing-a-long, and he, of course, makes the requisite denunciation of American bombing. He scoffs at the idea that Americans might have been abused by the NVA, having a good chuckle at the expense of an official who believed that American POWS were being abused; the documentary makes no mention of what's been learned since Zinn had his chuckle. Then, upon Dr. Zinn's return home, he is baffled by the US military and government's desire to examine, debrief, and return the 3 POWs, as opposed to Zinn being allowed to do so, and it is made plain that this is yet another example where a lying hostile US government thwarted the actions of a peace-loving man.

That is not to say Dr. Zinn didn't face other trials. He spoke out against the board of trustees of his university, and there's intense speculation that the tenure he received that day might have been put in jeopardy because of the dark forces at work on the board of trustees. He had to teach at a school with a university president who disagreed with him on politics. He has been arrested after a peace rally where he spoke turned into a riot. He also believes the FBI might have had agents among the crowd at some of his peace rallies. Yet, he has come through and triumphed despite these hardships.

And his triumph includes his belief that there is no need to obey the law. Law, Dr. Zinn tells us, is made by 'flawed, limited, petty' men who then treat it as a 'holy writ', rendering law and courts based on said law as arbitrary as the shifting sands. That there are peaceful methods, such as elections and courts, for changing laws is insufficient. Direct, passionate, and selected rioting will get the government's attention and change things for the better.

Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg also offer commentary.