It's also why Damon references Howard Zinn in the bar scene in Good Will Hunting.

How do you like them apples? =P

The narrator, Matt Damon, used to be Howard Zinn's next-door neighbor.

who knew that Novak would go on to commit treason in the disclosure of Valerie Plame?

And why no mention of Howard Zinn at the end? upvote for Matt Damon's neighbor, Howard Zinn!

gorgonheap wrote: "I think if Ron Paul were to get the GOP nomination that he would take a lot of democratic votes others, say John McCain wouldn't have."

Possibly true. What's more likely I think is Ron Paul will not get the Republican nomination, and then - although he has so far denied any intention of such a thing - he'll run as an independent. If he doesn't run as an independent then my suspicion is that a very large part of his supporters simply won't vote, abandoning the race to the Democrats.

Gorgonheap wrote: "Hillary, I don't think she's in the right time. She has strong standings with the far left but I really don't think people are ready to vote for a woman president."

Ah...what is your definition of "far left"? Traditionally "far-left" refers to Stalinist and Maoist politics but probably that's not what you mean. Or are you refering to people like Michael Albert, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, et al? I assure you that you'll find no fans of Hillary Clinton here.

Perhaps you're using the term "far-left" the way Bill O'Reilly uses it. In that case why didn't you just say mainstream Democrats?

Logically wouldn't most left-of-centre Democratic Party supporters be for Dennis Kucinich?

continued...

Togo sent Ambassador Sato to Moscow to feel out the possibility of a negotiated surrender. On July 13, four days before Truman, Churchill, and Stalin met in Potsdam to prepare for the end of the war (Germany had surrendered two months earlier), Togo sent a telegram to Sato: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace. It is his Majesty's heart's desire to see the swift termination of the war."

The United States knew about that telegram because it had broken the Japanese code early in the war. American officials knew also that the Japanese resistance to unconditional surrender was because they had one condition enormously important to them: the retention of the Emperor as symbolic leader. Former Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew and others who knew something about Japanese society had suggested that allowing Japan to keep its Emperor would save countless lives by bringing an early end to the war.

Yet Truman would not relent, and the Potsdam conference agreed to insist on "unconditional surrender." This ensured that the bombs would fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It seems that the United States government was determined to drop those bombs.

But why? Gar Alperovitz, whose research on that question is unmatched (The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Knopf, 1995), concluded, based on the papers of Truman, his chief adviser James Byrnes, and others, that the bomb was seen as a diplomatic weapon against the Soviet Union. Byrnes advised Truman that the bomb "could let us dictate the terms of ending the war." The British scientist P.M.S. Blackett, one of Churchill's advisers, wrote after the war that dropping the atomic bomb was "the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia."

There is also evidence that domestic politics played an important role in the decision. In his book, Freedom From Fear: The United States, 1929-1945 (Oxford, 1999), David Kennedy quotes Secretary of State Cordell Hull advising Byrnes, before the Potsdam conference, that "terrible political repercussions would follow in the US" if the unconditional surrender principle would be abandoned. The President would be "crucified" if he did that, Byrnes said. Kennedy reports that "Byrnes accordingly repudiated the suggestions of Leahy, McCloy, Grew, and Stimson," all of whom were willing to relax the "unconditional surrender" demand just enough to permit the Japanese their face-saving requirement for ending the war.

Of course, political ambition was not the only reason for Hiroshima, Vietnam, and the other horrors of our time. There was tin, rubber, oil, corporate profit, imperial arrogance. There was a cluster of factors, none of them, despite the claims of our leaders, having to do with human rights, human life.

We face a problem of the corruption of human intelligence, enabling our leaders to create plausible reasons for monstrous acts, and to exhort citizens to accept those reasons, and train soldiers to follow orders. So long as that continues, we will need to refute those reasons, resist those exhortations.

wiki: Howard Zinn (born August 24, 1922) is an American historian, political scientist, social critic, activist and playwright, best known as author of the bestseller, A People's History of the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

Howard Zinn served as Second Lieutenant and bombardier, U.S. Army Air Corps where he flew combat missions in Europe, 1943-45.

Important enough to publish in full:

The Bombs of August

Dispelling the Myth of Lives Saved by the Hiroshima Bomb

by Howard Zinn

The bombing of Hiroshima remains sacred to the American Establishment and to a very large part of the population in this country. I learned that when, in 1995, I spoke at the Chautauqua Institute about Hiroshima, it being the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing. There were 2,000 people in that huge amphitheater and as I explained why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unforgivable atrocities, perpetrated on a Japan ready to surrender, the audience was silent. Well, not quite. A number of people shouted angrily at me from their seats.

Understandable. To question Hiroshima is to explode a precious myth - that America is different from the other imperial powers of the world, that other nations may commit unspeakable acts, but not ours.

Further, to see it as a wanton act of gargantuan cruelty rather than as an unavoidable necessity ("to end the war, to save lives") would be to raise disturbing questions about the essential goodness of the "good war."

What could be more horrible than the burning, mutilation, blinding, irradiation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, children? And yet it is absolutely essential for our political leaders to defend the bombing because if Americans can be induced to accept that, then they can accept any war, any means, so long as the warmakers can supply a reason. And there are always plausible reasons delivered from on high.

That is why the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is important, because if citizens can question that, if they can declare nuclear weapons an unacceptable means, even if it ends a war a month or two earlier, they may be led to a larger question - the means (involving forty million dead) used to defeat Fascism.

The principal justification for obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it "saved lives" because otherwise a planned US invasion of Japan would have been necessary, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Truman at one point used the figure "a half million lives," and Churchill "a million lives," but these were figures pulled out of the air to calm troubled consciences; even official projections for the number of casualties in an invasion did not go beyond 46,000.

In fact, the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not forestall an invasion of Japan because no invasion was necessary. The Japanese were on the verge of surrender, and American military leaders knew that. General Eisenhower, briefed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the imminent use of the bomb, told him that "Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary."

After the bombing, Admiral William D. Leary, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the atomic bomb "a barbarous weapon," also noting that: "The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender."

The Japanese had begun to move to end the war after the US victory on Okinawa, in May of 1945, in the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. After the middle of June, six members of the Japanese Supreme War Council authorized Foreign Minister Togo to approach the Soviet Union, which was not at war with Japan, to mediate an end to the war "if possible by September."

I second the Chomsky recommendation, and would add Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."

Thanks, Persephone. (I love your pommegranite.)

Swampgirl, your country also has one of the most relentless regimes of indoctrination towards patriotism of any nation, and it starts at a very early age. And it's never been right to say "love it or leave it." That undemocratic intolerance is just another part of the culture of uncritical patriotism. And it's unfair to assume that your fellow citizens who commented above are doing nothing in their lives beyond posting on an internet site. I am sure some of them actively advocate for positive change in the best ways they know how.

It's always uncomfortable for one's beliefs to be challenged - but by the very nature of belief, if you say you believe in something, you are saying that you aren't thinking about that part of reality anymore. (This is just as much true for politics as it is for religion!) People who are serious and truly care apply critical thinking to serious issues.

The quip about "coming to your aid" is not informed by history and completely ignores or is unaware of the harsh strategic political and economic dimensions of leverage and coercion invariably attached to US "aid". You should bite the bullet and do some book research - as uncomfortable as that will be at first. I'm sure at the end you'll be a much different sort of citizen.

There's a good deal of material, but a well-written and researched place to begin is Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States". By no means is that the only book, however.

The Marshall plan was entirely in self-interest. Here's historian Howard Zinn on the Marshall Plan:

The motives for the Marshall Plan were both economic and political. Just to point to one aspect of the economic motive: George Marshall was quoted in an early 1948 State Department bulletin: "It is idle to think that a Europe left to its own efforts...would remain open to American business in the same way that we have known it in the past." Most of the money went to American businesses exporting to Europe. At least 10% of the aid money went for European purchases of oil, moving them away from coal-dependency (which involved dealing with troublesome trade unions) to oil dependency, with the U.S. dominant in the world oil market. The political motive was to shore up anti-Communist governments in France and Italy. Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson said at the time: "These measures of relief and reconstruction have been only n part suggested by humanitarianism. Your Congress has authorized and your Government is carrying out, a policy of relief and reconstruction today chiefly as a matter of national self-interest". You can read much more about the Marshall Plan, that is, realistic evaluations, in Michael Hogan's book "The Marshall Plan" (Cambridge Univ. Press 1987) and in Melvyn Leffler's excellent book "A Preponderance ofPower" (Stanford Univ. Press, 1992)

The Apollo Program was indeed a large project of the cold war - and it was arguably also a massive waste of money that was greatly needed elsewhere. I should have made it clear that by "great" I mean great in both the ethical sense as well as scale.

US history is like a clogged toilet; the more you flush the shit keeps rising.

I love the brain washed responses.

"Fight them over there, not here." Yeah because I see boat loads of iraqi insurgents gathering on the shores to cross the atlantic and bring it too us. Ridiculous. It's like saying I'd rather poke a stick in every hornet's nest in my neighborhood to try to kill a few on their turf while pissing off the rest, then have to make sure my windows and screens are closed to keep out the two a year that get in and try to sting me.

I don't care about them not serving, I don't think that's a fair way of presenting things. I do however care that they are ill-informed mouth pieces of the RNC, blindly drinking the Koolaid without taking in all sides. Why all the al queda talk? Do they think Iraq had something to do with 9/11? These folks need a good dose of populist history ala Howard Zinn and a big f$cking reality check.

I won't even touch Delay's abortion comment. Because the classist implications of what he said make me want to eat the rich and retake the middle class.