America: Imagine the World Without Her Page #4

One professor pulled

this narrative together.

His name is Howard Zinn.

I prefer to try to tell the story

of the discovery of America

from the viewpoint of the Arawaks.

Of the Constitution from the

standpoint of the slaves.

Of Andrew Jackson as

seen by the Cherokees.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck

grew up in the same

South Boston neighborhood as Zinn.

They gave him a nice plug in

their movie Good Will Hunting.

You want to read a real history book,

read Howard Zion's People's

History of the United States.

That book will knock you on your ass.

Zion's book has made

him quite the celebrity.

What I didn't realize is that

from the very beginning,

from when Columbus met the Arawaks,

there was... It was just nonstop, um,

violence and, uh, and,

uh, just taking over.

They're bullying people and

taking over their resources.

Howard Zinn is the most influential

historian of the past 50 years.

His book has sold over

two million copies,

becoming required reading in most

colleges and many high schools.

Even Tony Soprano's

kid had to read it.

His history teacher, Mr. Cushman,

is teaching your son that if

Columbus was alive today,

he would go on trial for

crimes against humanity,

like Miloevi in, you know, Europe.

Your teacher said that?

It's not just my teacher.

It's the truth.

It's in my history book.

This is the new story

of American shame.

Are our lives,

innocent on the surface,

part of a ruthless engine of

looting, exploitation and murder?

It's a powerful critique.

We can't just dismiss it with chants

of liberty, freedom, rah, rah, rah.

The critics are raising the

primary question of justice.

...with liberty and justice for all.

Read the Declaration of independence.

It's a cry against injustice.

For the American founders, liberty

was the solution to that injustice.

This is not just an attack on the 1%.

It's an attack on all of us.

We are a nation of

immigrants and settlers.

And we are the ones

accused of these crimes.

If these things are true,

something has to be done about them.

- There he is.

- How's it going?

- Good. Come on in.

- Good to see you.

- Been a while, hasn't it?

- It has been.

Reagan had called the Soviet Union,

you remember, an evil empire.

- Yeah.

- And the Soviet Union has dissolved.

So, who's the new evil empire?

Well, you're sitting in it.

One of the most vocal

critics of America

is Professor Ward Churchill.

He gained notoriety right after 9/11

by suggesting some of the people

in the World Trade Center

were like Nazi war criminals

and deserved what they got.

If the US had the

atomic bomb earlier,

chances are pretty good it would

have dropped it on Nazi Germany,

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