A predictably moronic piece and a predictably wimpy response by media matters. Hopefully this will encourage Zinn to take a more forceful stance on 911 truth. Along with Parenti and a few others, he is one of the only prominent "left-radical" intellectuals who has had the balls to endorse the 911 truth movement and not just parrot "blowback".

Author calls Zinn a "Marxist". While Zinn is obviously sympathetic to the Marxist critique of capitalism, he does not believe in a Marxist solution (ie authoritarian government). Zinn labels himself an "anarchist"; in fact he's written several great pieces on the subject. Here's one:

excerpts from Howard Zinn’s introduction to Herbert Read’s book “Anarchy and Order”. Not all paragraphs are contiguous.

"The word anarchy unsettles most people in the Western world; it suggests disorder, violence, uncertainty. We have good reason for fearing those conditions, because we have been living with them for a long time, not in anarchist societies but in exactly those societies most fearful of anarchy—the powerful nation-states of modern times.

It is these conditions that the anarchists have wanted to end; to bring a kind of order to the world for the first time. We have never listened to them carefully, except through the hearing aids supplied by the guardians of disorder—the national government leaders, whether capitalist or socialist.

The order of politics, as we have known it in the world, is an order imposed on society, neither desired by most people, nor directed by their needs. It is therefore chaotic and destructive. Politics grates on our sensibilities. It violates the elementary requirement of aesthetics—it is devoid of beauty. It is coercive, as if sound were forced into our ears at a decibel level such as to make us scream, and those responsible calls this music.

Anarchists almost immediately recognized that the fall of kings, and the rise of committees, assemblies, parliaments, did not bring democracy; that revolutions are the potential for liberation, but also for another form of despotism. Thus Jacques Roux, a country priest in the French Revolution concerned with the lives of the peasants in his district, and then with the workingmen in the Gravilliers quarter of Paris, spoke in 1792 against “senatorial despotism,” saying it was “as terrible as the scepter of kings” because it chains the people without their knowing it and brutalizes and subjugates them by laws they themselves are supposed to have made. In Peter Weisses’ play, Marat-Sade, Roux, straitjacketed, breaks through the censorship of the play within the play and cries out:

Who controls the markets
Who locks up the granaries
Who got the loot from the palaces
Who sits right on the estates
That were going to be divided between the poor.

Before he is quieted.

A friend of Roux, Jean Varlet, in an early anarchist manifesto of the French Revolution called Explosion, wrote:

“What a social monstrosity, what a masterpiece of Machiavellianism, this revolutionary government is in fact. For any reasoning being, Government and Revolution are incompatible, at least unless the people wishes to constitute the organs of power in permanent insurrection against themselves, which is too absurd to believe.”

Herbert Read, in a book with an appropriately absurd title, To Hell With Culture, wrote:

“What has been worth while in human history—the great achievements of physics and astronomy, of geographical discovery and of human healing. Of philosophy and of art—has been the work of extremists—of those who believed in the absurd, dared the impossible…”

The institution of capitalism, anarchists believe, is destructive, irrational, inhumane. It feeds ravenously on the immense resources of the earth, and then churns out (this is its achievement—it is an immense stupid churn) huge quantities of products. Those products have only an accidental relationship to that is most needed by people, because the organizers and distributors of goods care not about human need; they are great business enterprises motivated only by profit. Therefore, bombs, guns, office buildings, and deodorants take priority over food, homes and recreation areas. Is there anything closer to “anarchy” (in the common use of the word, meaning confusion) than the incredibly wild an wasteful economic system in America?

The difference between a one-party state and a two-party state being no more than one party—and that a smudged carbon copy of the other.

The vote in modern societies is the currency of politics as money is the currency of economics; both mystify what is really taking place—control of the many by the few."

The Eleventh Day of Every Month