'Bush Drives Us Into Bakunin's Arms!': An Interview with Howard Zinn
http://eserver.org/bs/54/zinn.html
Joe Lockard and Joel Schalit Bad Subjects, Issue # 54 , March 2001
At last year's Sundance Festival, historian Howard Zinn was invited to give a lecture on Hollywood's propagandistic slant. Zinn's talk was recorded and recently released as Stories Hollywood Never Tells by San Francisco's Alternative Tentacles Records and the UK-based radical publisher, AK Press. Over the course of sixty-some minutes, Zinn, speaking to the alternative film elite, spins out a marvelously accessible lecture about how Hollywood has always toed the establishment's line, reinforcing falsehoods and mythologies across the board. Not only does it offer an incisive expose of Hollywood chicanery, but the compact disc also provides the perfect forum for an activist cum academic like Zinn to reach beyond privileged university students seeking liberal arts enlightenment before moving on to law school and connect with another audience, the culture industry itself. The recording's one flaw is its introduction, which David Barsamian provides. Barsamian, noted leftist talk show host, head of his own syndicated Alternative Radio Project program, and much-loved in progressive media circles, introduces Zinn to the Sundance audience by comparing him to one of the towering figures of Islamic esoterica Sufi mystic Jalal al-din Rumi. Zinn, Barsamian explains, is not so much a religious mystic, rather he, like Jalal al-din Rumi, teaches forbidden knowledge, in this case, real history. For those familiar with the basic tenets of Marxist ideology criticism, there's some truth to Barsamian's discomforting, extremely 1960s analogy: Ideology is always about disguising the truth, that is, about the process of 'mystification.' In this instance, Zinn is the great revealer of suppressed truths or, in other words, the great demystifier.
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