A People's History of American Empire | Howard Zinn | Talks at Google

howard zinn is an american historian political scientist social critic and author in his introduction to the book voices of a people's history of the united states zinn writes when i decided to write a people's history of the united states i decided i wanted to tell the story of the nation's wars not through the eyes of the generals and the political leaders but from the viewpoints of the working-class youngsters who became gis or the parents or wives who received the blackboard telegrams he goes on to say every american school child learns about the boston massacre five colonialists were killed by british troops in 1770. but how many school children learned about the massacre of 600 men women and children of the pequot tribe in new england in 1637 paraphrasing what dale mccartney editor of the canadian online magazine seven oats oaks once wrote zin favors an openly political stance that reclaims a history of oppressed peoples regardless of race or gender his work is an important corrective to the academic tradition of objectivity that has played a key role in marginalizing oppressed peoples and derailing social movements zin comes to us today as scholar of american history former air force bombardier a child of working class immigrants a husband a father a grandfather and a citizen of the world please join me in welcoming howard zinn uh thank you anne uh should i say a few things before i listen to your questions maybe i will okay um maybe i'll start with the election because everybody seems to be interested right uh it just happened people were excited and i was excited too uh i was yes i felt great when obama won and it was very moving to see the the faces on television especially well both black and white people but especially black people meant so much to them and it reminded me because they also showed the pictures of students at spelman college you know young black women at spelman college in atlanta that's where i taught for seven years and and and i you looked at their faces and their exaltation it was very uh very heartwarming so yes enormous good feeling about the first african-american to be president um plus it wouldn't celebrate for every african-american they're african-americans and they're african-americans right i mean if klamath thomas what to run for president of the united states would we be running out and supporting him because he's african-american no absolutely not so it's more than that it's it's part of what it means after the long heritage of slavery and segregation then is part of what obama seems to represent something new so very articulate intelligent well-read and apparently open to well that word that he uses in the campaign again and again right change well that remains to be seen that is now that he's been elected now he's president now that he's uh capable of bringing about change the question is will he or to put it another way how much change will he bring about will he will be satisfied with the minuscule changes which show some separation from the bush administration and some uh move forward but not enough to really make important changes in american policy or will he be bold uh and will he make the kind of changes which are absolutely necessary today in this country and the world that's an open question i'm frankly not heartened by the campaign itself and by the caution of obama in the course of the campaign uh not heartened by the fact that the war uh was sort of put into the background i mean we are at war wars wars are hard to put into the background but yet the war was put into the background uh and uh not given a huge amount of attention uh and why because his opponent was a a supposed war hero i say supposed war hero because i don't consider mccain a war hero he's a man who suffered torture so not a war hero a hero no that's something else he's a man who bombed uh vietnamese villages killed a lot of people and then he suffered torture which was and underwent terrible conditions as a prisoner but that war hero was something else the uh it was because mccain had this military record that that uh obama was hesitant about uh dealing with the war and dealing in general with you know with issues of foreign policy in a way that he might be afraid would portray him as not strong enough like a person who'd been in the military maybe that had something to do with it but his domestic he concentrated on domestic issues both candidates said you know health and taxes and so on and there i felt that obama uh was not bold enough his health plan was like other health plans that have been presented a little better but they they didn't really get to the heart of the of the problem you know they presented another kind of health plan and which would still involve insurance companies and still involve middle people and still not give the american people what they need which is well what some other countries have what people in other countries have and which wouldn't leave 40 million americans without health insurance the what they is called a single-payer system or what i would call health security and that is where everybody in the population can get free health care without filling out forms without co-payments without going to the you know through a whole rigmarole of bureaucracy without going through insurance companies in other words have the kind of health care that people in the military get people in the military don't have to fill out forms they have to go through insurance companies you're in the military you get sick you're taken care of you don't think about it the government pays for it i was in the military i had pneumonia i was taken care of and so why not why not for everybody well i think there are two reasons why obama maybe there are seven but i can't i can't think of more than two at a time and um most of the time i can't keep more than two things in my head at a time so when somebody gets up on the board and says i will now list the five factors well very often that same person stops after two but uh yeah i think the two reasons why obama was cautious on health cautious on taxation even though he proposed yes i'm going to tax the rich more the poor and middle class less good good direction but didn't go far enough because we need really a more drastic change in the taxation system in order to really accumulate the amount of money that is needed to pay for the kind of social programs the health and education and environmental programs you know that the country needs so he's cautious on these things and as i said there are two reasons i think one is that there are powerful economic interests that stand in the way of uh bold changes in domestic policy powerful interest connected with the health system uh insurance companies and and ceos of health systems and so on powerful interests of course arrayed against a really high progressive taxes on the wealthy after all a lot of wealthy people supported the obama campaign corporations supported sure he got a lot of and this was very democratic and very healthy a lot of grassroots small donations to his campaign but also he well in keeping with the history of the democratic party uh always gotten corporate corporations lobbyists to contribute monies so these are their powerful economic interests to stand in the way of bold economic changes and the other reason for the caution in domestic policy is that if he were really going to do what i am suggesting he obviously is not listening to me uh but if he really were to make these bold changes in domestic policy and health care and in taxation and well let's say creating jobs for millions of people which is what roosevelt did what the new deal did that was bold you don't leave it to private enterprise if people are unemployed you don't wait for money to trickle down uh so that no you people are unemployed you give them jobs of course that costs money so all these programs if they were to be boldly initiated would cost money where's that money going to come from well one yes it would come from the a truly progressive tax system in which you taxed by the way not only income not only the incomes of the super-rich but you tax the wealth of the super-rich that is the accumulated income because they've accumulated trillions of dollars as a result of a tax system which favored them year after year after year and and which led to accumulated wealth yeah tax the wealth too so you need a lot of money to pay for all these programs you get one from the truly progressive tax system and then you get it from cutting down seriously on the military expenditures of the government which this year is costing at least 600 billion dollars at least 600 billion dollars you know there's a lot of invisible military money in in the budget but at least 600 billion dollars uh yeah there's a lot of money there well what you would have to do is you would have well you'd have to go in the direction it was just reported in fact in papers where an official body in the pentagon decided that they don't need uh these weapons systems which are incredibly expensive i mean when you think about it what do you need all these aircraft carriers for uh what do you need all these new jet plane systems for you know first you build the f-16 then you build the f-23 then you build the f-35 because by this time you sold the f-16 and the f-23 to other countries so you have to build another f and then when you sell this f to them you'll build another you'll call for more money for another f you see uh fighter planes yes uh and huge sums of money expended on these things in fact i was just listening to the radio today and they just the the this is a very petty expenditure but but uh you know the some hundreds of millions of dollars to refurbish the an aircraft carrier uh the intrepid why what for it's it's very interesting about building building this enormous military what is it to defend ourselves are they really defending us defending us against what it's very interesting that uh i i was on a some radio interview a week or so ago google is not the only place that interviews me i doesn't want you to know that there's at least one other place that and uh and some there was peak call-ins and this uh person called in and because i had said something about this dismantling on military bases abroad you know because we have military bases in over 100 countries and so i talked about dismantling our military bases save a lot of money and uh among other things among other advantages she said well if you dismantle our military bases how will you protect ourselves against terrorism i said i like to quote myself uh i said uh at the time that 9 11 took place we had 10 000 nuclear weapons we had aircraft carriers all over the world we had ships on every sea and 911 happen in what way are aircraft carriers nuclear weapons and this enormous enormous panoply of military hardware in what way is that going to protect us from terrorism in fact is it possible that the possession of these weapons and the possession of these military bases in other countries is something that provokes terrorism if you look at the official report of the commission when the commissioner set up the 911 commission look into that that issue this big 600 page report which you know hardly anyone reads right but somewhere in the report i claim that i read noam chomsky undoubtedly read it read it twice no uh somewhere in there they they say just like in passing so looking at the motives of the hijackers it says well they were furious at u.s foreign policy well the us foreign policy includes having these military bases all over the world people who live in those areas actually don't like those military bases the governments may like them but the people who are like them you bother people in other countries and you will create terrorists uh you will bother millions of you illinois irritate anger infuriate millions and millions of people out of those millions of people a very tiny number will become fanatically violent irrational and terrorist and so you know my answer to this person who called obviously was no just the opposite of what you think we're not being protected by these weapons we are being endangered by these weapons well obama did not want to touch this issue of the military in fact he spoke in his campaign about increasing the size of the armed forces talked about sending more troops to afghanistan well this is not uh not something that makes me optimistic about the future of the obama administration i want to be optimistic i want to be hopeful i want the enthusiasm that accompanied his election to continue you know as he pursues you know his policies in his administration but i'm i'm troubled by that caution that lack of boldness that that traditional approach to both domestic and foreign policy during his campaign obama said something at one point about how and this was one of the he said a number of wise things in the course of his campaign really and said them so well one of the things he said was we not only have to get out of iraq we have to get away from the mindset that brought us into iraq some of you may remember that the mindset that brought us into iraq well that's very important and uh and if if obama followed his own suggestion about getting rid of the mindset that got us into iraq then he would have to re-examine that mindset which follows traditional paths in economic policy like giving 700 billion dollars to the financial institutions that showed how inefficient and corrupt they were it would have to get out of the mindset in domestic policy that has proved inadequate to solve our domestic problems and get out of the mindset that accepts war and military action as a way of solving problems in the world and this it's the second thing this this mindset about militarism and war which is crucial because if you don't if you don't do anything about that you can't solve your social and economic problems no matter how lovely your social economic uh uh sort of plans are uh you are not going to be able to pursue them in any serious way unless you reverse the policy of the united states and becoming a military superpower and you have to decide and this would be a refreshing thing for obama to do uh and say tell the american people and i believe the american people would actually accept this there's so much underestimation of the american people so let me know and uh say we're not going to be an aggressive power anymore we're not going to be a war making power uh uh we are i'm not going to follow the bush doctrine of preventive war if you know uh no uh and uh we become a a peaceful nation there are countries that won't worry about terrorism by the way aren't they they're countries that how come they don't bother anybody we bother people around the world and we create terrorists obama i think has a possibility because he's articulate he's in he's and he's got a mandate he's president he he can speak straight to the american people in a way that they will accept and uh he can even educate the american people very often you know presidents and leaders look upon public opinion as static this is where the public is period public opinion is not static public opinion is volatile public opinion changes the president has a capacity he has the platform the forum the wherewithal to change public opinion as roosevelt changed public opinion and uh so yes i think uh you could say these things to the american public and i think they would accept it and that would be yeah uh that though that would make obama's election truly a revolutionary moment in american history i'll stop there and i must have irritated somebody so i just had uh two comments one was the intrepid the 100 million or whatever they spent on that was to turn it into a museum or refurbish the museum so perhaps that's going to lead the american public to worship the military if that's the purpose of the museum but it certainly wasn't out to protect the united states the other question i had is your stance on a single-payer system where the government pays for health care when you're in the military i assume they also fed you so i've kind of got a question why should health pit care be free if food isn't free well that's a good question i think food should be free where's my life why shouldn't food be free because there's certainly lots and lots of food to go around there's no shortage of food there's no reason why food should be determined by the market there's no reason why rich people should eat better than poor people really i mean it's so basic sure i'm glad you said that so we have a question from bart locanthi in the mountain view office his question is the us mainstream media's narrative on the georgia south ossetia conflict seems finally to be changing with new evidence of georgian aggression do you find this especially coincident coincidental with the end of the campaign season oh you mean like an october surprise exactly i don't know uh who knows i don't know it's suspicious huh uh yeah no i'm uh i'm going to follow the the line you know the traditional line of people up at podiums uh no comment there are things i don't know about i don't like to admit it but there's some things i really can't answer that's one i hope we don't find another okay two specific two specific things that you mentioned you hoped the obama campaign would do were taxing the wealth of the super rich and cutting back military spending uh folksinger and uh social activist utah phillips uh has a saying never delude yourself into thinking that the rich and powerful will let you vote away their wealth and power oh do you agree with that and if so what other way do you suggest to get the wealth and power distributed differently that's interesting utah phillips do you realize you're quoting a member of the iww of the industrial workers of the world a wobbly a radical or revolutionary yes you are uh so he he's saying he's saying it's naive to think oh you can do these to hear am i blindly saying let's do this let's do that and you'd have helped say you think these forces are going to let you do that no i think the relevant verb was vote away vote oh no vote away no votes no votes alone don't change society in any significant way no it takes and this is where you go back to the iww and utah phillips it takes direct action yeah uh now the president of course has a certain certain amount of power and there are things he can do you see now you say they won't let him do it uh if you know if he and congress and uh no uh of course these interests that will be affected or lose wealth as a result of such a program will fight it very very hard they always have but they're they're times when they have to submit uh they and during the roosevelt years during the new deal years there were powerful interests that were arrayed against his policies and roosevelt just took them on at one point in his running in his second campaign for president uh he said and i think it was a speech in madison square garden he said uh the wealthy interests of this country hate me and i welcome their hatred well uh that's a very bold statement that there are limits that they will try but we're not going to take away all their money that is the super rich will still be rich you see and they will at a certain point they'll face the question of what do we do and how do we stop this and votes themselves and elections themselves had never been sufficient it has always taken citizen action it has always taken direct action it has taken strikes and boycotts and at certain points when powerful interests stand in the way of progress people have gone out on strike and people have boycotted these powerful corporations and uh and i think it is i think it is possible to move ahead and enact bold measures uh sure the if you cut down on the military industrial complex there are corporations which are getting fat military contracts uh which will do their best to lobby against it and fight against it and campaign against it but in the end if the president and congress and the american people and public opinion stand behind a policy well they will give in they have at certain points in history and uh the uh well you have to go ahead and do it and see what happens okay so we have another question from choi to many interested in ending the war the election of obama has brought hope yet waiting more than five years for the chance to end it seems extremely long have we limited ourselves too much in waiting for elections versus seeking change through public protest well of course it's if you don't have public action and public protest and you just wait for the president of the united states to stop a war you will wait a long time and we waited a long time in vietnam waited a long time for that war to end and and what was needed in the case of vietnam and what was i think a very important factor in finally bringing the war to an end was that there was enormous public protest there was a national powerful anti-war movement and it was an anti-war movement that didn't just uh have rallies in washington it was an anti-war movement which made it difficult for the carrier for the president and congress to carry on the war by that i mean that young people refused to sign up for the draft people evaded the draft rotc chapters couldn't recruit enough people so they shut down the soldiers in vietnam became less and less enthusiastic they never were but they became less and less enthusiastic about participating in a war which they couldn't understand the military became an obstacle to carrying on the war you can't carry on a war if the military doesn't go along with you i i suggest you know that there's a there's a um there's been a lot of writing maybe not enough writing about the uh dissidents in the military there's a man named david cortright who wrote a book about the uh military resistance to the war and and and he did a lot of research on it he came to conclusion this really was the key factor in leading the nixon administration to decide to finally you know sign the peace treaty and bring an end to the war so it takes yeah it takes more than elections takes more than it takes what uh utah phillips would call direct action people refusing to cooperate uh ultimately the people who have power uh find that their power rests on the consent of the people and when people withdraw that consent they lose their power this is very important for ordinary people to understand that you are you seem powerless you feel powerless they have all the uh military might and wealth on their side but the fact is their power rests upon your obedience when you start disobeying disobeying then they lose their power when when workers disobey when workers go out on strike corporations lose their power when consumers disobey when consumers have a boycott of goods the people who produce those goods lose their power when soldiers will no longer serve in a war or create turmoil in the military ranks the government cannot carry on the war well we're not yet in that position in iraq we have some iraq veterans against the war like we had vietnam veterans against the war but we do not yet have a real really powerful military anti-war movement or even a powerful enough domestic movement in the united states to say to obama now look don't wait 16 months and don't wait two years don't wait three years we should really get out of iraq as fast as ships and planes can carry us so i i really liked i was thinking about roosevelt as you were talking and then you mentioned him like three times so i completely agree that the president's your statement about the president having the responsibility to change public opinion um i i think uh roosevelt did uh with the new deal and he had a mandate from the public to do the economic changes that he did in the early 30s but he actually held off despite being in office for like uh eight years he held off getting into world war ii until after pearl harbor despite over i don't know 12 or 18 months of truly believing it was the right thing to do personally but he didn't really have public opinion behind him to do it and i'm just so i i think obama needed to get elected before he can change anything and to get elected he's got to say certain things i think the question is i have for you is how can you take get when are you given a mandate to make hard changes uh given that people only want hard changes to occur during a crisis not during a normal year and i think right now we have that economic crisis but we don't have it in in other areas right now and that's my concern about our ability to change you don't think we have a war crisis that is you we did until we had the economic crisis then that seemed i mean not enough of a war crisis i mean we don't have a pearl harbor no but it's just that we've been at war for a long time and and the american people recognize it as critical and as a crisis because the american people have turned against the war and uh and the and the war is high up on the on on people's concerns but as you pointed out we have an economic crisis and and this economic crisis is an opportunity for this mandate that you're talking about and obama i think in this economic crisis because of the economic crisis has the ability to do something bold instead of giving 700 billion dollars to the to the financial institutions obama could have said maybe can still say i don't know we're not going to do it that way we're going to we're going to give money directly to people who need it instead of the trickle-down theory give 700 billion dollars to the super rich and hope it will trickle down to people who have to pay their mortgages we're going to help the people who have to pay their mortgages instead of hoping that that 700 billion dollars will trickle down to people who are jobless now we're going to give jobs to people so the crisis is there and the american people's reaction immediately to the bailout if you notice public opinion was immediately overwhelmingly against the bailout so it's it's not you can't have an argument say well the american people won't go along with this i think because we're in this financial crisis i think the american people are ready for bold moves and ready for bold moves there and for bold moves with regard to the war um so i really liked your point about other countries not bothering anybody and therefore they don't have to fear terrorism like for instance we have to um but i would like to hear more maybe about how you would reconcile that with the idea and i think it's true that we have you know great resources and a whole lot of great minds in this country and therefore we should be helping other countries who are less fortunate and need the help so how do we reconcile the fact that we shouldn't be bothering anybody with the idea that we need to kind of be a world leader and and help others well you bother people when you have military bases and troops in their country just as the british bothered people here when they had their troops here right patrolling the streets and so on yeah that bothers me i don't think you bother people when you bring them food and medicine uh there's no i know there are people who think that if you say you want to withdraw from the military bases around the world and you want to become a peaceful nation and not wage aggressive war that people very often say oh you want us to be isolationist no no uh of course give aid to other people in fact when you when you dismantle your military budget you will then have much more to give to people who need it to to create clean water in africa i mean to you know relatively small percentages of our military budget would save the lives of millions of people in the world and so no i don't think there's any conflict between those two you know no longer a military superpower you become a humanitarian superpower so brian from this office had a question he said the mexican-american war was similar to our current iraq war in that it provided false pretenses and rhetoric he wanted to know if there are any lessons for getting out of these situations are you talking about the mexican war he's comparing the mexican war to the iraq war well well you could yes of course because in both cases there was pretense of doing something for other people we're going to civilize the mexicans uh uh how will we do it by taking half of their territory you know and uh and but we're doing it for that well all you know our all of our imperial ventures have been to help other people we went into cuba in 1898 to liberate the cubans from spain well there was some truth to that that spain was uh you know occupying cuba and we got rid of spain but we didn't get rid of ourselves we then became the the power the imperial power in cuba but the pretense was again pretense in vietnam we're going to save the vietnamese from world communism and communist aggression of course you know there are all these pretenses and same thing with iraq we're going to bring democracy to the middle east whatever uh i mean they're all cover-ups for real motives the real what are the real motives well the real motives are usually usually economic there's more land more raw materials more resources they're not only economic you know they're political there's political capital to be gained by a president who gets into a war we see this again and again president gets into a war his his ratings go up because until the war goes on for a while and then his ratings go down here but there's political capital in war and then there's there's psychological capital there's there's a certain and this is gets more vague right but it's i think it's it's real and that is that there's the psychology of empire the psychology of acquire as much as you can establish military bases wherever you can send your corporations wherever you can more more it's it's a it's not quite rational because uh you know what are you going to do with all of this and and does it do you any good and doesn't it eventually bounce back at you as empires have found it in the past and does it then lead you to the point where you collapse because you've over uh estimated what what you can do and where you can go but it's it's the same sort of psychology that that goes along with the accumulation of endless wealth because you look for a rational reason why a billionaire would want another billion uh there's there's a psychological element to imperial expansion but the economic motive is usually the key motive behind the pretense whether in iraq or in the mexican war the spanish-american war the philippines or you know vietnam the economic motive is usually crucial hi this is going to be a much lighter harder-hearted question in the film goodwill hunting matt damon references you and your work i understand he grew up or you grew up as a neighbor of yours can you tell us a little bit of the story behind how it ended up being referenced yeah this is a very important political issue uh i did tell you and uh yeah matt damon uh i have to explain this very often what's the connection why did they mention you your book in good will hunting they didn't have to really had nothing to do with the story totally thrown in arbitrarily really you know and uh well he wanted to you know do me a favor he went he had met damon and his brother and his mother his mother was a single mother taking care of two boys they were our neighbors uh for a number of years and so we've known matt since he was five years old used to come around for cookies and and then we uh when he started going to high school we went to his high school plays and so on so it yeah known him a long time and then when he went to high school his high school teacher at cambridge and latin used the people's history of the united states and he and ben affleck both were students of this teacher and so they they're the they were the screenwriters for write goodwill hunting so um when they made the movie i guess they decided that they wanted to give a little plug to the book uh as irrelevant as it was to the movie uh and that does that answer your question many european countries are moving toward a secular public sphere so religious signs are banished from schools and stuff like that while in the u.s every president uh salute the crowd blessing them and stuff like that and also religion is uh was used as justification or whatever reason behind all would happen in iraq afghanistan and so on yeah do you see a problem with these and why is why isn't u.s moving toward more secular countries secular government secular public sphere yeah that's an interesting question because here's the u.s and you you hear this all the time here in the us we believe in the separation of church and state well that's nonsense we never did never had the separation between church and state and we still don't and as you pointed out you know president's always invoking god if you've been elected why do you need god you know uh and mc you know that but really mckinley right some of you know that you know mckinley deciding whether to take the philippines tough decision turns to god he tells this to a group of visiting ministers he got down on his knees and prayed and asked god what he should do with the philippines god actually had a better mastery of geography than mckinley did because he had no idea where the philippines were and but god told him to take the philippines uh and to civilize and christianize the filipinos woodrow wilson invoked god all the time and woodrow wilson you know you would think oh he's a phd he's a rational person he's a he understands about separation of church of state no he was invoking god all all the time and then you're right all of these they all and then you know rest your hand on the bible and swear and and and god we trust and yeah god is everywhere in this supposedly separate god and state place so i mean it would be healthy if we stop doing that i mean what the right do we have to assume you know you know when we sing god bless america why us why pick on us all right god bless everybody if there's a god and if there's no god you know let everybody be happy and wither without god no it's time we grew up um and and yes became a country that didn't sort of rest on its uh favors from god yeah you quoted several you referred several times to fdr and the new deal model for a way forward from today there's a powerful strain of political thought that says all of fdr's reforms did nothing for the economic crisis and what really got us out of the depression was world war ii how do you view that that thought well that's half true almost everything that everybody says was half true right half true that is uh no they fdr's economic reforms did not end the the cr the economic cri well they let's put this way they ended the crisis but not the depression they put half of the unemployed people to work they helped a lot of people they ameliorated the worst effects of the depression but yes it was the war that created full employment the war that stimulated the the economy uh to the point you know where the economic problems that came out of depression you know were solved so even even roosevelt's measures were only you might say halfway measures he wrote you know the new deal measures helped a lot of people or other people they didn't help among the people they didn't help so much were people in the lower economic ranks you know sharecroppers not getting the benefit of the farm programs of fdr service workers not getting the benefit of the minimum wage because they were they were not covered by minimum wage laws they were not covered by social security uh and uh so there were a lot of gaps in the new deal program as far as helping people a lot of black people because they were of course disproportionately poor a lot of black people uh felt uh very critical of roosevelt because his programs were helping them somewhat but not enough to really solve their problem langston hughes uh wrote a poem uh i think you may find it in the voices book yeah look up langston hughes poem the voices book this poem that that's you know addressed to franklin roosevelt and and he's saying look we're in trouble you know there's a very poor rendition of the poem but it says something look you know hey roosevelt we you know we got problems here where are you at poem i think is called waiting for roosevelt waiting for roosevelt and uh in the documentary that we are now making based on the people's history i can't lose the opportunity to publicize i didn't think this would come up but here's a perfect opportunity for me to publicize it so take advantage of it in this documentary that we are now making based on uh people's history uh where we have actors reading important documents we have danny glover reading this poem by langston hughes and it's a really nice moment in a documentary look for it as they say on in all the commercials i'm actually curious to hear your thoughts on how you think hurricane katrina will be perceived you know 20 years down the road or something like that i know we talk a lot about the untold stories of people in history what do you think america is going to look like 20 years from now when that's discussed in the history books well my hope is you know the problem is of course that it's hard to predict what the perception will be 20 years from now because it will depend on who's doing the perceiving you know like it's you know people very often ask well how will history uh look upon what has just happened well depends on who the historian is and they'll look differently upon us so my hope is that the perception 20 years from now will be a very clear-eyed understanding that the american system was a failure that the capitalist system was a failure when it came to taking care of people that the idea of depending on private enterprise at the same time going to war which is not a private enterprise but a public enterprise that is using public enterprise for war and private enterprise uh at home uh that this was disastrous for people and it became manifest vividly when you had natural disasters which then the government was not capable of dealing with because it had left things to private enterprise and because it was engaged in war so my hope is that the perception 20 years from now will be a very intelligent perception of a country that uh was on its way down because if its dependence on militarism and war and its dependence on a failed system of what is of capitalism is that cautious enough because i'm you know i'm looking for votes well thank you professors in for uh coming to google and talking to us just on behalf of everyone here we'd like to thank you for that thank you thank you thank you

Channel: Talks at Google

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Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, howard zinn, A People's History of the United States, Voices of a People's History, howard zinn lecture, howard zinn interview, howard zinn american history

Id: lHthW6kh-N8

Length: 52min 17sec (3137 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 05 2008