Реферат: A Review Of A Peoples History Of

However, on the genocidal religious practices of Native Americans and on the African

elements of the international black slave trade, Zinn is virtually silent. That silence is a

crime of sorts. It is a crime because it distorts the truth rather than advances it and justice

cannot be had by any means other than the truth. If Zinn wants justice he needs to face

the truth and to face it he has to be willing to look for it. In my opinion he has attempted

nothing of the sort in this book.

Zinn’s interpretation of the motivations of the founders with respect to the

Constitution and the Bill of Rights are inaccurate. For example, if you knew nothing

about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Zinn would have you believe that they were

merely the results of a clever ploy by the rich landowners. To ?buy? enough support from

the middle class to assure continuation of the system that kept the rich, wealthy. You

would not know that these documents and the ideas they reflect have been profoundly

important not only in the United States, but also throughout the world.

In my opinion his history of the Cold War is wrong as well. In reading about the

Cold War, one would emerge from Zinn’s account believing that the U.S. government

had driven the arms race throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In his view the Soviets, it

seems, had no role in all of this. Zinn fails to mention that after the end of the Cold War,

what emerged from Soviet and then Russian sources strongly corroborated most of the

United States views on the Cold War. The Soviet missiles were real; they?re potential to

conquer Europe with their massive army was real as well. They?re military expenditures

were, in fact, much higher in terms of the burden they placed on the Soviet economy,

then we realized.

In discussing the Rosenbergs, Zinn leaves the reader with the impression that they

were framed. He conveniently fails to mention the substantial literature of the last fifteen

years, nearly all of which tends to confirm that they were guilty as charged.

His treatise on Vietnam begins with a false contention. On page 460, Zinn opens

his chapter on the Vietnam War with this paragraph:

?From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the

history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything