David Swindle offers a concise description:
“The People Speak” is a documentary inspired by Marxist historian Howard Zinn’s notorious A People’s History of the United States. It features Hollywood celebrities and musicians performing historical readings drawn from Zinn’s works. The purpose? To publicize Zinn’s book and its fairly simple message: America is an exploitative, evil force and has been since before it was founded.
See also, Michelle Malkin, "Hollywood & Howard Zinn’s Marxist Education Project":
The two most important questions for society, according to the Greek philosopher Plato, are these: What will we teach our children? And who will teach them? Left-wing celebrities have teamed up with one of America’s most radical historians to take control of the classroom in the name of “social justice.” Parents, beware: This Hollywood-backed Marxist education project may be coming to a school near you.Checking the links, we see, "WAR, TERRORISM AND OUR CLASSROOMS: Teaching in the Aftermath of the September 11th Tragedy":
On Sunday, December 13, the History Channel will air “The People Speak” – a documentary based on Marxist academic Howard Zinn’s capitalism-bashing, America-dissing, grievance-mongering history textbook, “A People’s History of the United States.” The film was co-produced/written/bankrolled by Zinn’s Boston neighbor and mentee Matt Damon. An all-star cast of Bush-bashing liberals including Danny Glover, Josh Brolin, Bruce Springsteen, Marisa Tomei, and Eddie Vedder, will appear. Zinn’s work is a self-proclaimed “biased account” of American history that rails against white oppressors, the free market, and the military.
Zinn’s objective is not to impart knowledge, but to instigate “change” and nurture a political “counterforce” (an echo of fellow radical academic and Hugo Chavez admirer Bill Ayers’ proclamation of education as the “motorforce of revolution.”) Teachers are not supposed to teach facts in the school of Zinn. “There is no such thing as pure fact,” Zinn asserts. Educators are not supposed to emphasize individual academic achievement. They are supposed to “empower” student collectivism by emphasizing “the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements.” School officials are not facilitators of intellectual inquiry, but leaders of “social struggle.”
Zinn and company have launched a nationwide education project in conjunction with the documentary. “A people’s history requires a people’s pedagogy to match,” Zinn preaches. The project is a collaboration between two “social justice” activist groups, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change. Rethinking Schools recently boasted of killing a social studies textbook series in the Milwaukee school system because it “failed to teach social responsibility.” A Rethinking Schools guide on the September 11 jihadi attacks instructs teachers to “nurture student empathy” for our enemies and dissuade students from identifying as Americans. “It’s our job to reach beyond this chauvinism.” And a Rethinking Schools guide to early childhood education written by Ann Pelo disparages “a too-heavy focus on academic skills” in favor of “social justice and ecological teaching” for preschoolers.
We need to ask the deep “Why?” questions. Nothing can justify the heinous attacks of Sept. 11. But to unequivocally condemn these attacks does not relieve us of the responsibility to explain them. A photograph from a demonstration in Pakistan that Bob Peterson uses with his students (page 10) urges, “Americans, Think! Why You Are Hated All Over The World!” Several articles in this issue suggest some U.S. policies that have led to such antipathy, especially in the Middle East: U.S. support for anti-democratic regimes, and the overthrow of more democratic ones, like Iran’s Mossedegh in 1953; the tenacity of U.S. support for sanctions against Iraq that have killed hundreds of thousands of children; U.S. arming of Israel and its support of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Beyond such policies, teachers need to engage students in questioning the global economic system. Its relentless emphasis on profit continues to impoverish millions around the world, dislocating cultural patterns and making people receptive to repressive fundamentalisms of all kinds.
Readers can see why I get angry and fight the way I do. It's all of a piece, from Hollywood to academe to the White House, these folks are intent on destroying our country.
The communists love it. See Socialist Worker, "ISR guide to The People Speak."
RELATED: Daniel Flynn, at Big Hollywood, "Howard Zinn, Intellectual Moron."
SICKENING PROPAGANDA.
ReplyDeleteTHE LEFT ABSOLUTELY DOMINATES H-WOOD.
THEE ARE ALMOST NO PATRIOTS LEFT THERE.
AVATAR WILL BOMB BECAUSE OF H-WOOD'S AND THE FILM'S LEFTIST PROPAGANDA.
IT WILL DESERVE TO.
My daughters used to refer to it as the Hitler Channel, because it seemed like everything on the Histroy Channel was World War II. They've broadened their programming somewhat, including shows about how Zeus became King of the Gods after his mother Rhea tricked his father Cronus, to where Cronus didn't swallow his infant son alive, and Zeus grew up and defeated his father.
ReplyDeleteIt all sounded so real!