Howard Zinn on Fourth of July: Put Away the Flags
The self-deception of exceptionalism: Put away the flags
Editor: People’s historian Howard Zinn died on January 7, 2010. This piece was originally distributed by the Progressive Media Project in 2006. Though Zinn was writing during the presidency of George W. Bush, the message is certainly no less relevant today, as we observe the Fourth of July weekend throughout the land.
By Howard Zinn
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been
