Can We Handle the Truth? Howard Zinn
I was recently invited to participate in a symposium on the Boston Massacre. I said I would speak, but only if I could also speak about other massacres in American history.
The Boston Massacre, which took place on March 5, 1770, when British troops killed five colonists, is a much-remembered--indeed, overremembered--event. Even the word massacre is a bit of an exaggeration; Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary says the word denotes 'wholesale slaughter.'
Still, there is no denying the ugliness of a militia firing into a crowd, using as its rationale the traditional claim of trigger-happy police--that the crowd was 'unruly' (as it undoubtedly was). John Adams, who was a defense lawyer for the nine accused British soldiers and secured acquittals for seven of them, described the crowd as 'a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattos, Irish teagues, and outlandish jack tarrs.'
Adams could hardly have expressed more clearly the fact that the race and class of the victims made their lives less precious. This was one of many instances in which the Founding Fathers registered their desire to keep revolutionary fervor under the control of the more prosperous classes.
Read more: http://www.utne.com/2007-09-01/Politics/CanWeHandletheTruth.aspx#ixzz2EqVqZT2t
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Somehow, we are so exceptional that the reality and analysis of class uniquely doesn't arise or apply here. That is because, as I found out over the course of three years in various course and seminars with Prof. Zinn, in American politics, the media, and in academia -- places where elsewhere in the world this subject would constantly be haggled out in public -- we are either under a regime of totalitarian self-censorship or successfully segregated safely away from wider public notice and comment. "Serious people" just don't speak about class in America, not outside carefully controlled forums, anyway, so it doesn't exist.
What gets said on these subjects in paneled committee rooms and graduate seminars never, ever gets covered in the corporate media. That is because news and information in America are products, privately owned and tightly controlled by corporations who have a virtual monopoly on the means of mass dissemination of ideas. That reality has only changed at the margins from what it was in the '80s with the coming of the Internet.
The United States in this sense is the least free of all the western societies, and for more than 75 years Americans have paid an increasingly steep price for that in the poverty of our politics and the inequalities of American society
