The power of tyranny is overestimated (not in the short run, but in the long run)…and can be overcome by the unity, the determination, of apparently powerless people. Howard Zinn epigraph to The People's Historian by Dave Zirin
Their cruelties, in their minds, constitute a moral good. But that’s the macho posturing of
nerfy, weak men with uncallused hands and a great deal of unresolved anger. The truth is
that they were shaken to their bones by the 2020 protests and this is the brutish, reactionary
response. They lock away the works of Zinn not because they loathe the historian but
because they fear the history. The irony, however, does burn. What Trump and his cabinet
of reality-show contestants, pro-wrestling executives, and fascist-fanfic authors are
showing in practice is that they actually share a very fundamental belief with Howard
Zinn: that history from the point of view of social movements holds the potential to
empower the powerless. That’s why Zinn worked to popularize this kind of history and
that’s why they aim to erase it. They fear something Zinn wrote decades ago: “Our
country is full of heroic people who are not Presidents or military leaders or Wall
Street wizards, but who are doing something to keep alive the spirit of resistance to
injustice and war…. To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to
remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look around us for the
unnoticed heroes of the present.” They oppose this because their algorithms aimed at
fostering alienation and gloom are essential to making a populace feel defeated. ibid p10
A [person]’s spirit can be marked most clearly in its passage from the reform to the revolutionary impulse at the moment when [they] decide that their enemy will no longer write [their] history. Murray Kempton ibid epigraph
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