One of the problems I have is a lack of brevity – I tend to overcomplicate and overanalyze. Howard Zinn, on the other hand, does not.
Q: What should the world know about the United States?
HZ: What I find many people in the rest of the world don’t know is that there is an opposition in the United States.
Zinn says “corruption” of the US
system enabled Bush to win office [EPA]Very often, people in the rest of the world think that Bush is popular, they think ‘oh, he was elected twice’, they don’t understand the corruption of the American political system which enabled Bush to win twice.They don’t understand the basic undemocratic nature of the American political system in which all power is concentrated within two parties which are not very far from one another and people cannot easily tell the difference.
So I think we are in a situation where we are going to need some very fundamental changes in American society if the American people are going to be finally satisfied with the kind of society we have.
Seeing the U.S. through the eyes of the rest of the world is important, since the rest of the world isn’t too happy with U.S. policy at the moment. We’ve been jabbing everyone else with pointy sticks for far too long.
I wish I could summarize this well:
The power and influence of the United States has declined rapidly since the war in Iraq because American power, as it has been exercised in the world historically, has been exposed more to the rest of the world in this situation and in other situations.
So the US influence is declining, its power is declining.
However strong a military machine it is, power does not ultimately depend on a military machine. So power is declining.
Ultimately power rests on the moral legitimacy of a system and the United States has been losing moral legitimacy.
I’d never heard of Howard Zinn till I read this al-Jazeera article. Good stuff. We need more thinkers like this guy to present points of view that are clearly legitimate and are currently being mostly ignored. Two parties which are not very far from one another – the base problem in our country right now. Thanks for that summary Mr. Zinn.