The Great Refusal
#Howard_Zinn
April 01, 1983
▻https://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/howard-zinn-wini-breines-great-refusal
The obliteration of people’s movements from history is one of the fine arts of American culture.
In the case of the 1960s, where the movements gave birth to one another in tumultuous succession—black rebellion, anti-war demonstrations, women’s liberation, prison uprisings, Indian occupations of stolen land—the memory is too fresh, the consequences too much with us, for simple erasure. Rather, newspapers and television, with practices surgery, have removed from that decade its inspiring, magnificent core—its militant but non-violent protests, its communities of affection and struggle, its attempt to give American democracy the meaning that two centuries of governments have failed to do. They then present the ‘60s to us, with smiling condescension, as a wall scrawled with obscenities, behind which are nothing but drug-befuddled youngsters and violent Weatherpeople.