Friday, January 29, 2010

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

We've just lost Howard Zinn.

Listen to his words here.

Howard Zinn wrote in the Foreword of Noam Chomsky's American Power and the New Mandarins:

"When the Reagan administration declared a blockade of the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua, five hundred of us occupied the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in downtown Boston, and were arrested. Noam and I, and all the others, were charged under an ancient Massachusetts statute: 'Failure to quit the premises.' That charge―'failure to quit'―could well describe Noam and indeed the whole protest movement in this country."

Then it became the title of one of Howard's books, Failure to Quit: reflections of an optimistic historian.