Ronald Rodash reviews Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn in Howard Zinn: Fake Historian over at the Law&Liberety blog. Writes Rodash:
Zinn tries to blame organized labor strikes right before and during WW II on labor militancy that could not be contained. Grabar first shows these strikes were limited and of brief duration. She discusses the June 1941 strike of workers at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California and notes that the CPUSA-led union kept other non-strikers from going to work, using threats and actual beatings by union thugs to maintain the strike. President Roosevelt’s decision to send in 2,500 soldiers to restore order and open the factory was greeted with cheers by most of the workers, who wanted the strike ended so that they could return to work. Grabar does not mention that the strike was ordered by the Central Committee of the American Communist Party on Moscow’s orders. Because it took place during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin wanted to harm war production in the United States. It was not militancy by locals that caused this famous strike, but an order from the Kremlin. For years, pro-Communist writers and historians have blamed the Cold War on America’s desire to dominate Europe and avoid détente with a peaceful Soviet Union. Zinn, Grabar shows, ignored the very real threat the Soviet Union posed to Western Europe, rooted in Stalin’s desire to dominate it as he did the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe. Zinn was, Grabar aptly puts it, “a propagandist for the Soviet Union’s ‘peaceful intentions.’”
Now available on Amazon: Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn