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Independence Day Hypocrisy - by Stephen Lendman
All US federal holidays wreak of hypocrisy, representing notions and events other than what they commemorate. Besides Christmas, none perhaps is more celebrated than when America became independent from Britain on July 4, 1776.
Coming in the summer, parades, outings, barbecues, other celebratory events, and baseball highlight the day for many - relaxing, not reflecting on the same independence we deny nations globally, waging imperial wars and other ways to prevent it.
July 4 also commemorates America's history, liberation and traditions most people don't know, never learned, or forgot. Instead - in school to the highest levels and through media managed news - they've been force fed distortions, half truths and illusions to believe what, in fact, isn't true now and never was, a sanitized rewritten history, what historian Howard Zinn corrected in his "People's History of the United States."
First published in 1980, it became an extraordinary non-fiction best seller with over two million copies sold and counting, followed (in 2004) by "Voices of a People's History of the United States," presenting words and thoughts of labor and anti-war activists, anti-racists, feminists, socialists, and others rarely heard.
Zinn himself called his signature work "a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction - so tremblingly respectful of state and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements - that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission."
His exhaustive, informative, and gloriously original work includes material on America's Declaration of Independence and war waged for it not taught the way he did it.
In the July 2009 edition of The Progressive, he headlined an article, "Untold Truths About the American Revolution," saying:
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