The new Frozen movie is barely disguised political propaganda. Okay, okay: I promise I can back that up.
In the movie, our hero sisters learn a dark secret: that their power-mad grandfather betrayed
the native people of their land , slaughtering their leader and stealing their wealth.
This is a well worn plot device. Indigenous innocents terrorized by greedy colonialists.
This is Hollywood attempting to say something profound about the origins of the real America.
This is fake history. Invented by this guy.
Howard Zinn. Back in 1980, Zinn was just an anonymous history
professor when he published this book: “A People’s History of the United States.”
It had the modest aim of smashing America’s self-satisfied mythology...
ZINN: "We grow up with the idea that we are special, we are different... we are the boyscouts of the world.
Well when you look at the history of this country, we were not. We were not."
Zinn wanted to flip the fairy tale about America,
to expose our heroes as bloodthirsty villains. And his top target, right there in Chapter
1, was Christopher Columbus. According to Zinn, indigenous society
was a perfectly progressive utopia.
The Arawak Indians Columbus encountered were
unspoiled by petty capitalist desires.
Columbus was a greedy thug.
Columbus was the prime mover of centuries
of relentless plunder.
Zinn invented this flipped history
of Columbus as the ultimate villain.
ZINN: "Aggression, expansion, the enslavement of other peoples... That's what Columbus represents."
But Zinn's book is not history, it's a new fairy tale.
One that strategically slices away some inconvenient complexities
For starters, Columbus did not introduce slavery to America.
One of his early journal entries records how the Arawaks “bore marks of wounds on their
bodies.” which “indicated... that people came from other islands.... and had [tried] to
capture them...” Pre-colonial America was not a perfectly peaceful
utopia. The Arawaks were in constant conflict with
nearby tribes, including the Caribs, who had a tradition of cannibalizing their enemies.
They’d chop up the hearts of particularly courageous adversaries and feed them to their
children. And a standard warfare tactic for many tribes
was disemboweling defeated enemies and tying them to a tree with their own intestines.
Every civilization is built on cruelty. These ugly facts don’t mean that Indians
were simple savages. The egalitarian parliamentary system of the
Iroquois nation may have inspired key features of the US constitution.
Now, Christopher Columbus committed about an average number of atrocities for a colonialist,
Which was a lot. But his discovery also connected the continents,
super-charging innovation in food, medicine, literature, and technology.
And the true tragedy of his discovery was entirely accidental.
As those same new trade routes enabled a cross continental germ exchange that wiped out up to
90 percent of America’s indigenous population. All of these things are true at the exact same
time. Anyone telling you some simple soap opera
story arc about unique America evil is not trying to educate you; he’s
trying to enslave you to an ideology. That’s Zinn’s mission. Ideological
enslavement. His blind enthusiasm for the grand collectivist
experiments of Stalin and Mao last century left him mute when those experiments turned
massively murderous, Zinn was an active member of the Communist Party at the height of the
cold war. Zinn’s enslavement initiative has gone remarkably
well. A People's History became a publishing phenomenon, eventually
selling 2 million copies and infiltrating primary and college curricula, reaching
million of students. And the book is a mainstay in college, featured on over 1,500 curriculums.
For many students, Zinn is the primary American history they receive.
Zinn himself becomes a pop culture icon.
And there’s a certain category of American
laborer that finds Zinn’s simple stories just irresistible
"I'm Woody Harrelson and I'm sitting here with Howard Zinn, one of my great heroes."
Hollywood just loves Zinn, with A-listers lining up to perform live readings of his work
“And Howard’s book was very helpful... you want to fight on the right side of history.”
Do you want to watch Jason Bourne, Aragorn, Whistler, and the bald kidnapper from the
princess bride read a Zinn speech calling for a Marxist revolution?
Oh, yes you do. "The wealth is distributed in this country
as not simply to require small reform, but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth."
"From when Columbus met the Arawaks, it was just nonstop bullying people and taking over their resources"
And that's how Zinn’s politics make their way to your movie screens.
So along with the singing snowman, you get some subtle propaganda, Hey kids, your cartoon
heros are unwitting agents of an evil empire built on plunder.
And you are too.