 August 2005
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Sara Burke, Jaime Lederer Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Editorial material in Peacework is published under a Creative Commons Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
An Instinct for the Historical Moment You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, A film by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller (2004). Released for home distribution, May 2005 (DVD). Reviewed by high school history teacher Peter Gow. The release of the DVD edition of Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004) turns this inspiring documentary on the life and work of Howard Zinn from an art house treat into an educational resource. The story of Zinn's career as a teacher, an historian and, well, an agitator, reminds us that the spirit of the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam-era protest resides among us in the righteous example and commitment of warriors for peace like Zinn. Early in the film Marian Wright Edelman, one of Zinn's former students, riffs on the inspirational quality of his "capacity for moral outrage," and it is the explication of Zinn's sustained and intelligent fury that turns a rather conventionally produced biographical documentary into a film with its own powerful political and social message. Zinn began working as a shipbuilder, but he quickly fell into labor organizing. He might have spent his life in the yards, perhaps rising to shop steward, had not World War II propelled him into the cockpit of a bomber over France, where he took part in an early napalm drop on German soldiers (and French civilians) in the waning days of the war. The experience, combined with surviving a beating during a New York City labor protest, pushed Zinn to begin questioning the values and mythology that had led his generation to war. The rest, as they say, is A People's History of the United States. Zinn's writing and political activism have always focused on the underdog, questioning the actions and exploring the interests of the powerful. Like a left-wing Forrest Gump, Zinn has been present at every turning point in the history of American protest for half a century; the newsreel footage that comprises much of You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train testifies to both Zinn's instincts for The Moment and his centrality to The Movement. Famously fired from a teaching job at Spelman College in 1963 (and famously invited back to give this year's commencement address, the text of which has been touring the internet as "Read this!!" email), Zinn understood from the beginning that the Civil Rights movement was about poor people, white people, and power every bit as much as it was about the oppression of Southern Blacks. When the growing antiwar movement of the Sixties was still struggling to define precisely what was wrong about Vietnam, Zinn brought clarity with the simple message that the war was just that: wrong. It was wrong that people were fighting, wrong that people were dying, and wrong that people were paying for it. The appearance of A People's History of the United States in 1980 (and its more recent companion reader, Voices of A People's History of the United States, written with Anthony Arnove) marked a watershed in the popular meaning and use of history. The appearance in one highly readable text of "the other side" of the historical record -- forgotten events in the class war, the points of view of the oppressed and conquered, an analysis of the role of economic interest in "the rise of America" -- spelled the end of the one-sided, triumphalist narrative of American history. Zinn showed historians as well as curious readers that the standard narrative was tragically flawed -- incomplete at best and dishonest at worst. That teachers and leaders had been telling lies was no longer a secret, and some schools even began supplementing or replacing their US history texts with Zinn's. The gift that Howard Zinn has given to several generations now is to have removed the veil of secrecy from acts of injustice and from the base motivations and prejudices that have been embodied in the interests of American ruling classes. The notes he sounds in footage from the 1960s are as perfectly on key as his critique of the current war in Iraq. You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train continues that gift by offering, in one package, the biography of one of the last living heroes of the Depression-era labor movement, a history of American political protest in the last sixty years, and the story behind the creation of a number of important works of history. Inter-cut with the history are talking-head vignettes, excerpts from Zinn's speeches, and interviews with the man himself that will help members of subsequent generations discover and refine their own values in the struggle against war and injustice. That we can now watch the film over and over, and that the DVD release contains even more material, makes it likely that You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train will join A People's History as a resource that educators and activists will constantly pull off the shelf to inform and energize a new generation to act against intolerance, oppression, injustice, and violence.
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