Read this piece by Michael Kazin from Dissent, which was picked up by Front Page, on the world's only rival to Noam Chomsky in mendacious anti-Americanism and pseudo-history, Howard Zinn. Mr. Zinn is the author of The People's History of the United States, a notorious conglomeration of conspiracy theory and falsehood. Kazin destroys both Mr. Zinn and his book.

I once owned a copy of said People's History. It was given to me by a good friend of mine named Jane, who used to live here in Barcelona. About Jane's only fault was a slightly hung-over '60s leftism (that and she was a packrat; she piled up amazing quantities of junk that should have been thrown away years ago as a goddamn health hazard); she'd actually been at Altamont, for example, and knew minor Beat poets and stuff like that. Anyway, she left that particular book to me when she went back to the States. I got about as far as the American Revolution before deciding that this was a complete waste of my time unless I wanted to do a seven-hundred-page Fisking. I then donated it to a charity auction some friends were having, where it went for five euros or so.

Maybe I should have burned it; it's undoubtedly gone on to poison another mind or two. It's been translated to Spanish and is a big seller over here, where it is of course taken seriously just as the ravings of Noam Chomsky and the gibberish of Susan Sontag and the pretentiousness of Paul Auster and the flat-out stupidity of Michael Moore are.