Neo-Marxist Strategy to Destroy America by Rewriting American History

Admitted Anarchist and Socialist Howard Zinn Publishes A People's History of the United States in 1980

This Substack article is an excerpt from my book The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation.

Stephen Coughlin and Richard Higgins are two former intelligence officers who understand we are in an ideological war with the neo-Marxist Left. Experienced in military counterinsurgency tactics, Coughlin and Higgins apply a political warfare analysis “to reframe the political environment in order to provide timely anticipatory situation awareness in support of decision-making” in a last-ditch attempt to preserve this country as a beacon of freedom for ourselves and all peoples of the world. Let’s expand the quotation from Coughlin and Higgins’s remarkable 2019 book Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left. The full excerpt reads as follows:

National policy has come under the influence of constructed narratives that mainstream and conservative leaders neither understand nor control. Lacking situational awareness to recognize the operational nature of information campaigns directed against national policy, responses tend to be tactically limited and predictably reactive along scripted action-reaction cycles built into the operational sequencing of information campaigns controlled by the Left. These powerful but misunderstood narratives drive policy. At their core, these narratives are not American. Rather, they are dialectically driven Neo-Marxist memes that infuse mass line efforts operating at the cultural level intent on powering down into the political space. This furthers the Left’s political warfare effort to impose conformance resulting in the non-enforcement of laws by those tasked with their oversight and enforcement. As these narratives transition into prevailing cultural memes, non-enforcement becomes institutionalized and enforced by an opposition that increasingly comes under the control of those narratives.¹

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One of the key strategies in the neo-Marxist campaign to destroy the United States is to rewrite American history. The neo-Marxist goal is to change the cultural understanding of our founding principles. Traditionally, American history has been taught from the perspective that our Founding Fathers created a form of limited government, a republic, not a democracy. Principles such as separation of powers—i.e., the division of ruling authority between coequal executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government—aimed to prevent the emergence of a dictatorship. Finally, as the Declaration of Independence articulated, preserving God-bestowed individual rights and liberties was the central purpose of the new government the Constitutional Convention created in 1787. The neo-Marxist rewrite portrays our Founding Fathers not as defenders of freedom but as racists who devised a system of white privilege that institutionalized slavery. Neo-Marxists condemn the United States beyond redemption based on the argument that our Founding Fathers were determined to create a system of government that bestowed God-endowed individual rights only to white men owning property.

President Lincoln’s 1862 message to Congress expressed the urgency the Civil War had created to remedy the fundamental flaw in the nation’s creation that the Constitutional Convention had failed to fix. In that message, Lincoln said: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”² Lincoln fought the Civil War not to free the slaves but to preserve the Union, renouncing the legitimacy of the states’ rights argument used by the Southern states to justify succession. But by January 1, 1863, the date he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln knew that freeing the slaves had become an unavoidable issue that the Civil War had to resolve if the nation, as articulated by the Declaration of Independence, was to survive.

On January 31, 1865, the U.S. Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment when the House of Representatives, in a second vote, narrowly passed the measure that abolished slavery approximately two months before General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Watching Steven Spielberg’s 2012 movie Lincoln, virtually nothing is said to clarify that Lincoln was a Republican and the opposition to the Thirteenth Amendment came mainly from Southern Democrats.

Yet, in its stubborn insistence, the neo-Marxist Left ignores Lincoln’s determination to extend the Declaration of Independence’s statement of equal rights to all Americans, including the slaves. The historian Howard Zinn, an admitted anarchist and socialist who preferred to call himself a democratic socialist,³ made this point abundantly clear in his 1980 college textbook A People’s History of the United States.⁴ “There is not a country in the world in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States,” Zinn wrote in chapter 2, “Drawing the Color Line.”⁵ Zinn argued that even Thomas Jefferson, in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, was a racist. Zinn explained as follows:

Thomas Jefferson had written a paragraph of the Declaration accusing the King of transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” This seemed to express moral indignation against slavery and the slave trade (Jefferson’s personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died). Behind it was the growing fear among Virginians and some other southerners about the growing number of black slaves in the colonies (20 percent of the total population) and the threat of slave revolts as the number of slaves increased. Jefferson’s paragraph was removed by the Continental Congress, because slaveholders themselves disagreed about the desirability of ending the slave trade. So even that gesture toward the black slave was omitted in the great manifesto of freedom of the American Revolution.⁶

Zinn begged the reader to understand that his intent is not to put “impossible moral burdens on that time [i.e., 1776]” but “to try to understand the way in which the Declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others.”⁷ In the language of today’s critical race theory, Zinn’s point is that Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal” was, in reality, a statement affirming “white male privilege.”⁸ Not willing to excuse Jefferson from a charge of racism, Zinn repeated his accusation in a subsequent chapter. In chapter 5, “A Kind of Revolution,” Zinn wrote:

Jefferson tried his best, as an enlightened, thoughtful individual might. But the structure of American society, the power of the cotton plantation, the slave trade, the politics of unity between northern and southern elites, and the long culture of race prejudice in the colonies, as well as his own weaknesses—that combination of practical need and ideological fixation—kept Jefferson a slaveowner throughout his life.⁹

Historian David Greenberg, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, wrote a highly critical 2013 analysis of Zinn’s scholarship, entitled “Agit-Prof: Howard Zinn’s Influential Mutilations of American History.” Greenberg noted that since its 1980 publication, Zinn’s textbook had sold over two million copies. He also commented that “as a faculty brat” in the 1980s, he was “enamored” with Zinn’s history, thrilled by Zinn’s “now-famous victims’-eye panorama of the American experience.”¹⁰ But Greenberg also noted that the radical Left’s debunking of American history gained widespread academic acceptance in the 1970s amid the race riots that began in the mid-1960s and the anti-war protests that intensified in the 1970s. Greenberg pointed to Jonathan Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. Wiener, in 1989, published an academic article explaining how radical history strongly influenced by Marxism became institutionalized as the norm among academic historians.¹¹ Beginning in the late-1960s, in short order, curriculums in major universities across America began featuring courses in “African American History,” “Woman’s History,” and “Hispanic History.” These courses universally described the United States as a capitalist nation with a history of racism, sexism, and antagonism to immigrants that resulted in social and economic discrimination.

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Coughlin and Higgins point out that those of us who believe in God and cherish the Constitution’s extension of equal rights to all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or sex, are losing today’s battle to preserve the nation Lincoln conceived and brought forth. Why? Because we fail to understand how the neo-Marxist Left dominates the Democratic Party today and uses techniques derived from the Hegelian dialectic to construct and drive the dominant narratives of our time: “Political correctness is the enforcement mechanism of the multicultural narrative that implements neo-Marxist objectives.”¹²

Political warfare is fought on a battlefield that does not require guns and tanks. In combating neo-Marxist political warfare, we need to understand that the radical Left’s battlefield is made of ideas, the tactics are dialectical, and the weapons are pseudoreality narratives. The revolution the radical Left is planning today does not require a foreign army attacking our shores. Today’s enemy is an enemy fighting traditional values, and the revolution is a spiritual coup d’état, a Maoist cultural insurgency directed by the neo-Marxists who now control the Democratic Party. The crux of Coughlin and Higgins’s political warfare analysis is that the radical Left in America today influences national public policy through carefully constructed neo-Marxist narratives “that mainstream and conservative leaders neither understand nor control.”¹³

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1 Coughlin and Higgins, Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left, 2. Bold type in original.

2 Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862, The American Presidency Project, Presidency.UCSB.edu, n.d., https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/second-annual-message-9.

3 “War Is the Health of the State: An Interview with Howard Zinn,” Institute for Anarchist Studies, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 7, no. 1, (Spring 2003): 1, 8–10, quotation at 10. Archived on the “Wayback Machine” by Paul Glavin and Chuck Morse at http://www.cwmorse.org/archives/perspectives.on.anarchist.theory.vol7.no1-spring2003.pdf.

4 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1942–Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1980, 20th anniversary ed., 1999).

5 Ibid., chap. 2, “Drawing the Color Line,” 23.

6 Ibid., 72.

7 Ibid., 73.

8 Ibid. Zinn explained that Jefferson’s use of the phrase “all men are created equal” was “probably not a deliberate attempt to make a statement about women.” But Zinn continued to insist that to Jefferson “women were beyond consideration as worthy for inclusion” because in 1776 women were “politically invisible.” Quotations at 73.

9 Ibid., 89.

10 David Greenberg, “Agit-Prof: Howard Zinn’s Influential Mutilations of American History,” New Republic, March 18, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/112574/howard-zinns-influential-mutilations-american-history.

11 Jonathan M. Wiener, “Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959–1980,” Journal of American History 76, no. 2 (September 1989): 399–436, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1907976.

12 Coughlin and Higgins, Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left, 3.

13 Ibid.