Howard Zinn--a remarkable activist for peace and justice, a great teacher, and a willingness to listen and learn

Here's one (of two or three) quotes I want to post, this from an introduction:

We live in an age in which the self has become the center of politics and everyday life. The formative culture, public spheres and institutions capable of challenging this privative notion of survivalism and market-driven notion of barbarism are both under siege and rapidly vanishing. The public intellectual has been replaced by the anti-public intellectual, just as the university as a democratic public sphere is now colonized by corporate and national security interests. Social movements barely speak beyond a narrow identity politics, and the questions that connect agency to pedagogy and social change have been replaced by the search for consumers and clients.

In his work, Howard Zinn criticized all of these positions, while embodying a notion of agency that exhibited a fierce moral courage and a deep propensity for engaged social action. He never faltered in his attempts to connect scholarship with politics, and he never retreated into the dystopian world of indifference or cynicism. Howard has left us a legacy of work, activism and hope that even in the darkest times offers a new language for reclaiming the link between politics and democracy, agency and critical thinking, ethics and a space of social responsibility and hope. We at Truthout are committed to his legacy, vision and mode of engaged struggle, and we are thankful for the work he left us and the humble and courageous spirit he offered as a model for all of us.