In the "new" "enlightened" approach to history, you don't study historical events in order to learn the consequences and results of certain kinds of decisions and policies. History is a source of lessons, but you don't study history and derive lessons from past events. The lesson comes first. The conclusion is already known. You study history to find justifications for that lesson, but you already know the lesson is right before you begin that study.
If history doesn't actually give you the justification you require, then you modify it as needed so that it does. That may mean you ignore some of it and emphasize other parts, or it may require you to rewrite it so that it happens the way it should have happened. This is a fundamentally teleological approach to history, in which the esthetic beauty of a conclusion, and the fact that we strongly want it to be true, are more important than whether it is empirically correct. If not, then the universe must change, because the mind and the concept are the most fundamental realities of all.
And this is all before SDB ultimately refers, at the very end of the post, to Zinn's writing as "rubbish" and jokes that the act of reading Zinn may be harmful to the brain. Which may certainly be true, if Zinn really is in the habit of ignoring facts and making stuff up when he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Only except that in the paragraph immediately preceding the quote above, SDB says this:
I have not read Zinn's history and have little interest in doing so, but from what I've heard I've come to the conclusion that it bears only a slight resemblance to history as it actually happened.
I wonder if Howard Zinn has ever pontificated at length about a book he hasn't read, basing his pronouncements instead on "from what I've heard"? Having never read Zinn myself, I wouldn't know.
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