“How,” inquires a reader, “can ‘A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present’ by Howard Zinn be such a lousy textbook when it’s No. 7 in popularity at the University of Washington, and a course at The Evergreen State College requires that ‘all students should have read it before the first day of class to give us a common background to begin the class’?”

Well, if Daniel J. Flynn, executive director of Accuracy in Academia is to be believed, and I choose to believe him, many of the copies of this book which sells 128,000 copies a year 20 years after its publication, many of those copies are assigned readings for courses in colleges and high schools taught by leftist disciples of their radical mentor.

It’s surely no secret that two of the most radical groups in America are journalism and academia.

I wrote about the Zinn book last month when a neighbor told me he and five other families had pulled their kids out of an American history class at Bainbridge High School and enrolled them with a private tutor because of the anti-Americanism that permeates this textbook.

Flynn called it “cheap Marxist propaganda.”

Bainbridge school officials I spoke with said they had received no complaints about it and a committee of teachers and parents reviews all reading material used in class. Those officials, the superintendent of schools and the curriculum director, admitted they had not read the book.

I didn’t have the time to read much of it either although I read the chapter on wars in all of which Zinn made America the aggressor, suggesting that we, not Japan, were to blame for Pearl Harbor by provoking the Empire of the Sun and forcing it to attack us. Also, that we didn’t have to drop the atom bomb. If we had not insisted on unconditional surrender and agreed to accept the condition that the emperor would remain in place, the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.

We dropped the bomb because we’d invested too much money in its creation not to use it.

That aroused Dr. John Stanley of Bremerton to write me this letter:

“You said he suggests that we did not have to drop the atom bomb. Of course, that is true, but we were told that if we invaded Japan we could expect up to one million casualties. The Japanese were training their civilians, including children to use any means available to fight Americans, just as they trained suicide pilots.

“I was on an amphibious assault ship. After landing in Borneo, our flotilla was sent back to the Long Beach shipyard to be converted into rocket ships. We were in Hawaii when the first bomb was dropped and halfway to California when the second was dropped. We were still planning for invasion at that time.

“I have no doubt that dialogue with Japan was going on but we were told the military controlled the government including the emperor. If Mr. Zinn writes as an opinion, I guess it is OK, but that should not be in the body of a text.”

There were letters in support of the book including one from Tom Walden of Port Townsend who calls Zinn his hero for presenting the un-sugar coated truth instead of the “fairy tales” I seem to prefer.

Zinn’s book, he said, takes a look at history “from the perspective of the downtrodden and poor working class people who did the work of building this country, with the thought they could have a decent life for themselves and their families. Liberal to me means caring about others rather than helping the 1-percenters own the world. I am proud to be a liberal.”

Sorry, but I agree with my neighbor and the others who don’t want their children exposed to this kind of anti-American propaganda. We talk here about how to end the teaching of Muslim children to hate and distrust America. We should take a closer look at what our own children are being forced to accept as historical fact.

Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA 98340.