Germany showed the way

When I reached Dr Rainer Schwertz, in Heidelberg, he expressed something that has been in short supply from nearly everyone in the UK: honest hope that the Covid-19 crisis may be under control. “For four weeks here we have had more recoveries from Covid-19 than new cases,” he told me. Schwertz is head of the public health department in the Rhein-Neckar district of Germany, a local administrative region of over 600,000 people, which includes the city of Heidelberg. Germany has been lauded for its response to the coronavirus crisis, moving quickly with an aggressive track-and-trace strategy that appears to have stalled the outbreak and prevented it from overwhelming the health system—as I write, Germany’s death rate, adjusted for population, is less than a quarter that of the UK.

The response that Schwertz and his deputy, Dr Andreas Welker, outlined to me is surely a big reason why. For them, the crisis began in earnest on 27th February, the moment the first confirmed case was reported in a local hospital—a person who had just returned from a skiing holiday in Italy. “We realised people are coming back from Carnival vacation, and there would be more cases,” said Welker. “The numbers were not bad yet, even to the first week of March, but we saw what was happening in China, in Europe, and we took a leap of faith to scale up,” added Schwertz.

Starting the next day, the public health authority restructured all its departments towards crisis response—staff that usually worked on dentistry or children’s health were moved to public information call centres or processing testing data. “At first we asked the University of Heidelberg for some medical students to help out—initially there were 11, a week later there were 120,” said Schwertz. The local government seconded 100 staff to public health and opened the coffers for “whatever we needed,” he explained. And indeed, Stefan Dallinger, the district administrator of the Rhein-Neckar region told me: “In the beginning I didn’t know what an FFP2 mask was, but the doctors know best and my job is to back them up, give them the budget to do everything.”

From the beginning, the plan was clear. Widespread testing had been recommended by the Robert Koch Institute, the national body in charge of infectious disease response, and the state government was recommending the same. The strategy was to test anyone who had symptoms, and track down all the people they had contact with to isolate them as well, snuffing out potential spreaders and keeping pressure off the hospitals and ICU bays. The University Hospital laboratories switched their research personnel and equipment to coronavirus testing. The call centre that the health authority set up fielded 2,000 calls a day, directing residents to hospital testing centres and then, when they began to worry about spreading within the hospital, to three remote testing stations set up a few weeks later.

The ability to test made the outbreak visible and allowed precise responses. The doctors began a “corona-taxi” service—medics in local authority cars checking up on asymptomatic people who had shown up as infected at home, keeping them away from hospital. They built a separate facility to house Covid-19-positive care home residents, shielding other residents from them, while also keeping them out of ICU until necessary. None of this could have been done without widespread testing of suspected cases.

Things weren’t perfect. “The labs we used couldn’t always get the reagents. We never knew if one week later we would have to stop testing,” said Welker. But disaster never struck. Schwertz and Welker said they were lucky. Unless you take the view that Germany has made its own luck, it must have been allotted quite a bit of it. Although states and regions have significant autonomy to direct their own response, it has been uniformly good across the country, even if not quite as good as Rhein-Necker. As of 27th April, the district had only 35 coronavirus deaths, about 10 deaths fewer than would be expected given Germany’s national average rate. By comparison, the same population mapped onto the UK could expect over 200 deaths.

Germany and the UK logged their first coronavirus cases within two days of each other—27th January in Bavaria and 29th January in York—but since then have taken different paths. We have all become obsessive graph watchers, and over the past eight weeks, while Germany has been a strong performer on virtually all the metrics, we have lagged behind—fewer tests, fewer hospital beds, tardier treatments—as we rapidly climb the most watched and indisputably telling measure of all, total deaths. It has become common knowledge that they have succeeded, even as we struggle to admit we have failed. When a Department of Health source told the Sunday Times: “We could have been Germany,” the message was all too clear.

And Britain only needed to open its ears to know that testing would make all the difference. In the week of 16th March, when WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus admonished nations to “test, test, test,” the Koch Institute—Germany’s government agency directing the coronavirus response—reported that more than 170 labs across the country were already doing a combined total of over 15,000 tests a day and that 400,000 had been completed since February. The UK at that time had not even reached a cumulative 40,000. By the end of that month, when Matt Hancock tweeted the UK had finally reached 10,000 tests a day, German media were reporting that a single lab in Cologne, DR Wisplinghoff, was on its own managing 5,000 tests every 24 hours.

Theories abound as to what might have made this difference. The more decentralised German health system, with more market competition and private laboratories? The greater institutional strength of German political leadership? Their biotech and mighty chemical industries underwriting their regime while ours were struggling to buy lab supplies? Or even their national character—competent, meticulous, upbeat—being somehow better suited to the crisis? None of this is quite right. Their success is complex in its details, but simple in precis: at every level they were co-ordinated, flexible and prepared. They knew what their healthcare system could do, and they worked within it. Our leaders, by contrast, sometimes appear to be describing the powers of a system that doesn’t exist.

“Germany’s success is complex in its details, but simple in precis—it was co-ordinated, flexible and prepared”
One particular advantage was clear: if you want to test a lot of people for coronavirus, it helps to invent the test first. A team at Berlin’s Charité Hospital developed a test for Sars-CoV-2 in mid-January. It shouldn’t have taken that long for others to catch up—the protocol was, after all, made publicly available by the WHO on 17th January. But despite the German test being available, the British government opted for some reason to develop its own in-house test, which came into use more than three weeks later on 10th February. A British medical virologist who didn’t want to be named told me they didn’t believe an in-house test was necessary. This tendency to turn inwards, away from obvious solutions, would come to characterise the British response.

The wisdom of rapid testing isn’t arcane or complicated. “The larger the number of undetected infected people, the faster the spread,” Koch Institute head Lothar Wieler explained at a late March press conference. If you can identify who has the virus, you can isolate them, and then move on to test everyone they may have infected as well. Do this fast enough and you break the exponential spread of infection. The WHO calls “test and trace” the “backbone” of Covid-19 response.

And yet despite this, the UK government admitted to abandoning this standard strategy sometime in mid-March. Yvonne Doyle, medical director of Public Health England (PHE), told the House of Commons Health and Social Care committee on 26th March that test and trace had recently been stopped. The same week, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jenny Harries told reporters testing and tracing in the general population was not an “appropriate intervention” at the time, and suggested that the WHO’s advice was only for “low- and middle-income countries.” The government has since scrambled to scale up testing, and Hancock announced in late April that large-scale contact tracing would
be resumed.

The structural differences between the German and British government and health systems are immense, and in some respects the early lead Germany jumped out to in testing appeared to be a product of these differences. Responsibility is highly devolved—below central government there is a strong state government, and below that more than 400 districts with public health responsibilities that can extend to running hospitals. Each level is granted a high degree of autonomy, leading to rapid, ad-hoc solutions like those seen in Rhein-Neckar. “Because we’re so decentralised people look for solutions in their own area. They don’t depend on direct orders,” explains Dr Peter Tinnemann, a public health researcher at Charité Berlin.

Anyone that wanted to scale up testing early was allowed to go to private labs—approved by the Koch Institute—or cobble together their own solutions. “We saw what was coming and made the decision regionally. Everybody had a PCR machine [required for testing] in the basement, we put those into service. Our transfusion service had a machine and we got it working round the clock,” said Matthias Orth, head of laboratory medicine at Marienhospital Stuttgart and a board member of the German Association of Clinical Pathology, whose own hospital began expanding testing in late February.

The situation in the UK, where power is concentrated and often hoarded in central bodies, couldn’t have been more different. PHE centralised testing in eight labs that it controlled, with an initial capacity of 1,000 tests per day. This eventually expanded to hospital labs, but I spoke to doctors at several London hospitals and none of their in-house labs started testing until mid-March, three weeks after many German regions. Before that they were sending tests away to PHE, which became a bottleneck in the system.

I also spoke with several medical researchers in charge of labs with the expertise, equipment, and health and safety clearance to provide testing, who contacted PHE to offer their services in March, but were either ignored or rebuffed. “A good lab could do 1,000-2,000 tests a day. We could easily have 50 of those labs doing 50,000-100,000 tests a day. We were offering the facilities but it wasn’t on the cards at the time,” explained Alan McNally, of the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Microbiology and Infection.

But a decentralised health service isn’t the only answer: in the wrong circumstances, it would be no answer at all. Hundreds of autonomous actors could lead to chaos instead of coordination. While many of the local officials and doctors I spoke to were confident about acting independently, Maike Voss, a public health researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, which advises parliament, said she spoke with local authorities who were “helpless in the beginning,” and looked to the central government for support. Advice and support are important.

The Koch Institute provides guidance for all levels of government below it, which isn’t enforceable, but is traditionally followed. “It would be very difficult not to follow the guidance, you’d need a very good explanation,” said Tinnemann. “Some local regions realised very early. But when the federal level started taking it seriously it filtered down quickly. Everyone got into gear.” Jens Spahn, health minister, pushed to declare the outbreak a pandemic on 4th March, more than a week before the WHO.

And the central government has stepped in when the local authorities have been unable to cope, for example sourcing the chemical reagents needed for testing. “Everyone was doing their own procurement but many were overwhelmed. The local government often stepped in to buy in bulk. It then moved towards the national level,” said Voss. A representative for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia says the state Health Ministry has directly negotiated bulk purchases of over 1.1m test kits which it has distributed in the region.

This is a level of co-ordination that the UK’s political establishment and civil service has been totally unable to match—and this isn’t just about structures, but decisions. The UK’s health service is more centralised, and yet on 25th March Sharon Peacock, PHE’s National Infection Service Interim Director, told the House of Commons Science and Technology committee inquiry that it had considered allowing more distributed testing early in the crisis, following the South Korean example, and rejected it. This is despite PHE recently disbanding its own network of regional labs intended to support the NHS during an infectious disease emergency.

The UK government holds immense power to direct health policy, and yet from Boris Johnson down, ministers and senior scientific and medical advisers have delayed and equivocated explaining their strategy, sometimes leaving workers to guess at what it may be.

The countries that have addressed the crisis well don’t share many structural similarities. Germany is not much like South Korea, and neither are like Singapore. What they all did was manage to marshal energy towards the maxim of “test and trace.” Their reward was precious life for their citizens. In the UK, our civil service has been at time hubristic, convinced the centre could hold its grip on a system cut back to breaking point, our politicians have been clueless, a step late or a step off-course. The penalty, for citizens, is nearly too terrible to imagine. For those of us glued to the charts, it is etched above the grim British curves that could soon resemble the horror of the United States.

SOURCE 






UK government faces legal challenge to lockdown from businessman

The government is facing a challenge to the legality of the coronavirus lockdown by a wealthy businessman who fears it will kill more people than it saves.

Simon Dolan, whose Jota Aviation company has been delivering personal protective equipment (PPE) to the NHS, has put the health secretary on notice that he intends to issue proceedings for a judicial review, unless the government reverses some of the lockdown measures and reinstates freedom of movement.

He is taking the action, which echoes that taken by Gina Miller over Brexit, on the grounds that the lockdown was both legally defective and disproportionate in law. He is also seeking minutes of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) meetings this year, some of which involved Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings.

“Failure to do so [release the minutes] will result in an application for disclosure if proceedings have to be issued,” says the “letter before action” that has been sent to Matt Hancock.

Dolan, the author of a book called How to Make Millions Without a Degree, says he is not taking the case to throw the country into chaos, but to restore the public’s right to decide for themselves if they want to visit friends, go to work or stay indoors, according to a crowdfunding page.

He has offered to “consider not issuing proceedings if serious, alternative, less draconian suggested restrictions were imposed”.

His lawyer, Michael Gardner, said the government had been given until Thursday to reply to the letter. If it does not come back with a satisfactory answer, he will apply for an urgent court hearing in the same way Miller did when she challenged the prorogation of parliament last year.

Dolan runs his chartered airline business out of Southend in Essex and employs about 600 people across 10 companies.

He said he had no political affiliation but mounted the action because he feared the cure for coronavirus would be “worse than the disease”, with cancer referrals and chemotherapy down and as many as 18,000 extra cancer deaths predicted, according to recent research by University College London. Reports of domestic violence have risen, and police reported early signs of an increase in suicides and suicide attempts.

“The lockdown is telling us to stop living to avoid dying,” Dolan said. “To imprison people in their homes is an extremely dramatic decision to make. It is unprecedented and it would have been a brave Boris to say ‘no, we are not going to do that’, but it has gone on too long now, and we need to lift it or loosen it.

“Too many people are losing their jobs; people can’t get cancer treatment, there is suicide, domestic violence. Why are we prevaricating? It’s like the government is now keeping this going to justify their original decision, whereas what they should do is say we did this and now we are doing something different.”

His action comes as pressure to relax lockdowns extends around the globe, with the most extreme examples in the US, where gun-toting protesters entered Michigan’s state building on Thursday.

“It’s not storming the city halls with guns like in America, but British people have done their bit, made their sacrifices but life has to go on and it’s going to be really hard for years to come,” said Dolan. He said the crowdfunding drive was an attempt to test British people’s “backbone” as he was “amazed nobody else was doing something”.

SOURCE 





A rare victory for common sense in the trans debate

Liz Truss has promised to uphold single-sex spaces [as in single-sex toilets] and to protect gender non-conforming children.

The moments I want to hug a politician are rare, particularly in these times of social distancing. But Liz Truss’s announcement this week left me a bit gooey. Setting out her priorities as minister for women and equalities, Truss confirmed that the protection of single-sex spaces would be maintained. She added that adults who identify as transgender will be protected from discrimination but with ‘checks and balances’ to prevent abuse of the system. She also indicated that children who identify as trans will be protected from making ‘irreversible’ decisions about their bodies.

The response from the usual suspects has been frothing outrage. Online magazine Pink News framed the announcement as ‘an extraordinary attack on equality’. Mermaids, a charity that describes itself as supporting ‘gender-diverse children and teenagers’, opined that the moves would introduce ‘a new form of inequality into British medical practice’.

However, for those who value single-sex spaces, and those who are concerned about the medicalisation and sterilisation of gender non-conforming children, Truss’s comments were cautiously welcomed.

The Gender Recognition Act (2004) (GRA) states that those wishing to change their legal gender must undergo a two-year waiting period before a panel reviews their application. The process, which costs applicants around £140, has been described by transgender campaigners as ‘bureaucratic and humiliating’. Reform of the GRA was one of the first commitments made by Maria Miller MP in her then role as chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee in 2015. The aim was to ‘demedicalise’ and ‘streamline’ the legal process for changing gender.

Miller’s proposed reforms, which gained cross-party support, would have made changing legal gender a matter of ‘self-declaration’. In a single administrative stroke, access to female-only services such as rape-crisis centres, prisons and hospital wards could have been opened to any man who claimed to feel like a woman, no matter his motivations. In 2016, Miller said she was taken aback by what she described as an ‘extraordinary’ backlash to these proposals from those she derided as ‘purported feminists’.

As the self-identification proposals gathered steam, a grassroots resistance started to form. The online platform Mumsnet became the unlikely crucible for online radicalisation. A diverse bunch, though overwhelmingly women, came together to demand proper scrutiny. Groups, including We Need to Talk, Women’s Place UK and Standing for Women, sprang up, bringing the fight offline and into the real world. At events organised across the country, attendees faced physical violence, attacks on their livelihoods and even a bomb threat.

Assisted by high-profile journalists, politicians and celebrities, for four years, social-justice warriors attempted to prevent members of the public from assembling to discuss their rights. Even groups dedicated to protecting civil liberties, such as Amnesty International, helped to shut down debate. Only a handful of Members of Parliament, most notably David Davies, were brave enough to voice concerns. Davies said he was even threatened with police action by a fellow Conservative MP.

The reform of the GRA seemed like a done deal. A disparate collection of self-funded women’s groups was fighting against the weight of the establishment, including the LGBT charity giant Stonewall, which has an annual income of around £8.7million. It has been a Davina and Goliath battle.

After discussing the GRA online, Kellie-Jay Keen was one of those who decided to take action. She founded Standing for Women in 2018 and has since become a vocal campaigner for the rights of women and girls to single-sex spaces. She told me that while she welcomes the statement by Liz Truss, ultimately the entire act must be repealed:

‘The idea that there is a legal mechanism whereby people can lie about something as fundamental as their sex is ludicrous. That official legal documents, such as birth certificates and driving licences, can be retrospectively changed to reflect a delusion is dangerous. We need to know who is male and who is female. Just look at the Covid-19 pandemic, there is clear evidence that it affects women and men differently, irrespective of how one chooses to identify.’

In a less politically correct era, those who today are recognised as ‘trans women’ would be understood to be transvestites and fetishists. It is an uncomfortable fact that men are more violent than women – the fact that some men wear frilly pairs of pants, claim to be oppressed and use ‘she / her’ pronouns does not lessen this risk. The GRA allows for the creation of what is described by lawyers as a ‘legal fiction’, whereby sex is recorded as a marker of identity rather than of biology. This has profound implications for the collection of data, policy formation and the safety of women and girls. It is only surprising that it has taken so long for there to be any widespread questioning of this bizarre piece of legislation.

No one likes admitting that perhaps their mum was right, but many feminists of the second wave did try to warn us. In 1979, Janice Raymond predicted in The Transexual Empire that transsexual males could ‘colonise feminist identification, culture, politics and sexuality’. Forty years later, transgender model Munroe Bergdorf took to the stage as a keynote speaker at a London Women’s March. But in 2004, when the GRA was passed, second-wave feminism was as unfashionable as Birkenstocks and lumberjack shirts.

For years, popular feminism sought to distance itself from earlier grassroots women’s movements. Liberal feminist organisations have actively sided with the transgender activists to quash the resurgent radicals in their demands for a public debate on transgenderism. Almost three years ago, feminist academic Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans was pushed from her post as spokeswoman on violence against women and girls for the Women’s Equality Party, after she cautioned against the social and medical transition of children. Dr Brunskell-Evans is just one of many heretics to have been burned by mainstream ‘feminist’ organisations for deviating from the approved line.

There is some wriggle room in the wording of the statement from Liz Truss which needs further examination. As yet there is no clarification on whether ‘single sex’ spaces will be open to those who have changed their legal gender through obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate. We also do not know what ‘checks and balances’ will prevent abuse of the system and what counts as ‘irreversible’ with regard to the medication taken by children who identify as transgender. The government’s full proposals are set to be published in summer.

Should the self-identification aspect of the proposed reforms to the GRA be fully rejected, as has been indicated, there will undoubtedly be legal challenges. Whatever domestic law might decree, at an international level transgender rights have been intricately woven into the protections originally designed for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

Nonetheless, this week’s statement from Liz Truss feels like a small victory – a tiny glimmer of hope that despite the might of lobby groups and the crushing stupidity of virtue-signalling politicians, the truth will out.

SOURCE 






BOOK REVIEW OF "Debunking Howard Zinn" by Mary Grabar

Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

The most widely read historian in the United States today is Howard Zinn, whose A People’s History of the United States has sold over 2.6 million copies. Zinn’s vision of American history is creeping into curricula across the country and, Mary Grabar warns, is becoming the “dominant narrative” in many places. The narrative is relentless and blunt: the people should be ashamed of their history. The history of the powerful abusing the weak is at America’s core. America is not, as Abraham Lincoln intoned at Gettysburg, a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Rather, it was conceived in oppression, was born of oppression and has always been dedicated to oppression.

Zinn’s influence has been spurred by groups like the Zinn Education Project, which supplements his book with documentaries, role-playing activities, workshops for teachers and librarians, and dozens of spin-off volumes. There are graphic adaptations, such as Zinn for Beginners, dramatic public readings of Zinn, and a Zinn book fair. When there is pushback against the Zinnification of the educational system, such as when a state legislature considered a bill to keep Zinn’s materials out of taxpayer-funded schools, these groups mobilize. One might call it the Militant Zinndustrial Complex

The purpose of Grabar’s book is to unmask the blatant, destructive lies that pervade Howard Zinn’s history. As she convincingly summarizes, Zinn presents the United States, “the freest nation in world history, as a tyrannical, murderous, and imperialistic regime. ... He has done this by lying, distorting and misusing evidence, hijacking other historians’ work, and falsifying the facts, as we have seen again and again. The problem is not that, as Zinn liked to pretend in this own defense, he wrote a ‘people’s’ history, telling the bottom-up story of neglected and forgotten men and women. The problem is that he falsified American history” (p. 250, emphasis added).

Zinn’s book begins with “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” a chapter that spells out its point of view: “The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest ... between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people ... not to be on the side of the executioners” (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present, New York: HarperCollins, 2003, p. 10). Yet, as Grabar clearly shows, Zinn was often on the side of the executioners—such as the men running the Soviet Union.

Accordingly, Zinn paints the pre-Columbian New World in idyllic terms, even downplaying the Aztecs’ “ritual killing of thousands,” because their “cruelty ... did not erase a certain innocence” (Zinn, p. 11). A more even-handed account would include estimates of over 80,000 human sacrifices at the “consecration” of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan only three decades before Hernan Cortes destroyed this evil empire. Any fair history would not lump Christopher Columbus together with violent, ruthless conquistadors such as Cortes. Nor could an honest history draw a beeline from the Spanish conquest of Central and South America to the British settlement of North America. Yet Zinn does all these things. (The differences between Spanish and British actions in the Americas are so stark that the initial conditions have had profound implications for the subsequent divergence between their areas of settlement that persist to this day. One influential examination is Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, “Factor Endowments: Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth among New World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States,” in Stephen Haber, ed., How Latin America Fell Behind, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. This interpretation provides evidence that the inequality of wealth, human capital and political power in Latin America arose from the ability of a small elite of Europeans to take control of areas with high population concentrations—such as the Aztec and Incan Empires or sugar-producing slave colonies. Settlement in the U.S. and Canada proceeded along much more egalitarian lines because the land was so sparsely populated and native populations couldn’t be put to work.)

After a brief summary of Zinn’s upbringing and career (which includes an episode in which he lost his job after being found in a parked car with a female student on a dead-end street far from her destination late at night), Grabar focuses on a sub-set of chapters in Zinn’s People’s History—the chapters that focus mostly on race and war. Informed readers of Zinn have always seen through his mischaracterizations, but the heart of Grabar’s accomplishment is simply to catalogue and rebut his fabrications, demonstrating their immensity. For example, Zinn’s odd statement that George Washington was the richest man in America is parenthetically noted and dismissed. Zinn’s intimation that slavery in the capitalist United States was the worst in history is rebutted with the compelling demographic fact that only a small fraction of slaves shipped to the New World came to the U.S. but over a third of the slave population in 1825 lived there. Zinn’s suggestion that Malcolm X was probably closer to the mood of the black community than those who peacefully marched on Washington, DC, is deflated when Grabar cites public opinion polls of African-Americans—one of which found that only 6 percent of blacks believed that Malcolm X was “doing the best” for black Americans (p. 194). Similarly, Zinn brushes aside the accomplishments of anti-Communist black leader A. Philip Randolph and his successful efforts to push Franklin Roosevelt to establish the Fair Employment Practices Committee to end blatant discrimination in the defense industry, saying that it changed little. Grabar refutes Zinn by citing the research of economic historian William Collins. (A few pages later, when she chides Zinn’s lack of dismay over the lives lost in the urban riots of the late 1960s, she could have invoked additional research by Collins and his co-author Robert Margo, which shows that these riots significantly depressed the median value of black-owned property.)

I regularly teach in a program designed to bring economic history research to high school teachers. A few teachers in the program have suggested that indentured servitude as practiced in colonial America was nothing but slavery in disguise. What is the source of this peculiar reading? One teacher pointed me to Howard Zinn. Zinn’s chapter “Persons of Mean and Vile Condition” demonstrates the same tactics as those highlighted by Grabar. He asserts that indentured servants leaving Europe for America were largely forced into their contracts by “lures, promises, and lies, by kidnapping ...” (Zinn, p. 43). He selectively draws on the respected work of Abbot Smith but ignores Smith’s broad conclusion that “the malodorous reputation which the servant trade has attained in most historical accounts is in part undeserved, for it springs from the testimony of persons who wished to see the business suppressed”—those people being employers in Britain who didn’t want to see their supply of workers diminish as they left for opportunities across the Atlantic (Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1947, p. 7). Zinn decries the exploitation of indentured servants, yet his chief source concluded that the servant “found himself well protected against capricious and excessive exploitation” (Smith, p. 19). Zinn denies all agency to the bold men and women who indentured themselves and cannot countenance that indentured servitude was a win-win solution to the tight constraints facing hardworking people on all sides of the bargain.

Zinn suggests that “servants were packed into ships with the same fanatic concern for profits that marked the slave ships. If the weather was bad, and the trip took too long, they ran out of food. The sloop Sea-Flower, leaving Belfast in 1741, was at sea sixteen weeks, and when it arrived in Boston, forty-six of its 106 passengers were dead of starvation” (Zinn, p. 43). With a little digging I learned that the problem with the Sea-Flower was that “death plagued the ship, including the Master of the vessel along with all the crew but one, leaving the passengers in mid-passage” adrift and unable to sail the ship (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, “A ‘Cannibal Cruise Liner’ of 18th-century Immigration”). The cause of this tragedy had nothing to do with the mistreatment of these indentured servants.

Reading other “economic” chapters in Zinn’s People’s History, one finds numerous misrepresentations and errors. In the chapter “Robber Barons and Rebels,” for example, Zinn tells us that by 1892 “free land [was] gone. The last acre of available farmland [had] now passed into private or corporate hands” (Zinn, p. 282). The facts belie this. Historical Statistics of the United States (Susan Carter et al. New York: Cambridge University Press, Vol. 3, 3-351, series Cf77) shows that the peak years for Homestead entries were between 1900 and World War I. (Technically, Zinn doesn’t directly make this error. Characteristically he cites someone else to this effect—a novel in this case—so that the mistake isn’t his per se.) Next Zinn states that “Harvesting wheat required a machine to bind the wheat ... which the farmer had to buy on credit, knowing the [money] would be twice as hard to get in a few years. ... In the South the situation was worse than anywhere—90 percent of the farmers lived on credit” (Zinn, p. 287).

These charges are downright silly. Machinery prices fell during this era and interest rates certainly didn’t double. In fact, data on the farmers’ terms of trade (crop prices versus the prices of things farmers purchased) show that they broadly improved in the late 1800s (see, for example, Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, A New Economic View of American History, second edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). Likewise, Zinn’s claim that 90 percent of Southern farmers lived on credit is completely unfounded. And then there’s the place where Zinn says that the Supreme Court refused “to break up the Standard Oil and American Tobacco monopolies” (Zinn, p. 260). Oops ... they dismantled both Standard and American Tobacco in 1911. Most importantly, the chapter fails to note the broad, strong rise in workers’ standards of living during this period—the magnet that attracted so many people to our shores.

My point is that Mary Grabar has only scratched the surface of the inaccuracies and distortions in Zinn’s book. Ideally someone would create a website pulling together all of Zinn’s mistakes. If you google “Howard Zinn mistakes” or “Howard Zinn errors,” you’ll find a lot to work with—and Grabar’s book near the top of the list. But a one-stop platform correcting Zinn’s errors would be even more useful, especially to students who are assigned Zinn’s book, perceive its cynical biases, sense that it is “fundamentally and grossly dishonest” (Grabar, p. xiii), and notice that it is packed with inaccuracies but who don’t have the time or energy to sift through all its fabrications. If such a platform existed, students would quickly find it and widely quote it, forever challenging the infiltration of Zinn’s People’s History into the American educational system and stemming the Zinn tide. In its absence, Grabar’s book is the readers’ best defense against Zinn and his minions.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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