Politics & Power Quote by Howard Zinn

The sting in Zinn's line is the contrast between civic self-image and civic record: a nation that schools its citizens in benevolence while repeatedly acting out something harsher. As a historian of power, Zinn isn’t merely accusing the U.S. of hypocrisy; he’s pointing to the machinery that makes the hypocrisy feel like common sense. “Have been taught” matters as much as “uncivilized.” It suggests civility isn’t a natural national trait but a curriculum, a story delivered through textbooks, speeches, movies, and commemorations that trains people to experience American force as reluctant, exceptional, even moral.

The intent is diagnostic. Zinn targets the gap between ideology and policy because that gap is where consent lives. If citizens inherit “civilized and humane” as default settings, then war, coups, segregation, or economic coercion can be filed away as aberrations, necessary evils, or somebody else’s fault. The subtext is that innocence is political: it keeps accountability diffuse and makes dissent sound like betrayal rather than civic due diligence.

Contextually, this sits squarely in Zinn’s lifelong project, from A People’s History to his activism against the Vietnam War: history as a tool for demystifying empire and domestic hierarchy. His diction is blunt, even prosecutorial, because he’s contesting a dominant national myth that is itself polished and euphemistic. The line works by refusing that euphemism. “Too often” concedes complexity, then tightens the moral ledger anyway: patterns, not isolated scandals, are on trial.