Politics & Power Quote by Howard Zinn

Zinn’s line is less a lament than a warning shot: ignorance isn’t just a private deficit, it’s a public weapon. The sentence is built like a trapdoor. It starts with “people,” the broad democratic subject, then quietly introduces the real actor: “the government,” treated not as a neutral administrator but as an interested party. The hinge phrase - “doesn’t have their interests in mind” - rejects the comforting civics-class story that state and citizen naturally align. Once that story collapses, the rest follows with grim logic: a population trained to confuse authority with benevolence becomes easy to mobilize for violence.

The subtext is about manufacturing consent. War, in Zinn’s framing, isn’t primarily a sudden moral necessity; it’s a policy choice that requires emotional engineering - fear, patriotism, simplified villains - and, crucially, a baseline trust that leaders are acting “for us.” His phrasing matters: “more susceptible” implies not stupidity but vulnerability, the way an immune system weakens under constant stress. People can be decent, skeptical in daily life, and still pliable when the state wraps interests in the flag and calls it destiny.

Contextually, this sits inside Zinn’s lifelong project to re-read American history from the bottom up, where wars often appear less as heroic inevitabilities and more as bargains between elites, industries, and geopolitical ambitions paid for in ordinary lives. It’s pointedly contemporary, too: the quote could be taped to coverage of Vietnam, Iraq, or any moment when dissent is recast as disloyalty. Zinn isn’t asking you to hate government; he’s asking you to stop confusing its power with your protection.