Everytime you think that an American national holiday might have passed in peace, you find out that America's most famous faux-historian Howard Zinn showed up just in time to -- paraphrasing Hunter Thompson -- piss down everybody's throats.

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

Well, no. The great evil of the 20th century was atheistic totalitarian collectivism, of which Zinn has been a lifelong supporter. I believe the body count is now upwards of 100 million and likely to climb if the likes of Hugo Chavez get their way. The great evil of the 21st century, on the other hand, seems to be shaping up to be totalitarian theocratic collectivism.

But Zinn does not, in fact, seem particularly interested in putting up any resistance to this particular evil. In fact, he seems to regard the very idea as morally heinous.

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Apparently, the idea that fighting Japanese fascism (allied with German Nazism, a fact Zinn coveniently omits) might be a good thing was a psychotic nationalist delusion caused by the fact that

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

Zinn, incidentally, derides such an idea as "self-deception". Frankly, Zinn should be proud of himself. I've never heard the pro-fascist case put forward with more concision and eloquence. Of course, the fact that Zinn is more than a bit sanguine on the subject of fascism shouldn't be surprising. It is, after all, merely another variety of totalitarian collectivism. And considering Zinn's position on Vietnam and the eventual communist takeover, we can conclude with some certainty that he doesn't have much of a problem with mass murder either.

Given his concomitant rejection of any "proportion" to a military response to 9/11, we are therefore forced to conclude that the only things of which Zinn genuinely disapproves are "civilization, liberty, democracy" and, of course, those who use force to defend them. This shouldn't be particularly surprising, since Zinn has been in favor of overthrowing the US constitution and instituting a totalitarian socialist state for most of his life. For those in doubt, feel free to consult the utopian final chapter of Zinn's faux-history of the US.

Being a native of Boston, I've heard Zinn and his acolytes regurgitate this rhetoric for as long as I can remember. It appears that the American republic, however, remains unharmed by treasonous wankerism spouted by doddering old communists playing at senility and sedition simultaneously. Its nice to see that some things don't change.