“Tyranny is Tyranny” by Howard Zinn

In Chapter 4 of a people’s history, “Tyranny is Tyranny” by Howard Zinn, it talks about the movement for leveling (economic equality) in the colonies. Also it talks about the causes of the American Revolution. Zinn discusses that the Founding Fathers nervous for war to disturb the societies from their individual economic troubles and discontinue popular movements, a scheme that he prerogatives the country’s leaders would resume to usage in the future. “Tyranny is tyranny let it come from whom it may,” from A People’s History of the United States. This sentence it comes from the last sentence of Chapter 4 in people’s history.  In this chapter, Zinn is saying that the American Revolution was not actually the honorable effort to create a reasonable and democratic humanity that we tend to believe it was.  Instead, he discusses, the Revolution was mainly a method of switching one elite (the British one) with alternative elite (the colonial or American one). Then the Revolution did not actually do much to variation the involvement of the working class and the poor. In this chapter, Zinn discusses that actually the Founding Fathers were only a set of leaders who were fascinated in maintaining their own supremacy and keeping the minor classes in their place.

 Also he says that the American leaders used democratic rhetoric to catch the minor classes on their side; however, they did not really trust in the rhetoric.  Zinn points out men who signed the Declaration of Independence were about 69% which had led office under British administration. This was not a rebellion, just a varying of the upper layer of society.  Zinn finales the chapter by telling us that the approaching of the Revolutionary War led to a plan in Boston; however, people who were wealthy did not have to join in.  In other confrontations, the American “patriot” elites (Zinn chapter 4) were basically considering the poorer classes as harshly as the British had.  Their dictatorship, he discusses, was no less dictatorial just because people born in the colonies did it. At the end, this sentence in Zinn’s mind means that the Founding Fathers were no superior than British leader who had controlled before them.