• 2Password2Remember [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    shitlibs love posting that picture of the guy standing in front of the tank, as some kind of own, when if that happened in the US the cops would have gleefully run him over and then been made into a celebrity for it

    Death to America

  • sshff@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Also here in the UK a large majority believe that “Empire” was a nice pleasant good thing that did nothing but good to the countries we merely ’looked after’.

    We call the ones that haven’t fully told us to ‘fuck off’ the ‘Commonwealth’ and hold lots of PR events like Olympic-esque games and ‘rich monarch waves at people who’s country has a GDP less than their hat largely because we stole all their resources before they could use them to develop’ tours.

    • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Jesus Christ, do not ever tell an English person that you think Winston Churchill was a monster. Worst mistake of my life. You’d swear I’d shat on his mum’s grave.

        • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          There’s been a concerted effort to paint him as a heroic figure so that the blitz can be used as a rallying point for British nationalism.

          The Welsh curriculum at least taught me about the time he sent the military in to gun down striking miners in Tonypandy. I don’t think the English education system teaches children about any of the shit he did.

          The end result is he’s almost become a secular saint for some English.

          • CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.net
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            I can confirm my English history classes very much did teach me that Churchill never ever set a foot wrong and is an unimpeachable war hero with no flaws, never heard about his opinions on India/Africa, nor what you mention about miners, I honestly never heard a bad thing.

            I know some people were taught differently, but I was also taught the Soviet Union was basically useless and Britain was effectively the sole reason for the Allied Win of WW2.

            • Dessa [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              In my US Classes, he was always a hero as well. We were taught that Neville Chamberlain kept concedingnthings to Hitler in hopesntht being nice would sway him, and when it didn’t, Brits got mad and voted in tough guy Churchill who really gave em the business. Stalin was a Nazi ally until the Nazis betrayed him, and that stopped the bleeding, then Roosevelt declared war after Pearl Harbor and the US won the war for the Allies.

              • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                voted in tough guy Churchill

                Churchill wasn’t even elected. When Chamberlain resigned, Churchill replaced him as prime minister and then elections were stalled until 1945 as part of the emergency wartime powers that a prime minister can enact.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Everyone also thinks the queen was just a passive tourist icon and not an actively supportive participant and cheerleader of that colonialism.

    • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I remember that old black and white footage of queen whoeverthefuck (victoria?) tossing little pieces of food to the ground for african toddlers to scramble for in the exact same way you or I would feed pigeons in the park.

    • PreachHard@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Am I remembering right where William and Kate tried to visit somewhere with one of these bullshit tours and were told to fuck off pretty much?

  • privatized_sun [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    “Uyghur people are being GENOCIDED simply for their culture of having knifes to demonstrate their manliness (which the CIA used to agitate for terrorist attacks)”

    vs

    “actually US settlers were right to kill natives because they were scary and had sharp obsidian knives” :scared:

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    When I was in I think 2nd grade I gave a presentation on the Civil War while wearing a costume of a confederate soldier.

    I was taught that factory workers in the north had it worse than slaves, that the Civil War War Between the States was about states’ rights, that Confederate generals were noble and honorable while Union ones were incompetent drunks who relied on essentially human wave tactics and burning down cities to win. Gone With the Wind was presented to me as an accurate and unbiased depiction of history.

    Growing up I definitely had a couple awkward dinner conversations with certain “history buff” relatives where I was like, “Well sure, but still, I mean, obviously we can all agree the South was wrong, right?” and suddenly people start exchanging looks kind-vladimir-ilyich

    I actually got a similar reaction once for saying the Crusades were bad, Catholics are fucking wild I tell you.

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      I was taught that factory workers in the north had it worse than slaves

      In Marx’s “Theories of Surplus Value” which he never published while he was alive, but was instead compiled from his notes by Kautsky, and then later Riazanov, he called out 1700s reactionary anti-capitalists like Linguet who made these kinds of arguments.

      Linguet however is not a socialist. His polemics against the bourgeois-liberal ideals of the Enlighteners, his contemporaries, against the dominion of the bourgeoisie that was then beginning, are given—half-seriously, half-ironically—a reactionary appearance. He defends […] slavery against wage-labour.

      (Linguet was guillotined by the Jacobins lol)

      • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        “Wage slave” is the modern equivalent. I get the point is to emphasize how deeply exploitative low-wage work is, but my boss can’t cut off my foot if I don’t show up.

        • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          yeah the term “wage slave” is certainly an exaggeration that minimizes slavery. I would point out that even Frederick Douglass used the term, but this alone does not legitimize it. It became popular because it’s short, to the point, sounds almost poetic (assonance), and gets at the heart of the coercive element of capitalism (you sell your labor power, or you become homeless and starve). But yes, it’s certainly not the most nuanced or sensitive thing to say.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I actually got a similar reaction once for saying the Crusades were bad, Catholics are fucking wild I tell you.

      Papists still getting off from the sack of Constantinople

    • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      I actually got a similar reaction once for saying the Crusades were bad, Catholics are fucking wild I tell you.

      My convert Catholic dad once told me that all the crusades were “self-defence” against Islam. I guess there must have been a really big threat of an islamic invasion of Europe from the Baltics.

      • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        i’m pretty sure at least one of those crusades resulted in christian armies sieging/looting/pillaging/committing atrocities in christian majority cities on their long march to Jerusalem, with most of them starving or dying of dyssentery or deserting along the way. Most effective form of self defense I’ve ever seen. And even when they made it to Jerusalem, surprise surprise, turns out there was a lot of christians and jews coexisting with muslims and they all got treated as muslims by the invading armies.

  • RedundantClam [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    thinkin-lenin On US education I remember in 8th grade the one thing I learned about Marx was one paragraph and was basically just “he wrote the Communist Manifesto and believed that history was a cycle of conflicts between classes.” And I was just like “Well what is communism? Isn’t that going to be important going forward?” I guess it wasn’t and I never learned what Communism/Socialism actually is or what the USSR did beyond “be authoritarian” until I was an adult.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      You probably didn’t actually learn what capitalism is either until later, given that Marx is the most comprehensive breakdown of how capitalism functions, so much so that even the economics courses at universities use Marx for that part.

      The intentional avoidance of teaching how the system works is essential to making sure people don’t question it. You don’t want your workers knowing how it works, merely accepting it. Understanding how it works is reserved for the ruling class.

      • MCU_H8ER2 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I remember I took economics 101 in college. The professor was explaining how growth is required for capitalism. Even as clueless I was back then, I raised my hand and said well nothing can keep growing forever, what happens then? He told me that would be a long time from now and to not worry about it.

    • uralsolo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Same. In the American education and political system it was really hard to encounter any anticapitalist critique until after 2016 when the Bernie campaign turned a lot of people on to the idea and it started getting talked about again (and even now it’s only brought up very occasionally outside of fringe websites like ours).

    • I tended to have communism/socialism condescendingly poopooed as “well-meaning” but “never really working because human nature”.

      Anyways, time to learn about the french revolution and the reign of terror, which in no way should be viewed as an indictment of liberal revolutions the way the red terror does for socialism.

      • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I remember almost my exact words when I was in high school “communism has a lot of valid criticisms about capitalism but their solutions didn’t work”

  • RedDawn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I just read to my parents about the Haymarket tragedy and the origins of Mayday, and how the United States freaked out that people all over the world began recognizing that day and in order to cut it off in the US they made May 1st loyalty day and used red scare shit to make sure nobody would demonstrate or do anything on May 1st here lol. They had never heard of any of it.

  • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    US PUBLIC EDUCATION HISTORY CLASS: And today kids, we are going to learn about all of the native indians, the Southwest Indians, the plains indians, AND the forrest indians. Are you excited to learn about all the indians that were here, kids?

  • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Question to American comrades: How are the genocides of native Americans and Lebensraum manifest destiny being taught in American schools? What does the average American know?

    • jetsetdorito@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I remember being taught that it was just their desire to expand to the Pacific Ocean, they believed it was their god given destiny. Big focus on that. I don’t recall a lot of all of emphasis on how it impacted the natives.

    • uralsolo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      I seem to remember getting a very centrist version of the Native American Genocide. Crimes committed against the Native Americans by colonists were skimmed over in brief, settlement of land was described as a net positive because the GDP went up and railroads got built, there was a little bit of time spent on the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, and then it was on to talking about the Mexican-American War and Native Americans never got mentioned again after that.

    • NotErisma [they/them, any]@hexbear.net
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      My school rushed all the events of US history, “manifest destiny” was no exception and was merely a brief footnote, though the trail of tears was mentioned.

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      I was taught in Jersey and Florida during the 80’s and then 90"s, and manifest destiny was taught as a good thing. Anything resembling truth I got out schooling came from subversive teachers, not the official school curriculum. It wasn’t till I read Zinn and Lowen that I learned how badly I was lied to.

    • ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      I learned Christopher Columbus would chop the hands off of indians that didn’t follow orders, and we wiped out 95% plus of their population

      But I went to school in California. Unfortunately, other states can teach their version of history

  • Averagemaoist [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    I’m convinced all the people saying that America doesn’t teach what happens to the Indians (besides the first Thanksgiving) stopped paying attention in history class after elementary school.

  • Rapidcreek@reddthat.com
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    That is not true in my case. We learned about various massacres and the trail of tears, ect. Of course that was at a time when you actually studied history.

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      it really depends on what state you live in, and what decade you grew up in. Southern states were particularly prone to whitewashing US history, especially with respect to colonialism and slavery. I did learn about slavery and indigenous genocide in school, but as an adult I still find the public education I received lacking, incomplete, and still somewhat whitewashed, even if it was loads better than the McCarthyist and Daughters-Of-The-Confederacy sponsored shit I would have gotten jammed into my brain in the 1950s.

      For example here are some issues I had with my liberal education in the 1990s:

      • it was pretended that the civil rights movement was only successful because of peaceful protesters like MLK and was almost ruined by totally unwholesome radicals like the Black Panthers
      • it was pretended that only the south had an economic interest in slavery. It was entirely ignored that the North relied economically on slavery indirectly.
      • the civil war was depicted as an ideological crusade by the north to end slavery. this is an inversion of the confederate myth that it was about “states rights.” The main objective of the south was to preserve slavery. The main objective of the north was to preserve the union. Neither side was abolitionist, it’s just that abolition became practical in 1863 as the war dragged on. Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation so he could draft black soldiers and further demoralize the south. he had never been ideologically an abolitionist, though some in his party to his left (like Thaddeus Stevens) were.
      • it was pretended that all the problems of capitalism were entirely isolated to the gilded age, and that once we got a semblance of social democratic reforms (8 hour day, overtime pay, etc.) capitalism was now “fair.”
      • labor militancy was altogether ignored. it was pretended that social democratic reforms were won entirely because silver-tongued reformists demolished capitalists with logic and reason, not because shit like the battle of blair mountain happened.
      • it was depicted that indigenous genocide was mostly a matter of “both sides” being “equally mean.” i.e. that manifest destiny was mostly colonizers just protecting themselves from raids or something
      • zero mention of CIA coups or any of the stuff declassified in the church committee
      • zero mention of US supporting dictators abroad
      • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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        it also always ended with “but now we’re in modern times where racism is over, and we are friends with the native americans now =)”

        Might be different now that history has restarted, but when I was going through in the obama years, yeah history was taught to me like a long running TV show that had just had its series finale and all is well

      • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        In my history classes, it was like black folks were a footnote until you get to the lead up to the Civil War. Then after the Civil War they disappear from the stage again until the civil rights movement.

        I did have a lib teacher who thought it was super important to teach us about Native American society and culture, even if he didn’t cover the genocide part as much as he could have.

      • maus@sh.itjust.works
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        Live in a red shithole, rural public education. Still learned the horrifics of slavery, trail of tears, black panthers, etc.

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      One way to look at this is comparing the western media blitz every year around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident to annual western coverage of any of our many, many domestic atrocities.

      We get an annual top-line reminder of how irredeemably evil China is because of a 30-year-old event that even U.S. journalism schools admit we misrepresent. But besides token coverage of “it’s X holiday,” or maybe some stories about “should we even recognize X as a holiday” (see the Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day discourse), there is precious little media reminding us of any of our own original sins. Instead, as you note, it’s relegated to history classes, which many Americans never seriously engage with and most Americans never revisit again.