• 2Password2Remember [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months 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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    10 months 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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      10 months 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.

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          10 months ago

          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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              10 months 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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                10 months 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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      10 months 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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      10 months 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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      10 months 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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    10 months 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:

  • RedundantClam [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months 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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      10 months 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.

    • 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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        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”

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    10 months 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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        10 months 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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          10 months 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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      10 months 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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      10 months ago

      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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        10 months 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.

  • RedDawn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months 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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    10 months 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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    10 months ago

    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?

    • Water Bowl Slime
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      10 months ago

      I was unequivocally taught that it happened, white colonists were responsible, and that it was genocide. It came up a few times over the years in age-appropriate lessons (they don’t go into detail when teaching third graders ofc) and every time the narrative was about the same.

      HOWEVER our classes never dwelled on it much. It was taught with as much gravitas as any other random lesson, i.e. I was bombarded with a litany of names and dates to memorize for a standardized test which I promptly forgot in order to prepare for the next one, and the next one, and the next one…

      My classes didn’t distinguish between the indigenous peoples and I never learned about the native tribes that belong to my area. My teachers taught only what colonizers did to them, not who they were and are. And crucially, I was taught that this was all history and not that it is an ongoing genocide. And that the colonizers of the past are, somehow, disconnected from our government of the present.

      Also we never made a connection between the Nazis and the colonists, or talked about class and capitalism at all, really.

    • jetsetdorito@lemm.ee
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      10 months 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.

    • Othello [comrade/them, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      every year in elementary school we watched some movies about how the pilgrims and Indians were friends and every year I would get in trouble for screaming “AND THEN THEY MURDERED THEM ALL”. teachers would get mad and say that it was both sides fault. and then we hit middle school and got the full story, but teachers would both sides it. Also most of my peers one year believed that the genocide of the native Americans was good, needed to happen, and that they would do it again. then i went to a super libby highschool and learned even more.

    • ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub
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      10 months 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

    • 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.

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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.

    • Zuberi 👀@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      Nah it just wasn’t taught.

      We (Texans) take 3 years of the history of our own state that just says “spain bad. Mexico bad. We want slaves. Confederacy good”

      You think after 3 years they’re just going to mention anything about the natives in the region?

      Maybe YOU learned about it sure, maybe we could come to terms with the education system being different in literally every region (all 50) of the states (and each country globally)?

      • schlongjohnson [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        true, i remember slavery being a literal paragraph in texas history textbook. Next to no mention of American indians outised of tejas means friend

    • CabbageRelish@midwest.social
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      10 months ago

      My education I got in Ohio was abysmal about this shit. Most of it was just review after elementary. And I say that as someone who would read the textbooks cover to cover.

      A people’s history of the US was probably pivotal for me properly turning left, didn’t find it until well afterwards though.

    • Kuori [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      “this wasn’t my experience, so it didn’t happen”

      or you could listen to the people telling you otherwise, but why do that?

    • MrSqueezles@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Yeah, my education didn’t cover who taught whom about corn. It definitely covered reservations and forced marches and murder and sickness. Maybe we can cover all of that in a couple of weeks and forget how much time it took and what was covered?

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    10 months ago

    Just gonna use this post as an opportunity to link this piece from one of my favorite writers of all time, since it’s an article which covers the absolute state of both public education and homeschooling in the American South in depth (CW for extreme racism and general bigotry)

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Look it’s important that Western countries don’t show the full vid, otherwise their citizens would think they can do the same to cops in the US, can you imagine what they’d do to a guy walking around on one of their armored vehicles?

        • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          So that’s why China allows open conversation about the incident right? If it’s all just a big misunderstanding, they should be happy to allow their citizens to share the facts. Certainly they wouldn’t take steps to ban all mention of the incident as if there was something terrible there they wanted to hide.

          • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            So that’s why China allows open conversation about the incident right?

            This actually gets discussed in Chinese state media. The idea that people get -500 social credit score when they barely mention Tiananmen Square is mostly Western propaganda. Maybe somebody else will link you articles about this from China, i’m not gonna bother because they’ve already been linked ITT and you liberals don’t read them anyway. But of course they’re around.

            Your post also shows a vast ignorance about how propaganda even works in the first place, whether we’re talking China or the USA or any other country. That’s because you get your ideas about politics from idiots like the antisemitic snitch and cousin r*pist George Orwell and then you think dictatorships work like 1984 and completely miss that you’re living in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Propaganda is not about hiding things from the public, that simply doesn’t work well enough. You can downplay the truth, but you’ll never get rid of it entirely. We’re one example of that, existing and driving you nuts in spite of the largest propaganda and surveilance apparatus in the world working against us. And the same applies for the smaller, less overarching, less well funded Chinese “intelligence community”, as you’d call their spies and snitches and secret police if they were Western spies and snitches and secret police. For example, anybody in China can install a VPN and look at Western news sources if they care, and a lot of younger people actually do that, just as you can come here and get exposed to facts that counter Western narratives.This is why propaganda works by emphasizing what you want the people to hear to the point were the noise drowns out what you do not want them to hear. By establishing counter-narratives to the truth. For example, you get flooded with the still image of the guy standing in front of the tank instead of the full video. You get fed the story about China somehow wafflestomping 10.000 corpses down the sewer drains by rolling over them with tanks until they’re mush, as if that could even work, even though the only source for this is something 1 (in words: ONE) British diplomat has allegedly heard from somebody in Beijing. But because people like you never actually check their sources, you think there’s hundreds of accounts of that incident just because there’s hundreds of articles citing that one unnamed British diplomat or each other, and that’s all over reddit, that site that has not only ruined your sense of humor and your ability to ever have a good faith discussion with another human being again, but that has also turned you into a mindless drone lashing out at anybody questioning the racist, national chauvinist narratives that have been blared into your ears until you came here 3 months because the pedophile spez threatened to take away the apps that allowed you to more conveniently doomscroll that hellsite on your mobile phone.

            What you usually do not get to see in Western media are the Chinese cop strung up on a lamppost and set on fire by the protesters, or that many of the counterrevolutionaries where, what a surprise, reactionaries that earlier the same year took part in riots against African exchange students at Chinese universities.

            Anyway, it was fun yelling at you, have a nice day.

      • KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        My favourite bit about the video is that the tank column is leaving Tiananmen when this guy stops them, and I always get the impression he’s essentially asking the tankers to go back to the Square.

        Naturally the lib framing is that he’s blocking them from entering the Square

        • YuccaMan [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt-2/

          Edit: the other source I was looking for

          https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php

          The thing to get is that there was no massacre on the square, and in fact there’s no verifiable evidence that anybody died there at all that day. Many people did die elsewhere, in street clashes with soldiers, after demonstrators killed and burned a few of them.

          I would like to note also that bringing up events like Tiananmen Square, especially heavily propagandized and warped versions of them, without an understanding of the complex political context which led up to them, is not a gotcha, it’s just ignorant. Not saying you’re doing that or that you would do that, but it’s something others do frequently when they invoke it round here.

          • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            With no actual evidence, it just seems like China’s word against the US’s. Neither are sources I trust, and both have motives to lie. I’m just going to assume nothing.

            • PosadistInevitablity [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              Can you possibly explain why the western diplomats stationed there told their home countries nothing happened in diplomatic cables?

              Why would they do that if it was real?

            • YuccaMan [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              I said there was no evidence that a massacre took place in Tiananmen Square. What actually took place there is well evidenced by eyewitness testimony, a fair bit of which is contained in the two sources I linked.

              Edit: I also take issue with the assertion that both the US and China are equally untrustworthy, particularly when the Chinese government freely admits that violent clashes between civilians and PLA personnel took place that day, something they would certainly have incentive to lie about if they were as untrustworthy as all that.

              • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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                10 months ago

                I recall seeing eyewitness testimony supporting both sides. Although, its possible the testimonies I saw were about the clashes that China admits to, and were simply framed as being about a massacre. They didn’t seem very specific or definitive.

                Even though the Chinese government admits to those violent clashes, its still very plausible they would lie about a massacre. Its much easier to justify that than it would be an actual massacre, especially when the civilians act violently. Its also possible that admitting some aspect of it would benefit them more than complete denial.

                • YuccaMan [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  10 months ago

                  You’d have a point there, if there wasn’t ample photographic evidence which also suggests that no concerted massacre took place, in the square or elsewhere. All available photographic evidence that I’ve seen supports the Chinese government’s version of events: scattered street clashes which unfortunately featured some quite heavy duty violence, but no mass formation of tanks coming in and deliberately schwacking everybody in sight.

                • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                  I’m sorry, you’re actually being reasonable and in good faith. Some other people in your instance have shortened my fuse a bit when i see the @shitjustworks, and you didn’t deserve that. I’m going to reign it in, and i apologize again.

                  Thanks for genuiniely engaging with other people from hexbear on these issues

              • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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                10 months ago

                Oh, come off it. Your comment was removed because there was no content warning for violent images, which you were told and which is stated in the modlog.

                Here, I’ll post your link with a CW and you can watch it stay up.

                CW: Violence, Gore

                https://www.aboluowang.com/2008/0529/89034_3.html

                We don’t want this to be a space where people could randomly stumble across images of graphic violence they’re not prepared for. You’re not being censored by the CPC, dumbass.

            • YuccaMan [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              10 months ago

              Firstly, we insist on content warnings being applied to violent content of that sort.

              Second, I’m guessing you didn’t bother to translate any of this or investigate the sources cited - or lack thereof, since most of these images lack citation or provenance. The one source I was able to follow back was an interview of the man who lost his legs, conducted by right wing rag the Epoch Times and signal boosted by noted CIA cutout Radio Free Asia. Most everything else in there is unsourced, and many of the captions just outright lie about what’s being depicted, such as the one claiming the crushed red motorcycle is actually a guy run over on his bike.

              Important to note also, none of these pictures are claimed to have been taken in the square itself. That violence occurred elsewhere is not in doubt; I never claimed there wasn’t violence, and the Chinese government themselves acknowledge it. What often gets left out is that the student demonstrators initiated it, and even western journalists working with eyewitness testimony concede that the PLA operated with remarkable restraint until things boiled over.

              Third, and this is a comparatively minor point, the site you link to is a noted right-leaning anti-communist news organization which I suspect has ties to RFA. Even if that weren’t the case, it doesn’t seem at all trustworthy, given its clear bias against the Chinese government.

              Edit: Upon further investigation, I found that Fang Zheng, the man who claims his legs were crushed by a tank in an unprovoked attack by the PLA, is himself not a very trustworthy source. The one person who he identified as being able to corroborate his claims, declined to do so, saying that she didn’t remember being with him at all on the day that violence broke out. Also potentially significant, he’s a founder of the Chinese Democracy Education Foundation, a California-based nonprofit opposed to the Chinese government. The organization has worked with RFA, and Fang Zheng himself has attended Falun Gong rallies and apparently shares their insane organ harvesting conspiracy theories.

              Is this really what you’re giving us?

    • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago
      Tianamen and the official narrative

      Reposted from elsewhere.