Idaho and Critical Race Theory
- Thread starter Trunkage
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A: There's certainly a reason to assume the civil war wouldn't have happened if they had done things differently. It was fought over slavery and the matter hadn't been sorted out yet because the founding fathers kicked the can down the road until it blew up. That's all their compromises amounted to. Which would be a lack of foresight.
B: They wanted Canada. Jefferson said it was just a matter of marching. And then they did not get Canada and the White House got burned down. Its not about winning or losing, its about the absence of wisdom. Its a sign of some of the founding fathers being far more foolish than their reputation suggests.
C: If you put a system in place to block a potential Caesar and that system then forces a potential Caesar who would otherwise have lost on the country then the system backfired. Not only did it not do what it was intended to do, but it did what it was supposed to prevent. It really is very straightforward.
The latter isn't necessarily required, though it's common.
But regardless, whitewashing has never required every source to be involved. So there's absolutely no contradiction in saying "US history is whitewashed" and also taking arguments from historians/figures who weren't involved in whitewashing.
A: There isn't, because the compromises made on slavery are what got the south into the union. The only sense i concede to the claim there wouldn't have been a civil war is in the sense that it may not have been a civil war, but a war between two nations.
B: There is a list of grievances for why they declared war. Canada is not that list of grievances. Wanting Canada was certainly a thing, but blowing up that one point that did not have a consensus behind it is pretending the entire context of naval barricades and the Napoleonic Wars are irrelevant. The stated cause for war was Britain blocking US ships. The reason to block them disappeared, and the war ended with no victor without any purpose to continue. In your theory of "they just wanted Canada", that's all just happy coincidence.
C: Your perspective is harshly distorted.
But now you've taken all meaning out of the sentence. This started as "it highlights history that has been whitewashed for years". The implication is that this information is/was concealed and difficult to come across, but only now is publicly acknowledged. If that statement says that some people have whitewashed and others haven't, there's no real significance at all to the publication.
This doesn't make any sense.
"Concealed and difficult to come across" doesn't mean "impossible". Obviously, the information still existed and could be sought out and evaluated. This is because whitewashing doesn't represent a complete 1984-style "memory hole".
Well, a 1984-style memory hole is fiction. And I'm not describing fiction, I'm describing reality. I don't think that there is any aspect of American History that within our lifetimes has been more difficult to find the condemnatory take than the celebratory take. "A People's History of America" is not like a cult classic or something. Criticism is so prominent. So what is the problem here?
Define "concealed and difficult to come across."
Nations have an "official" account of their own history, which the political system largely gets to define. This whole debate is about what account of history should be taught to children in schools. Should they learn the version where the USA is a nation founded by great men imbued with pure and noble ideals of liberty for all, or do we teach them the version wherein the founding ideals of the USA were the hypocritical product of flawed human beings who often participated willingly in the abuses of slavery? Someone gets to decide, and that someone is part of the political system. It doesn't actually matter very much what the historical consensus really is, or what academic historians believe or agree on.
And this is the problem, because it means that students sometimes leave school with a very warped idea of their own history, or possibly just not having been taught about something very important to them because it was "controversial". We've dunked on the US a lot, but Britain is arguably even worse in this regard. Because our current national curriculum is the result of the compromise between Thatcher's conservative government and the teaching profession, British children are not taught about the British Empire. A significant proportion of the population has been given basically no education on what is probably the most important feature of British history, because the teaching profession collectively decided that was preferable to some kind of nineteenth century patriotic education about how the Empire was great and brought civilization to all the savage peoples under its dominion.
The fact that you can go to university and study with real historians and learn all about counter history and the misuse of history in national ideology doesn't really matter if it starts when someone is already an adult and is only available to a small handful of people with a specialized education. That's kind of like saying that not teaching evolution in schools isn't depriving children of scientific knowledge because they can take a degree in biology later. The vast majority of people only encounter their own history through exposure to the "official" historical narrative, and thus that narrative matters.
The problem is that this isn't actually true.
The founding fathers are borderline hero-worshipped. The genocidal treatment of the Native Americans is downplayed or brushed over, secondary to a heroic narrative of overthrowing the tyrannical English; the founders' use of slavery is ignored. Decades of CIA-sponsored coups and regime change in South and Central America is scarcely known by the majority of Americans. I doubt most Americans could provide even cursory detail of the Trail of Tears, Iran-Contra, the Philippine-American War, Japanese Internment, etcetera.
Criticism is easy to find now. For most of the last century, not so much.
We can and do teach children both of these things.
Native Americans are not brushed over, slavery is super-not ignored, I'm not going to make a blanket statement about CIA sponsored coups because some of that criticism is fair and some is communist conspiracy rambling. Of your list of things, the only one I would say is poorly known is the Philippine-American war, but that's cause our history classes on that period of time focus heavily (and understandably) on the changes in Europe. People know about the other three.
A quarter of millennials don't know what the Holocaust was, and we fucking *adore* WW2. Your level of faith in the school system is hilarious
Almost a Quarter of Young Americans Think the Holocaust Is a Myth or Exaggerated
A 50-state survey found that a disturbing number of young Americans have bought into Holocaust denial conspiracy theories that have spread like wildfire on social media.
www.vice.com
Can we just stop with all the great men history stuff. Napoleon wasn’t a great general. He just had people under him that lead him to victory. And then he pretended he came up with them. What Napoleon WAS good tat propaganda. See also the nonsense surrounding Musk, Jobs, Gates, Ford and the Founding Fathers. Their underlings do most of the work and they take the credit
They are only great because history was totally changed to create that narrative.
They are only great because history was totally changed to create that narrative.
And? Is that because the schools aren't teaching about the Holocaust? Do people not know about it because it's being whitewashed from history? Is a person who is ignorant of common knowledge a useful argument when discussing what historical interpretations are most represented?
The article groups Gen Z and millennials together, so as a millennial, Gen Z can suck it!
That aside, I don't dispute the findings. That said, I'm going to say something that's going to win me no friends, but to be honest, I think there's too much emphasis on the Holocaust.
Yes, absolutely, we should learn about the Holocaust, but even if it was the worst genocide in human history (which is an argument that can be made), it wasn't the first genocide in human history, nor did genocide magically stop after WWII. That 25% think it's a myth or exagerated is appalling, but ask those people about other historical genocides, and that number's going to go up. I'm not claiming that it's some grand conspiracy, but over the course of my entire school life, I only learnt about two genocides in any great detail (the Holocaust, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia), and only the latter because I took modern history as an elective. Even in our own lifetimes, we've lived through genocide, ranging from Rwanda, to ISIS, to the Rohinga, to the Ughyrs, to all this other stuff going on RIGHT NOW, and I could still tell you more about the Holocaust than recent events.
Second that. Especially as the Holocaust only includes a bit more than half of the people murdered by the Nazis, that being the 6 million Jews out of 11 million people total. Depending on how you count it, 11 million people might be several million too low. Obviously, it was terrible that 6 million Jews were murdered, but to quietly forget that at least almost the same amount of other people were murdered at the same time by the same people is appalling.
Secondly, stuff like the Belgian Congo. When learning about WW1, (assuming we learnt anything) we were all told that Germany invaded neutral Belgium, and that that was awful. Fair enough. But you could also express it as Germany decided to act in Europe a bit like how Europeans acted in other continents. Now, that wasn't Germany's motive or anything, but double standard there.
I believe that stats shows that are there were more Russians killed than Jews.... obviously some of those Russian WERE Jews being the reasom that discrepancy
As to the Congo, it was 'common knowledge' of the whites at the time that the Congolese were cannibals as they were talking about it ALL the time. Turns out that the Africans were saying that the whites were cannibals becuase they took so many body parts. Miscommunication right? Anyway, guess who still was called cannibals many years later.
I'd also point the US intervention in Indonesia to prevent the spread of communism in the 50s that killed a million and incarcerated another million. This was so effective that 'Jakarta' was used as a catch cry for right wing fanatics across the world wanting the same treatment of communist by the US. And they got it
There's also stuff like about a million civilians starving to death in the Siege of Leningrad. You can count that as being part of the "normal" military death toll, but killing the civilians was part of the plan anyway even if the city surrendered.
On one hand, I absolutely agree that we need to teach the holocaust in the context of a larger program of German war crimes.
On the other hand, it's important to remember that there were only about about 9 million Jews in Europe prior to the holocaust, mostly concentrated in eastern Europe. The significance of the holocaust isn't just that a lot of people died, but that the Jewish community in Europe was essentially destroyed, and will never recover.
And here I think we have to kind of ask ourselves why we we bother teaching children about historical genocide at all. The vast majority of children or even young adults don't have the emotional maturity to understand something like that. Quoting big numbers of dead people to them doesn't trigger any kind of emotional response. Most children don't even have much of a concept of death on an individual level, trying to explain the death of millions of people is so far beyond their frame of reference that it's essentially fiction. So, why do we bother?
I think the most important reason to teach historical genocide to children in particular is to help develop the capacity for empathy, and that's a controversial statement because a modern neoliberal education system isn't supposed to care about people's emotional development, but it is kind of important. Teaching children about genocide without accepting that the goal is to change how they feel is essentially doomed, and probably outright harmful.
And in this regard, I think the holocaust is an interesting pedagogical gateway, because in order to understand the holocaust properly you have to develop empathy for its victims, and once you can do that you can develop empathy for any victims of any genocide. Again, the holocaust didn't just kill abstractly large numbers of people, it did something which even children can be afraid of, it left its survivors completely alone. It destroyed their entire families, their entire communities, everyone they'd ever known and everyone who might help them. That is the most frightening thing that a child is actually capable of imagining, and if we accepted that the goal was to get them to emotionally empathize with the victims of genocide, it's a natural place to begin.
Another useful thing about the holocaust from a pedagogical standpoint is that, despite how monumentally awful and depressing it is, there are literally thousands of well documented accounts of people from all over the world risking their own lives and careers to save people. There's a relatively uncomplicated goodness there which I think children also need in order to deal with difficult topics.
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True. Though, depending on estimates, that could also be true of the Romani, who are generally forgotten. Less of them around so less murders of them in total, though.
Well, you only get a state run teaching syllabus for children, so that's when you can ensure they learn about it, or not, and even if they don't understand it, they'll take that knowledge into adulthood.
I've always thought the idea was about how racial hatred was a problem, and that was a big example, handily done by someone else that your own nation may have fought against. There is the problem that you can end up implying that racism has to be that bad to count, which excludes all sorts of less extreme examples. Possibly intentionally.
Having said that, we never covered WW2 at all in history at my schools, and I've no experience with teaching myself.