Magefeanor said:
I didn't learn this from high school at all, and as far as I know the Norwegian high school actually cares about giving you the correct account and not glorifying everything... ...Anyways, next time you give a reply to a comment, don't just assume I went to a crappy high school where they don't give a shit about history.
I don't believe there are any schools with the intent to fill their students heads with glorified nonsense. The US has one of the best education systems in the world(especially considering all the extenuating factors that other countries don't have to deal with.) There are 37,100 private and public high schools in the US. I recall mine being ranked in the top 500 at the time I went to it, and a quick check put it at 671 for this year. So it was without a doubt one of the best high schools the world. They honestly did a really good job of teaching us, but a lot of the history they told us was misinformation or misrepresentation.
Even having gone to college and gotten a degree in history, I had multiple teachers who really had no idea what they were talking about. I actually got into something of a shouting match with a history prof who was basically outright bullshitting the class, saying that Viktor Chernov was a Menshevik and that the Mensheviks and the SRs(Socialist Revolutionary Party) were the same people. Not only was I 99% certain from offhand knowledge going into it that he wasn't(and the 1% is only because I have a gigantic amount of self doubt,) but a cursory glance of the source docs he had literally just handed out proved his statements to be false with regards to Chernov. And even if that weren't true; I am 100% certain that the Mensheviks and the SRs not only weren't they same group, they legitimately hated each other. But the professor just stood up there, even when I showed him the source docs saying he was wrong, and repeated "no, I'm right. You're wrong." over and over. And that isn't even an exaggeration or a missquote.
My long winded point is that even the best of schools will get it wrong. There's a billion reasons why. Historians in the past shaped history, and it's hard to contradict some of the classically accepted stories even when we know them to be wrong. Some history teachers feel the need to at least have an answer for everything and so will try to talk on subjects that they aren't really well versed in. Others have their perceptions colored by preconceived notions and so they won't look for contradictory information. Or they won't give information that isn't on the state mandated tests because their funding might get pulled. Or they might even not like pointing out parts of history that make them feel ashamed to be from their country. Or information that hold back for moral or personal reasons. It's why no one really mentions that Lincoln blackmailed pro-peace anti-war senators, or that he tried to suspend Habeus Corpus and was such an abuser of constitutional rights he almost certainly had the most contested presidency in history having been elected with only 39.8% of the popular vote.
It isn't that they are trying to trick you, or that they have some secret agenda to glorify histories violence, just that they are humans with imperfections. Not me though; my inhumanity allows me to speak only the truth.
Magefeanor said:
Oh and no offense taken, I actually read through you whole comment, it was an interesting read. I'd just like to advocate that the bombs had an impact too, besides everything else.
Everything has an impact obviously, that's what makes history such a ridiculously impossible subject to ever completely understand. My point is that the the worlds second most powerful country with the biggest army had a whole heck of a lot more to do with their surrender than the nukes. Especially when you consider the extreme damage firebombings had already caused I simply can't accept that the nukes were anything but a superfluous act of terror on a civilian population because we wanted to test our new toys and show Russia what our researchers were coming up with.
Oh god I've done it again. I really need to work on my brevity; it's just that when I get started I can't get stopped.
