The native Hawaiian military was oppressed so harshly, martial arts in general were declared illegal in Hawaii. The locals worked around it by disguising the basics of their military arts as dance. You might have heard of the hula…

somebody actually did splice together the video when the Chinese tank goes around the guy, and the footage on the other side is from the BLM protests when a cop car just drives into the crowd

And the comments would say: He sHoUlD hAVe JuSt CoMpLiEd

Jeff Widener, an American photographer with the Associated Press, won a pulitzer prize for that photo, precisely because it was a still image. He also took a video, but the video tends not to be shown, because it reveals that the man wasn’t run over. Then you have the fact that all the US press corps showed up right as the protests took off, a lot of dark money from NGOs and western think tanks was floating around, and then deliberate conflation of the worker riots (in which PLA troops were lynched outside the square) being confused with the mostly peaceful events inside the square. Then you have that interview with the protest leader where she was crying and basically saying she was trying to provoke a massacre so that the protesters could be seen as martyrs. She got her wish, even if the massacres didn’t actually occur, since that’s how the west depicts those events. Then there the highly suspicious fact that nobody talks about the fact that you had many different types of protester simultaneously. Some were opposed to liberal reforms, privatization, etc, (the workers rioting outside the square) while other protesters wanted more of that stuff (the student protesters inside the square). Then you have some racist elements mixed in with the student protests I’ve heard, i.e. that there were some Chinese who were protesting because they didn’t like the presence of African exchange students at their universities. I don’t know how true that is, but I’ve heard it a few times.

The tank man image is relevant not because of the tanks but because of the dude. He stood up and made the whole line of tanks stop (momentarily). That’s the kind of energy i like in my protesters.

You’re 100% correct the cops in the US would probably just plow into him, though. Hell, they’d swerve to hit him.

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.

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.

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.

“Adobe!”

-Me in fourth grade, demonstrating complete mastery over the curriculum

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

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.

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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.

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 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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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