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.
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
every year I would get in trouble for screaming “AND THEN THEY MURDERED THEM ALL”
Holy fucking based
yeah I had a lot of based moments as a kid, I would like to thank tim and moby for my political education. it sucks republicans are cutting kids access to it. Tim and moby say trans rights
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
MOVE bombings, what MOVE bombings? That’s not part of the history curriculum.
“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:
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.
Tianamen and the official narrative
Reposted from elsewhere.
- wikileaks published a private diplomatic cable stating that no one was killed in the square itself, although a smaller number of people did die in clashes elsewhere in Beijing, consistent with China’s own official account. (Here’s a Telegraph article on the cables).
- a spanish film crew was in the square all night and filmed people peacefully leaving the square in the early morning, singing the Internationale, here’s footage of a Hong Kong news report that includes the spanish film crew footage, which never appears in western reporting).
- one of the main organizers of the protest, Hou Dejian, states that no one died in the square and calls out other organizers for lying I Interview where Hou Dejian, a Taiwanese national and one of the leaders of the Tiananmen protests, says he was in the square all night and saw no one killed here is a twitter thread covering testimony by various organizers, including Hou Dejian).
- Numerous western media sources have stated that no massacre occurred in the square. (This article links to multiple western sources, including James Miles, attesting that no one died in the square.).
- various western massacre reports cite wildly different death figures, usually with little or no justification for the number.
- An attempt to collect all the names of the massacre victims ended early when they only found 155.
- CIA and NED goons were known to be present in Beijing and involved in the protests. (Here is an article from the Vancouver Sun in 1992, showing western intelligence involvement was known in the west decades ago).
- during most of the protest, protesters were calling for a return to stricter communism, not for liberal market reforms. These were Marxists. Their signs showed Marxist figures and slogans. (This article shows some images of the protesters displaying Marxist slogans and iconography and discusses it a bit — careful linking this site though, some of the articles are pretty dumb).
- tank man: the tanks in the video are leaving the square (you can see this in the uncropped footage) and it is broad daylight, whereas the main violence occurred at night.
- the first violence was against troops, not civilians. On June 2, 1989, two days before the June 4 incident when the main violence occurred, multiple unarmed Chinese troops were burned alive and their corpses hung from nooses in public. ((CW: gore) here is a thread of photos showing dead and wounded troops, some being rescued by civilians. Multiple men were burned to death, others were beaten. Some protesters stole guns from the army and can be seen brandishing them.).
- the violence against troops was uncharacteristic of the previous tone of interactions between troops and protesters in the preceding weeks. Troops and protesters had peacefully coexisted, singing songs and sharing food together. (Here’s an article that goes into it a bit)
yes the tank man at tinyman square from that famous picture got squished like a grape by the tank
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
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?
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.
