I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
authored by Chinese students and scholars
who are all based in the west, i checked
I’m trying to be unbiased here.
as a side note, there’s no such thing as unbiased. everyone is shaped by their class background and material conditions
Critiquing China from the left is ok. And what that looks like is acknowledging that there is racism present in China and there are marginalized groups who aren’t being treated fairly. That needs to change, just like it needs to change in nearly every other country in the world. Marginalization of minorities remains a global problem, and China could be doing more.
BUT, there is little credible evidence to suggest that minorities in China are worse off than minorities in the US, or Scandinavia, or Japan, or Isreal, etc etc etc. In some respects, they may even be better off.
So yeah, it would be totally reasonable to take, say, an anarchist perspective, and criticize China as part of a broader concern about power structures. Criticism that paints China as “evil” is not criticism from the left and is, intentionally or otherwise, buying into Western anti-China propaganda.
let’s be specific about what your claims are, marginalized is an incredibly low bar to clear when the US has been pushing lies about extermination camps
americans are some of the only people in the world who genuinely believe their country’s founding myths
Do they really know that stuff, though?
If they were truly aware, they’d tear down that evil fucking monstrosity and rebuild something better.
Like, that shit was worse than Nazi Germany. And no one even suggests doing the bare minimum and tearing up the constitution and demolishing the government?
I suggest they “know” of it, but are purposefully kept from actually examining what any of that really means and how it relates to their lives.
That’s a blatantly incorrect generalization. Americans know that the early settlers stole land, killed natives, owned slaves, spread disease, oppressed women, and set up a government to benefit land owning white men.
I’m afraid that’s far from where the mythology ends. There were 14 presidents before Washington under the government of the Articles of Confederation, we don’t talk about them because we might question circumstances under which that government was ended, which was basically a Federalist coup in response to an Agrarian Uprising and a cash grab by the rich. We don’t talk about why Georgia was founded as a white’s only state, why the Declaration of Independence came suspiciously on the heels of a British Court case bringing into question the legality of slavery in British territories, or how the concept of whiteness was linked with freedom of religion back in the days of Bacon’s Rebellion. Seriously, I just deleted like a whole other paragraph so I wouldn’t swamp ya.
might wanna start here. Real History: Myths of the Founding Fathers (FULL) Michael Parenti - YouTube
Slavery is never even mentioned as being at all relevant to the American Revolution.
My US History class started with the revolution (no mention of anything more than a couple years before) and only started talking about slavery in the lead up to the civil war. You’d have thought it was something that only appeared after the revolution, they act as if it was a completely unrelated issue, even though it was one of the leading causes.
But if you teach kids in school “The US was founded to stop Britain from taking our slaves away” instead of “No taxation without representation” they want to burn the whole place down and start over.
Does this mean the America’s revolution against England was never justified?
why the Declaration of Independence came suspiciously on the heels of a British Court case bringing into question the legality of slavery in British territories,
Does this show up in the journals or correspondence of any of the founders?
Hm, I didn’t claim to have a comprehensive list of wrongdoings that America is responsible for. This seems like a distraction to the conversation - pointing to things a country did hundreds of years ago as proof of why it is evil today.
Ultimately, I don’t find the actions or beliefs of the founding fathers or anyone around or before that period to be very relevant to how the modern world operates. No one today is going to defend slavery, but it wouldn’t hurt if the events you linked were better taught.
I feel like half of my public school history classes were about early America and slavery so there is probably only so much time they can dedicate to US injustices.
Can’t wait for my kid to ask “but what if the people voted for communism” in class
I forget the details but I swear I saw a poll once where a plurality of Americans thought that “communism” and “dictatorship” were synonyms, which goes a long way towards explaining why most people think that being a communist means being pro-dictator and anti-democracy.
I mean that was basically the entire bait and switch that cold war propaganda did. They absolutely recognized that framing it as a battle between communism and democracy was a much easier sell to people.
Americans with literally any topic. And in their minds the fact that it’s like the default opinion just reinforces that it must be true. Not even a moment of hesitation that maybe it’s the default opinion because we utterly despise teaching anything besides business and trades.
Most of us come out of college with barely any deep understanding of anything in history. Just a Wikipedia glossary full of stubs.
usians are the most propagandized people on earth
