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I was wondering if Americans learned history of other countries in school. HN users or Americans in general probably think China is a totalitarian country, but
by hintymad 6y ago
I was wondering if Americans learned history of other countries in school. HN users or Americans in general probably think China is a totalitarian country, but even Chinese students are taught in both elementary and high schools, repeatedly, that an authoritarian regime always started with moralizing everything, always started with telling its citizens to hate their neighbors, and always told their citizens that misinformation and disinformation was evil.
So if you listened to Voice of America, you would be convicted. If you questioned scientists for telling you that an acre of rice fields could easily produce 30,000 KGs of grains, you would be punished. If you lived in East Germany during cold war, of course your neighbor was so evil that it was your duty to spy on them and to report them. Oh and yes, many people were executed for questioning the ideology of Pol Pot. Guess how many people during the Pol Pot era believed that their neighbors deserved the death?
But of course, the US is the lighthouse of righteousness and justice and democracy, right? Our government didn't do anything wrong, right? It's just a few congressmen asking companies to be responsible for the evil disinformation and misinformation, right? The 1619 Project won Pulitzer because its narrative was for our own conscience, right? We teach kids critical race theory so they can hate an entire race but it's for our own good, right? We did all these for our moral high ground, what's wrong with it, right?
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- refenestrator 6y agoHistory is written by the victors in all cases. If Hua and Deng didn't win against the Gang of Four, you'd have a different history of the cultural revolution. Fortunately, they won. America's won too much, even when we're wrong or stupid, and our historical frame has suffered.
- unityByFreedom 6y agoEconomies are not zero sum. Every transaction has winners on both sides. People need different things at different times.
- neonological 6y agoEconomies are zero sum. Your statement is a fallacy I see touted everywhere. All economic products cost energy to generate and all energy is limited in totality by the available energy on earth. When someone uses this energy, another person cannot use it. This holds true even for the most abstract product. Say the economic product of poetry produced/sung by a poet. The poet needs energy to sustain himself and the time needed to produce the poem. When he uses that energy, entropy increases and someone else now cannot use it. That is zero sum. The transaction you are describing is the equivalent of two people taking gold from limited reserves and trading that gold. The fact of the matter is, the gold is still missing from the shared reserve regardless of how fair the trade was.
- maxerickson 6y agoEver get a sunburn?
- neonological 6y agoYes and the person living in my shadow didn't get a sunburn as a result. Zero sum.
- maxerickson 6y agoNot for 'Earth', the energy came from outside. The sun hitting the planet at a given moment is on the order of 100 petawatts. Human energy utilization is on the order of 15 terawatts. It's a really good thing that it isn't zero sum.
- neonological 6y ago
- kiba 6y agoHistory is a lot more complicated and varied than the victors writing histories. Actually, it's people who know how to write that write history that writes history. Even then, they are not the final words on the subject. Who care about the conqueror and winners of wars if they aren't literate?
- refenestrator 6y agoEveryone involved in the late-70s intra-Party disputes in China not only knew how to write, but was a skilled propagandist and had learned from one of the best to ever do it. Winning is what mattered in that case. There's gotta be a Mao quote for that, barrels of guns or something.
- camjohnson26 6y agoI’m sure England ran out of authors after 1776
- thret 6y agoMao Tse Tung said change must come Change must come thru the barrel of a gun?
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoGermany vilifies one Adolf Hitler, and treats him as the personification of Satan. The U.S.A. celebrates one Christopher Columbus with his very own holiday. Both men did rather similar things, with the one exception of course that the latter won his genocide campaigns and racial superiority wars, and the former lost them.
- refenestrator 6y agoCompare Colombus Day to President's Day in terms of body count. Which one gets pushback? Who's on our currency?
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoObviously the amount of deaths due to Columbus is very hard to calculate, as well as the amount of deaths in general around that area, but the total number of indigenous deaths due to European settlers in the Americas around that time has been estimated at 50 million[1]. — how many were directly due to Columbus is of course difficult to calculate. The total death toll of W.W.2. is 75 million on all sides, for comparison. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-changed-after-europeans-killed-indigenous-americans-2019-2?international=true&r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-changed-after-europe... I have no idea what your currency is and who is on it.
- refenestrator 6y ago> I have no idea what your currency is and who is on it. My currency is American and every single one of them has more native bodies on them than Columbus. President's day has zero people protesting against it. Like I said, history is written by the winners.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoWell who's on it then? Since the source I cited comes with an estimate that 90% of the indigenous population was killed off before the U.S.A. even broke off from the British Empire.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago>History is written by the victors in all cases. A big counter-example is Sima Qian, who was given the choice of being executed or castrated by the Han Emperor. Because he made a promise to his father to write a history of China, he chose castration, and is now considered the father of Chinese history.
- ehwhyreally 6y agoI wouldn't say you won. Id say you're willing to kill a lot more innocent people.
- proc0 6y agoHistory refers to what actually happened, victors might write history books, but at least in modern era everyone can write their own version and have it out there. The point is I think Americans have little to no World History knowledge because education has been steadily deteriorating and seems to now be culminating in what we can observe as an attack on STEM. Not knowing World History has led to this, but now let's see what happens when Math undergoes a similar change of focus.
- onethought 6y agoNot sure what you mean? The “history” still mostly absolves Mao of any wrong doing... so the Mao worship can continue.
- whatever10 6y agoAh the typical authoritative propaganda “they are all the same, at least we have order”. No we don’t have in the US a non elected politburo making nationwide decisions on speech issues.
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- malaya_zemlya 6y agoHere we have unelected eBay management (and earlier this year - Twitter, Google, Facebook, Amazon etc) making nationwide decisions on speech. We are getting there.
- whatever10 6y agoYou can select a different vendor with a single click. You cannot select a different supreme leader without a bloodbath. That is the difference. Remember 1989?
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- hintymad 6y agoYou miss the point. The point is the US in a way is worse than a totalitarian regime like China: in a totalitarian regime it is the government the pushes censorship and hatred in the disguise of morality. In the US it is the elites and ordinary people who do that voluntarily for the so-called narratives. The US is building its own highway to tyranny.
- stickfigure 6y ago"democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
- mushbino 6y agoThis is a wildly inaccurate, simplistic, agenda driven take. I was going to give some additional perspective, but you've covered about 40 topics, and all of them poorly.
- nzmsv 6y agoOf course. Or in other words: "I didn't read Pasternak but I condemn him"
- nine_k 6y agoBut the US have started as a strict official theocracy of Massachusetts, and also highly religious other states, like Pennsylvania (even though Quakers were not as oppressively moralizing). This moralizing aspect runs very deep in the US, and religious, righteous fervor is more widespread than one might think, covering much of non-church-going population. Human imperfection is still seen as a degeneration or a disease; it's just being Catholic, or Black, or gender-queer is not seen as an imperfection any more. But breastfeeding a baby in public still is :(
- dc2k08 6y agoThe critical race stuff is getting more and more sinister and anti-white. https://www.unz.com/article/review-of-robin-diangelos-white-fragility/ https://www.unz.com/article/review-of-robin-diangelos-white-...
- onethought 6y agoI feel baited. But what’s sinister about a book on “White Fragility”?
- rayiner 6y agoThe book is predicated in characterizing people based on their race, which is racism. The author is also a racist who says things like how she “tries to be a little less white every day.”
- __float 6y agoYou are not using the same definition of "racism" that they are. "Prejudice + institutional power" is another framing where "racism against white people" is somewhat nonsensical. Why does that quote mean she's racist?
- rayiner 6y ago> Why does that quote mean she's racist? She’s taken negative characteristics, ascribed them to a group of people based on skin color, and implied that it’s a good thing to try and be “less white.” Its bigotry plain and simple and I’m actually taken aback that I have to explain it to you.
- onethought 6y agoWell seems their working from a premise of ‘prejudice + institutional power’... so in that sense, ‘white’ could be seen as shorthand for that in some countries. So being less prejudice and more aware of institutional power is a virtue/good thing.
- aidenn0 6y ago> ...always told their citizens that misinformation and disinformation was evil. While I get your point, intentional misinformation and disinformation is evil. OTOH for the most part, when my neighbors spread disinformation, they are not doing it intentionally, so my neighbors aren't evil. It's often by glossing over subtleties like this that those in power divide those they would rule; there are some communists who would like to overthrow the government; all communists are socialists; therefore anyone who ever professes a socialist view wants to overthrow the government. > an authoritarian regime always started with moralizing everything, always started with telling its citizens to hate their neighbors Authoritarian regimes start with telling citizens to hate their neighbors; moralizing is just one of the more convenient ways to to accomplish this. The anti-Jewish rhetoric in Nazi Germany definitely had a moralizing component (particularly ascribing the vice of greed), but it also spared no opportunity to portray them as inferior while simultaneously playing on envy. Actually HUAC and Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda point to another important commonality: those to be attacked were "Un-American" or "Un-German." I'm more concerned with the degree to which both the right and left attempt to de-legitimize the other side than I am about ebay choosing which books they stock.