5 ms·

I had to read Zinn for AP US History in 10th grade, and I fucking hated that shit. The guy would somehow always find a way to spin everything this country did i

I had to read Zinn for AP US History in 10th grade, and I fucking hated that shit. The guy would somehow always find a way to spin everything this country did in a negative way. Glad to hear that at least part of it was bullshit.

rsj_hn 5y ago
I'm sorry you had to read that in high school. This kind of stuff is why you see parent revolts. The problems with polemicists like Zinn or Chomsky is that they go looking for any evidence to support their thesis (namely that America is an evil empire committing atrocities around the globe), which makes for very bad history. I mean, I could mine Swiss newspapers, interviews, selectively quote from some policy papers, and make it look like Switzerland is some violent third world hell-hole if I had enough time and a strong enough obsession to prove my point. But that's not history, because it doesn't tell you the big picture or the main facts, instead it focuses on things that either didn't happen at all, or were exceptional. People who read that stuff come away with a truly warped view of the world, and then this penetrates into popular sites even like wikipedia. For example, the "US Overthrow" of Iranian Mossadeq or the 1973 Pinochet coup are completely misrepresented, whereas things like US involvement in supporting Algerian rebels and African left-wing rebels is erased. So you don't get an understanding of US policy or the factors driving it, which are not easily reducible to soundbytes or simple analyses. Similarly the anti-communist military action by the Dutch in Indonesia after WW2, the Korean War (Chomsky claims it was the US that was the aggressor), and even key facts about the Vietnam war and the Khmer Rouge are massively distorted. This results in students having holes where huge parts of history are entirely missing, and have been replaced with hate, and a lot of people emerge from that scene very angry and militant, both at the U.S. and more recently at Europeans in general, which I guess is the whole point of teaching this stuff - to create angry, radicalized, students. I hope you escaped that trap.

rsj_hn 5y ago

I'm sorry you had to read that in high school. This kind of stuff is why you see parent revolts. The problems with polemicists like Zinn or Chomsky is that they go looking for any evidence to support their thesis (namely that America is an evil empire committing atrocities around the globe), which makes for very bad history. I mean, I could mine Swiss newspapers, interviews, selectively quote from some policy papers, and make it look like Switzerland is some violent third world hell-hole if I had enough time and a strong enough obsession to prove my point. But that's not history, because it doesn't tell you the big picture or the main facts, instead it focuses on things that either didn't happen at all, or were exceptional. People who read that stuff come away with a truly warped view of the world, and then this penetrates into popular sites even like wikipedia. For example, the "US Overthrow" of Iranian Mossadeq or the 1973 Pinochet coup are completely misrepresented, whereas things like US involvement in supporting Algerian rebels and African left-wing rebels is erased. So you don't get an understanding of US policy or the factors driving it, which are not easily reducible to soundbytes or simple analyses. Similarly the anti-communist military action by the Dutch in Indonesia after WW2, the Korean War (Chomsky claims it was the US that was the aggressor), and even key facts about the Vietnam war and the Khmer Rouge are massively distorted. This results in students having holes where huge parts of history are entirely missing, and have been replaced with hate, and a lot of people emerge from that scene very angry and militant, both at the U.S. and more recently at Europeans in general, which I guess is the whole point of teaching this stuff - to create angry, radicalized, students. I hope you escaped that trap.