2 ms·
It's hilarious to read American history and read in every book how everyone who had something the US wanted, or went counter to US interests accidentally happen
by torginus 1y ago
It's hilarious to read American history and read in every book how everyone who had something the US wanted, or went counter to US interests accidentally happened to have been evil in some way so the US could conveniently show up out of selfless desire just to right the wrongs and end up with the geopolitical result that it wanted in the first place.
People with decades long scholarly careers write this shit (some even having the highest credentials), and people eat it up.
History as written by (especially US) historians is just racist boomer fanfiction (pushed as propaganda to enforce the national myth) for your own country. This is especially true of the US.
And their errors and not subtle by any means. When they write something that is so wrong about you that every man on the street who even has cursory familiarity with the subject would reject as not even wrong, so far from the truth it's clear to the observer that the one who made these claims doesn't even have basic familiarity with the subject.
You've countered this argument with an appeal to authority (his word against thousands of researchers) - how fortunate was a person like Galileo who could just make people look into a telescope and show his numerous and highly distinguished opponents that they we wrong - unfortunately no such thing can exist for history. The next best thing I could recommend to US scholars is to have their work reviewed by top and highly respected local scholars for obvious errors, not biases of overarching narrative but, basic shit and continuity errors that common man on the street wold laugh at.
How could this be? Do I believe Americans to be specially dumb? Just like Big Tobacco pushing studies on the health benefits of smoking for pregnant mothers, and Coca Cola delegitimizing the view that sugar is bad, US historians have a vested interest in propping up US imperialism - or are acting as reactionaries saying everything the US (or white people) has ever done was purely evil, what you have is a partisan shouting match (also called activism), that is the exact opposite of scholarly work.