Vol wrote:I didn't have the luxury of a white-washed education. Rather, we had yearly Holocaust classes. Also, American history was mostly wars and atrocities, again, repeated. Columbus bad, Revolutionary War, Indians fucked over, chattel slavery, Civil War, Europe colonies bad, something something, WW1, WW2, Nazis Nazis Nazis, then we'd be out of time in the semester. Over and over.
Sure knew a lot about Jews being murdered en masse, didn't know the Eastern Roman Empire existed until I was an adult playing a Total War game. Knew a bunch of ways the Huwhite Man oppressed and murdered blacks/Natives, didn't know they did the exact same things to each other until we came along.
A miserable, flagellant telling of history serves nothing good, and our standards are already circling the drain.
From what you describe, you had a white-washed education, just a Western-centric one.
The celebration of Columbus is a total absurdity, today it has been proven that he was a couple centuries too late to cross the Atlantic - the Vikings did it first. What he did was starting to colonize the continent, it's not historical revisionism to say so - and while there is most definitely a scale of ruthless to peaceful when it comes to American colonists, Columbus was very far on the "ruthless" side. Not to mention how dumb to say he "discovered" America - there were millions of people living there already. What Columbus did was organize the first meeting between European and American civilizations, and for a variety of reasons - some he did not control, such as diseases, some he did control, such as mass slaughters and slavery - it ended up killing hundreds of thousand native americans, if not more.
Re: the vikings, that's also a proof of western-centrism. Even Scandinavian cultures are depicted as "other", which explains the many, many misrepresentations of Nordic culture we have. For many, "Viking" = "Conqueror" - and that's absolutely not true, at best Northerners were colonists planning to settle, but they never planned to take control over large territories, they did not have the people. And that explains in part why many think an Italian, not a Northerner, was the first to cross the Atlantic on a boat. Sounds more glorious that way.
American history is no different from other histories really. All countries have had a lot of blood in their past. When you think it was peaceful, it's probably because not much was written and we lost traces of the shit.
And you not knowing about the Byzantines is 100% Western-centric, because the colonist powers - Spain, England, France - always thought Roman Empire = Rome & Italy. Ignoring the fact it also was in the East of the Mediterranean, that it split at some point and that the Western half collapsed super quickly while the Eastern one endured for 1000 more years.
As for the "differential treatment" for white colonization, well, it's because it has been more common for white countries to fuck shit up in non white ones than the other way, simple as that. Not to say white populations never were treated badly in the past by various other ethnicities, but when you start a list of the most horrible shit in history with two columns, one "did it", and one "suffered it", then white people are way more often in the "did it". The Holocaust, Conquistadores, Belgian Congo, and yes, what Native Americans got.
Does not mean that everyone else on Earth has been sheepingly nice, mind you. Or that you as a person are responsible for the atrocities. It just means that people that look like you, in the past, were massive cunts. You can acknowledge it without endorsing it.
But those that are hellbent on patriotic fervor and pride and honoring thy ancestors don't take it well when people just show them historical facts that clash with the stupid, romantic image they have of the past. So they reject it instead of questioning it.
