Incredibly sad that so many people in the imperial core can only learn about history when their superhero entertainment slop barely mentioned it. Watchmen had a scene showing the Tulsa massacre and millions of white people were like, "Wait, that happened?" I guess we need Spider Man 9 to have a scene detailing the Iran-Contra scandal for most people to realize that Reagan wasn't a great guy.
I legit wasn't taught about that in school either, even in world history classes. The closest mention of the India-Pakistan split came from I think a movie of the life of Gandhi. Yes, fucking movies were a significant part of my education. American education is a straight up joke
Lol this is how I learned about it too. I think watching theGandhi movie was the only teaching we were given on modern India/South Asia
The American education system is trash and skips over the crimes of imperialism.
Even that framing is wrong. It was not part of "India", an Indian nation let along the nation we have today didn't exist until the same time as Pakistan. There was the British Raj, the Princely States, and other protectorates. How did the show handle it?
There's an offhand reference to the Raj being the state before the separation, but it's easily forgettable, especially if you aren't familiar with what that was.
A plot point revolves the hero's grandmother using superhero powers to find her way back to the last train to Karachi as a toddler. The hero experiences some flashbacks to this scene - people making tough decisions and splitting families, people climbing on top of trains since they're so full.
The same grandma has a line that's something like "I am a Pakistani but my heart lives in India" in the modern day.
I wonder how accurate that is. Like would someone in that situation consider it India so much as their home being claimed by India. Like an Irish Republican saying "I am Irish, but my heart lives in the United Kingdom" referring to their being born in Belfast. It's like that's still sticking to the idea of nations as monadic solid things, while talking about how colonialism and borders suck. Contradictory liberal stuff
Oh I mean there are millions who found themselves on the other side of partition. What I am curious about is the framing of partition as bad, while still not questioning the validity of "this town is India no matter what". An acquiescence to the absoluteness of the nation state.
The lead show runner is Pakistani, and I think a lot of the writing and directing teams are, too. I'm sure it reflects someone's experience, but it does seem a little weird.
Either way :ukkk: :)
In India today we would say the British Raj was India. We call the partition the Partition of India
Yeah but is the lamentation as much that they got taken from India or that these two distinct entities with hard borders exist with peoples homes falling into one or the other? Do Pakistanis who had been in forced population transfers think of their old homes as Indian, or Pakistan/Muslim parts of the subcontinent that are occupied? Cause a better example than Ireland I realize would be Palestinians living mere miles from their homes taken during the Nakba, and I'm hard-pressed to think of one who would call their house that is currently occupied by settlers "Israel". It concedes the legitimacy of the theft of land
Honestly I'm not sure how it is thought of in Pakistan or Bangladesh. I was just sharing how it is thought of in India. There are territories still in dispute so people would say those areas are occupied I guess. My roommate is Pakistani so I'll ask him later today though
Funnily enough my grandfather got held up at the airport in Europe because his passport said his birth city was in India. Which was not the case anymore so the staff thought it was fake or something
It was not part of “India”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_subcontinent
actually nvm your comment still makes sense
Yeah I made sure to specify. After all India is named after the Indus river which doesn't even run through the nation of India save for contested Kashmir. So acquiescing to the idea of a nation state of India as possessing intrinsic borders based on the sub-continent is weird
Yeah it sucks but what do you expect? The American education system does not touch any of this. People who live in the most propaganda soaked nation in history aren't going to have knowledge of stuff they aren't supposed to.
For anyone outside the US that's thinking "wtf", yes, history education in the United States is that bad, even in the few states with good public schools.
History and geography education in the US is much worse than this. Most people have no idea where Pakistan is, what cultures are there, what life is like in any way.
In 10 years' time, instead of shady guys in alley ways selling meth you get guerrilla Critical Race Theory lectures in some guy's basement.
Iran-Contra scandal
The boys talked about it recently and it has had a similar effect as the watchmen thing
Weirdly I actually did learn about Iran Contra in high school, and it was very much painted as a bad thing. But they didn't really go into detail about how the contrast were essentially death squads
The contra are specifically tools being used for a cover up in the show, there's a bit more to that scene coming later if you haven't watched it yet.
Being said its not like a show produced by commies or anything, the takes are cool for lib shit but it's not particularly nuanced
* me having heard about the Tulsa massacre 3 months before the trailer from a podcast * haha, wow, can't believe so many people don't know about this.
Well I mean unless you're specifically researching American historical atrocities it doesn't come up, schools leave out a lot of pertinent information
Tbh I didn't know this, although it makes a lot of sense. I also didn't realize that Germany is a country formed in like the mid to late 1800s, same with Italy. Kinda blew my mind
The modern state of Russia is from 1991. The real fun one is Americans not realizing Israel didn't exist before 1948.
I actually did learn about Israel's creation in 1948 which in retrospect is pretty surprising.
Russia libs have a weird belief that Russia is the USSR is Tsarist Russia, all the same but under different names.
It wouldn't surprise me if most Americans don't realize Germany in it's modern, reunified state dates back to 1990.
Most Americans don't know that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slaveowners :john-brown:
they super don't know that George Washington wanted to be an officer in the British army but wasn't allowed as he was a colonial. Or that the continental army was organised very much like a European army at the time not some ragtag militias
TBF you could just remind them about the fall of the Berlin Wall and they'd get it.
History is taught in an extremely boring manner. And even if it was taught in a better magnet, most people just don't care and our educational system isn't here to make us smarter. It's too make us get used to being bored out of our minds and good little worker drones
Our education system is a daycare so that parents can continue to be wage slaves during daylight hours. The diploma is incidental.
I don't blame anyone for not knowing the Tulsa stuff. It was barely taught anywhere and actively covered up when possible. I only knew it before watchmen because of a reddit TIL. American education is just shit like that. Especially if you have to be stuck in the shit hole south. My entire history education from elementary to middle school was that the civil war was about states rights and it was a bad thing the south lost. Wasn't until high school that they finally admitted slavery was a bad thing going on around then.
The show is pretty good, though. The imam tells Kamala that "good is not something you are, it's something you do". In a media landscape obsessed with ideology, that's a pretty rare sentiment.
i learned about iran-contra from researching the sandinistas after listening to the clash because american schools don't teach jack shit about anything that isn't usamerican. occasionally you might get ancient egypt or the roman empire.
And when you do get American history, it's a mix of "...and then the Natives taught the Pilgrims to grow corn and they became best friends and lived happily ever after :wholesome:" and "the southern states, who were totally honorable and just fighting for a lost cause, broke away because of states' rights."
oh yeah. i got taught the pilgrims like 3 times in middle and high school, and ome of them was after i read lies my teacher told me. my curriculum was better than most i think, because we at least covered some of the 'conflicts' from a perspective CV ritical of the colonizers, but we still didn't teach it as a genocide or anything.
Reading LMTTM in sixth grade was probably the first step in my radicalization
…and then the Natives taught the Pilgrims to grow corn and they became best friends and lived happily ever after
Fun fact: the reason that "Squanto" knew how to speak English, and became friends with the Pilgrims, is because he had previously been captured and sold into slavery by John Smith. He was freed from slavery by compassionate Spanish priests and returned to America to find that his entire village had died of western diseases. So that's why he became a translator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squanto#Abduction
I got interested in the Sandinistas (and subsequently the Iran-Contra affair) when I was a kid who was playing MGS Peacewalker for hours straight. Just the fact that a Commie guerrilla group was portrayed as part of the “good guys” blew my mind.
Comrade Kojima?
according to some greek news channel he's the guy who just assassinated abe, and he did it for devious communistic reasons
Watchmen had a scene showing the Tulsa massacre
you must be talking about the show, because I don't remember this from the movie
I watched this movie with a group when it came out and some of them were confused about the person getting shot in the opening scenes. It was JFK. After I said it was JFK one guy was still like "Who?" We were all adults.
It’s funny, these days I’d call myself a wannabe history guy. I like reading about history. But coming out of high school, for years and years, I wanted nothing to do with American history. To me the 250 year span of America was the most boring epoch possible. And part of that might be my personality, as I’ve always been interested in pre-modern societies, but part of that is how I was taught in school. Because we get such a sanitized version. Founding fathers? They were all great, there was no conflict there at all, let’s spend a week talking about all the good and just battles of the revolution. Civil War? It was fought over… slavery, let’s move on. Assassination of Lincoln? We’re going to spend an entire week just on that. Reconstruction? Nothing to see there. Now we’re going to spend two weeks talking about westward expansion and reading extremely dry letters written by pioneers. You want to know about the trends and forces that shaped these events? Ha, here’s a primer on how to pan for gold. Okay, let’s spend the rest of the class talking about how cool and good America was in the two world wars.
I had two good teachers. One history teacher spent an entire quarter on native genocide. And one government teacher who straight up told us that the gulf of Tonkin incident was a false flag.
I can’t remember if my high school offered a world history course. I didn’t even have to take one in college.
My favorite teacher in High School was the history teacher. Reflecting on some of the stuff he said in passing, he was probably quite right wing, but since we were in very lib Toronto he had to keep that shit to himself or risk angry phonecalls.
So instead, he really focused on critically examining history and which sources we read, and challenging established narratives. Specifically, to challange the established liberal concensus on Canadian and world history. I think in his mind this would naturally lead us to what he believed.
But in a roundabout way, what he was acutally teaching us was a materialist analysis of history, and a good portion of that class subsequently became Marxists.
for years and years, I wanted nothing to do with American history. To me the 250 year span of America was the most boring epoch possible
I was the same but anything european in general from the last 1000 years
I've since graduated to anything younger than 10,000 years old being boring
And I've come around to very recent history being interesting but only in the sense of analyzing the social relations and analogizing them to stuff that happens today.
