Holy fuck they are wrong. Socialists know their history. Like an astounding amount of history.
It's so damn funny every time I see a comment like that. There are 2 overlapping ways people become socialists, either by tons of bullshit within their lived experience or by learning a ton of different history and having an existential crisis over it.
my family was sucking off the founding fathers and the constitution. when i told them about the whiskey rebellion they got mad at me lol. these people cannot handle anything other than pop history. if i gave them a copy of Settlers they would probably die of heart attacks
I would do Peoples History of the US so they don't die of heart attacks lol.
Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, a marxist history of the USA. maoists and third worldist types really like it
i don't actually have a physical copy, sorry. have you tried an e-reader? way better than reading off of a computer screen
Just gonna copy the rant I went off on from like 3 weeks ago:
This is so funny to me because socialists tend to be far better read and more educated in history and economics than the libs who say this. They think “learn more” means that the lessons you should take from life is that it does not get better, not that we must fight for a better world right now.
But almost without fail, the only history these people know about places outside the US are American propaganda about our wars, and anti-communist propaganda about places like Venezuela, Cuba, China, etc. They don’t really know anything about Central America, Africa, etc and the places we’ve staged regime change without getting into more traditional warfare.
They know nothing about the labor movement, the way striking won workplace protections, and how our employers have worked tirelessly since the very second they allowed these concessions o undo them.
They only see the MLK, Jr. speeches organized with hundreds of thousands in attendance, but never know that he was deeply hated by white America as a whole, and that the movement faced heaps of state and vigilante violence against them.
They forget that Stonewall was an actual, legit riot against the police, because now Pride is some corporate sponsored charity march that often invites the fucking police to march alongside corporations who donate to the LGBT lobby (who only seem to care about middle-class gay and lesbian couples).
It frustrates me to no end when I interact with people who want political activists to play nice all the time. They always think they are more knowledgeable about things, and it is almost never true. And when they do actually know their history, it tends to be that they were against the progress that happened while the fight was happening, but have no ability to think further ahead about what change is actually needed. They often still hold reactionary and bigoted views, and they will refuse to admit it outright.
Whoo…that was a bit of a rant.
Everyone that says that gets their history from either YouTube or the History Channel
I love when boomers are like "you don't know what you're talking about, I was actually alive when the Soviets were plotting to nuke us at any moment". Just ask them "oh, so since you know more than me I guess we can have a discussion about the differences in economic outcomes between War Communism, the NEP, Stalin's 5-year plans, Khrushchev's economic reforms, and Perestroika?"
Also, the Soviets were if anything too restrained in their foreign policy.
Not even, they got their history in an american high school classroom and never actually read a single book, essay or article relating to history since.
Most people don't do the reading for high school classes, so they've likely never actually rea a history book of any kind.
This could be a benefit depending on the textbook and the teacher. Most US High School history curriculums don't reference any original source material whatsoever, and most textbooks are watered down to cause as little controversy as possible in order to be marketable. At best, a student might be exposed to original sources in the course of writing an essay, if they don't simply take everything Wikipedia says for granted and copy the citations.
socialists need to know the exact dates of everything related to socialism to be taken seriously but liberals can talk out of their ass and people wont bat an eye
I do more partial differential equations arguing with ancaps than I ever did in third year quantum mechanics.
