For me, that the Cold War began with the US wanting to stop Stalin's plans of imposing communism on the world. Did anybody else's curriculum portray Trotsky in a positive light? lmao it's funny to imagine the weirdos who write those textbooks were trots.
"We had to nuke Japan to end the war quickly" was a big one. No mention of our fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, much less the horrors endured by civilians throughout occupied Europe and Asia. Certainly, no effort to draw a line between our conquest of Japan and subsequent wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Another whopper was my 6th grade math teacher claiming she received less take-home pay after her income went up and blaming this on progressive income taxes. She proceeds to work it out on the board, saying "Look, sure, I make an extra $1000 but then my tax rate goes from 25% to 28%, so now I'm actually poorer". Like, yeah, this is lib shit. But she was a math teacher ffs. I don't know if she was just fucking with us or if she genuinely believed it. But she refused to acknowledge effective tax rates.
The “We had to nuke Japan otherwise it would have extended the war” was definitely a big one.
A lot of people have no idea what they’re talking about with taxes. My wife one time said what your teacher said but she promptly realized how dumb it sounded and never mentioned it again.
I still have to tell people at work that getting a pay raise is always good, you will never lose more money on taxes then you are taking home. Its such a simple concept but so many people seem to have no idea how it works.
The most valid form of this argument is if you happen to go over a cut-off for a benefit. I'm not really sure what they are in America.
The Welfare Cliff is a big problem, but it largely comes in the form of reduced benefits (losing SNAP, losing Medicaid, losing HUD subsidies, etc). You're not going to be in a situation where your marginal tax rate on the next dollar is 100+%.
I'm a big WW2 idiot- what's the counterargument to nuking Hiroshima/Nagasaki?
The Japanese were already in a hopeless situation strategically and would’ve likely surrendered at around the same time. A ground invasion of Japan probably wouldn’t have happened.
Also it seems that Japanese high command didn’t give that much importance to civilian deaths resulting from the nukes and may not have been as relevant to their surrender as they’re made out to be.
Overall it’s the certainty with which we are told that “we had to nuke them or else a million soldiers would’ve died” which was just post-war apologia and not a contemporaneous justification.
I'd heard the Japanese were in pretty awful strategic state, but i guess the common belief is that the military elite were so radicalised that they were willing to continue being imperialists to the very end, regardless how doomed their cause was. Would that be considered true?
“We had to nuke Japan to end the war quickly”
I've had to argue with grown ass adults about this, even fairly recently. so troubling.
Yo that "jumping up a tax bracket" shit was so pernicious
High school history — in China.
- "Equality in opportunity (capitalism) is based, equality in result (socialism) sucks."
- "European expansionism was justified cuz the rest of the world was backwards."
- "The Second Opium War wouldn't happen if the Chinese simply respected diplomatic norms."
- "The Boxers Rebellion was a bunch of illiterate lower class superstitious xenophobic maniacs who set China back by decades." (This one trigs me the most now. Literally the Boxers stopped China from being directly colonized by the West. They cut power lines and uprooted rail tracks NOT BECAUSE THEY HATED TECHNOLOGY AS WE WERE TAUGHT but because they understood how technology worked!!! :agony-immense: )
Yes, many Chinese teachers were super :LIB: when I was growing up. I imagine the situation is much better now after Xi came to power. Lord the indoctrination.
“The Second Opium War wouldn’t happen if the Chinese simply respected diplomatic norms.
ahh yes, the diplomatic norm of bowing to the br*ts :ukkk:
I was really hoping this was a bit and at the end you'd reveal that "China" meant "Republic of China".
Wow, those brainwormed Chicago School economists Deng invited in were really just the tip of the iceberg huh.
I think people born in the 80s in China tend to be particularly more lib than previous and later generations. The sort of general zeitgeist of the 80s was indeed very Deng
Capitalism is not equality of opportunity. What a blatant lie. I didn't have the same opportunities that a billionaire's kid had. I guess most libs would say that because it's not illegal for me to have infinite money then I have the "opportunity" to be rich.
“Money is democratic! You can be a billionaire too technically!” :agony-wholesome:
Local — I should clarify that none of these were stipulated by the textbook (which was and still is centrally directed). It was the teacher’s own systematically lib & bootlicking interpretation. But at my school a lot of history teachers think and teach that way, and it didn’t seem there was anyone holding them accountable for what they said in the classroom
The Boxers being turned into the Luddites of China was something I wasn't expecting.
The phrase “boxers” is still used from time to time online nowadays as a diss against radical lefties, nationalists, people who express discontent with globalization — basically anyone not lib
Honestly that's worse than just not knowing about socialisim. Dude knew the truth and just went "nah I'm gonna continue being shit".
This is one of the most brilliant lies I've ever heard. It's just so blatantly designed to tear a wedge between minorities and those promoting policies that would disproportionately help minority communities.
The neutral phrasing makes it worse. It's not condemning the Nordic Model, so it reads as both 'if we want to tolerate minorities, we must accept poverty' and 'if we want to eliminate poverty, we need to impose white supremacy.'
I have to imagine the end goal of this is to have middle class liberals applauding impoverished immigrants working 80 hours a week as a sign of progress and tolerance, while an army of Bernie-Bros-turned-Nazbol stands ready to crush any any rebellious workers.
I can't help but look at it and think "I'd rather suffer under an objectively worse system because I don't want any 'urbans' benefitting from my hard-earned money!"
Personally, I never got much education on WWI and the rise of communism; we just 'glossed over' all of that. Most of my history education (in an admittedly solid public school) was focused around early US history, with some skipping around in the 20th century; presumably, said skipping was to avoid any 'political' landmines.
History and politics classes were always very separate, even in college.
History and politics classes were always very separate, even in college.
that's how they rob history of relevance and make it boring
I had one section on the Russian Revolution in my world history textbook. Also a few books on it and 3 Lenin biographies in the library.
We also had to read Animal Farm and other "anti-communist if you completely miss the point" books.
Overall, it seems there were anti-communist or at least pro-individualist tendencies in the education, but enough information available to circumvent it.
While Hitler's ideas and intentions were worse, Stalin was actually responsible for killing more people. AP world history lol :stalin-garrison:
"Stalin is worse than Hitler" really has to be top 3 insane things I heard in high school for sure.
One of my history teachers told us Obama faked his birth certificate and the Sandy Hook shooting was staged to take away guns. Standard chud shit but hearing it from a teacher makes it way worse.
A few things come to mind:
That the early settlers of the Americas were doing so because they just loved freedom so gosh-darned much, rather than companies trying to make a buck
That the USA fought the Nazis because we are "good" and they are "evil", rather than they let Pearl Harbor happen so they could fight Japan over imperial "rights" in the south pacific and only declared war on Germany after Hitler declared war on the US
And just the whole way of teaching of history as a linear flow of progress
woof, I heard that monkey line in high school health class too (2006 ish)
We covered the Russian Revolution very briefly and the teacher said that Rasputin by Boney M was a bad song
lol why would a teacher even waste time on that.... but that song slaps :xi-clap:
One of my history teachers showed us this song just because it's awesome and she wanted to make sure we knew about it
LMAO now that you mention it, if I had to recall the Russian Revolution from history class, it would be something like "There was this extremely horny dude named Rasputin who cucked the Tzar and everyone knew he was cucking the Tzar so they overthrew the government out of embarrassment."
