I actually got a similar reaction once for saying the Crusades were bad, Catholics are fucking wild I tell you.

My convert Catholic dad once told me that all the crusades were “self-defence” against Islam. I guess there must have been a really big threat of an islamic invasion of Europe from the Baltics.

I actually got a similar reaction once for saying the Crusades were bad, Catholics are fucking wild I tell you.

Papists still getting off from the sack of Constantinople

One way to look at this is comparing the western media blitz every year around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident to annual western coverage of any of our many, many domestic atrocities.

We get an annual top-line reminder of how irredeemably evil China is because of a 30-year-old event that even U.S. journalism schools admit we misrepresent. But besides token coverage of “it’s X holiday,” or maybe some stories about “should we even recognize X as a holiday” (see the Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day discourse), there is precious little media reminding us of any of our own original sins. Instead, as you note, it’s relegated to history classes, which many Americans never seriously engage with and most Americans never revisit again.

it really depends on what state you live in, and what decade you grew up in. Southern states were particularly prone to whitewashing US history, especially with respect to colonialism and slavery. I did learn about slavery and indigenous genocide in school, but as an adult I still find the public education I received lacking, incomplete, and still somewhat whitewashed, even if it was loads better than the McCarthyist and Daughters-Of-The-Confederacy sponsored shit I would have gotten jammed into my brain in the 1950s.

For example here are some issues I had with my liberal education in the 1990s:

• it was pretended that the civil rights movement was only successful because of peaceful protesters like MLK and was almost ruined by totally unwholesome radicals like the Black Panthers
• it was pretended that only the south had an economic interest in slavery. It was entirely ignored that the North relied economically on slavery indirectly.
• the civil war was depicted as an ideological crusade by the north to end slavery. this is an inversion of the confederate myth that it was about “states rights.” The main objective of the south was to preserve slavery. The main objective of the north was to preserve the union. Neither side was abolitionist, it’s just that abolition became practical in 1863 as the war dragged on. Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation so he could draft black soldiers and further demoralize the south. he had never been ideologically an abolitionist, though some in his party to his left (like Thaddeus Stevens) were.
• it was pretended that all the problems of capitalism were entirely isolated to the gilded age, and that once we got a semblance of social democratic reforms (8 hour day, overtime pay, etc.) capitalism was now “fair.”
• labor militancy was altogether ignored. it was pretended that social democratic reforms were won entirely because silver-tongued reformists demolished capitalists with logic and reason, not because shit like the battle of blair mountain happened.
• it was depicted that indigenous genocide was mostly a matter of “both sides” being “equally mean.” i.e. that manifest destiny was mostly colonizers just protecting themselves from raids or something
• zero mention of CIA coups or any of the stuff declassified in the church committee
• zero mention of US supporting dictators abroad

Jeff Widener, an American photographer with the Associated Press, won a pulitzer prize for that photo, precisely because it was a still image. He also took a video, but the video tends not to be shown, because it reveals that the man wasn’t run over. Then you have the fact that all the US press corps showed up right as the protests took off, a lot of dark money from NGOs and western think tanks was floating around, and then deliberate conflation of the worker riots (in which PLA troops were lynched outside the square) being confused with the mostly peaceful events inside the square. Then you have that interview with the protest leader where she was crying and basically saying she was trying to provoke a massacre so that the protesters could be seen as martyrs. She got her wish, even if the massacres didn’t actually occur, since that’s how the west depicts those events. Then there the highly suspicious fact that nobody talks about the fact that you had many different types of protester simultaneously. Some were opposed to liberal reforms, privatization, etc, (the workers rioting outside the square) while other protesters wanted more of that stuff (the student protesters inside the square). Then you have some racist elements mixed in with the student protests I’ve heard, i.e. that there were some Chinese who were protesting because they didn’t like the presence of African exchange students at their universities. I don’t know how true that is, but I’ve heard it a few times.

And the comments would say: He sHoUlD hAVe JuSt CoMpLiEd

somebody actually did splice together the video when the Chinese tank goes around the guy, and the footage on the other side is from the BLM protests when a cop car just drives into the crowd