• Gorilladrums@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I find it really annoying how Americans are so ignorant of history that they literally cannot make any historical comparisons outside of Nazi Germany. This is the only historical point of reference in American discourse. All historical comparisons default back to it because Americans don’t know anything else, not even their own history… like the Japanese Interment camps. Recorded human history is around 10,000 years old and it has everything, but somehow people in this country think there are no historical events or time periods to draw parallels from outside of what happened in central Europe during Hitler’s reign.

    • theparadox@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I find it really annoying how Americans are so ignorant of history that they literally cannot make any historical comparisons outside of Nazi Germany.

      To be fair, all we should need to say is “It’s kind of fucked up to do <fucked up thing being done>” and people should agree and it should stop. Instead, so much of the media and so many propagandized conservatives are just denying it all and making up excuses. Historically, Nazi’s have been universally seen as unequivocally evil so it’s the only comparison that we think might get through.

      Now though… Musk can fucking salute Hitler twice in a row at the presidential inauguration and calling it out is contentious. We’re frankly out of ideas.

    • Legge@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Unfortunately, the history taught here (at least where I grew up, but I believe it is like this in most parts of the country) is so US-centric and pre-WWII topical that we didn’t learn anything else. I don’t think I learned about the Japanese internment camps until law school and I was in “advanced classes” throughout my pre-university years.

      Of course people would educate themselves outside of class, but there’s a variety of reasons that doesn’t really happen. It’s quite sad and unfortunate we don’t learn about the other atrocities (even those directly caused by the US). I wish it were different.

      Slightly off-topic, but we’re not even taught the realities of our own history that we’re supposedly taught about. Example: the civil war. If you ask many people in certain southern states (and surely some more northern ones too), the reasons they give for the war do not match reality. Or at least they do not come close to telling the whole story. The stranglehold on our education system is bonkers