The native Hawaiian military was oppressed so harshly, martial arts in general were declared illegal in Hawaii. The locals worked around it by disguising the basics of their military arts as dance. You might have heard of the hula…

You probably didn’t actually learn what capitalism is either until later, given that Marx is the most comprehensive breakdown of how capitalism functions, so much so that even the economics courses at universities use Marx for that part.

The intentional avoidance of teaching how the system works is essential to making sure people don’t question it. You don’t want your workers knowing how it works, merely accepting it. Understanding how it works is reserved for the ruling class.

Same. In the American education and political system it was really hard to encounter any anticapitalist critique until after 2016 when the Bernie campaign turned a lot of people on to the idea and it started getting talked about again (and even now it’s only brought up very occasionally outside of fringe websites like ours).

I tended to have communism/socialism condescendingly poopooed as “well-meaning” but “never really working because human nature”.

Anyways, time to learn about the french revolution and the reign of terror, which in no way should be viewed as an indictment of liberal revolutions the way the red terror does for socialism.

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My education I got in Ohio was abysmal about this shit. Most of it was just review after elementary. And I say that as someone who would read the textbooks cover to cover.

A people’s history of the US was probably pivotal for me properly turning left, didn’t find it until well afterwards though.

“this wasn’t my experience, so it didn’t happen”

or you could listen to the people telling you otherwise, but why do that?

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.

Jesus Christ, do not ever tell an English person that you think Winston Churchill was a monster. Worst mistake of my life. You’d swear I’d shat on his mum’s grave.

Am I remembering right where William and Kate tried to visit somewhere with one of these bullshit tours and were told to fuck off pretty much?

“we sent the convicts to australia, and because we decreed that it was empty, everything turned out fine”

I remember that old black and white footage of queen whoeverthefuck (victoria?) tossing little pieces of food to the ground for african toddlers to scramble for in the exact same way you or I would feed pigeons in the park.

Everyone also thinks the queen was just a passive tourist icon and not an actively supportive participant and cheerleader of that colonialism.

We’re very clear about our politics. There’s nothing to be confused about.

We’re communists, anarchists, and other socialists. Hexbear is a non-sectarian left space so there is some variation on details or by degrees but we all share a revolutionary socialist perspective. That includes support for AES states. That includes educating ourselves about AES states instead of blindly accepting western propoganda.

The only one simping anything here is you. You’re the one that uncritically repeats state department talking points and believes CIA propaganda. Go investigate these claims for yourself - plenty of resources have been made available in this thread alone, yet all you could think of was this deficient condescending comment.

A little bit, I mean they did do this:

Corporate media and politicians lie and present biased framing to get people to hate whoever they want them to hate. We’ve seen it too many times and anytime we try to push back or ask for sources we get labelled as bots, shills, or tankies. We don’t mind criticism of any state, but we expect it to be well documented and framed in a reasonable context, and not just rumormongering.

If China “simping” includes calling out propaganda then yes

Everything you hear about China from western sources is a lie. Everything westerners write about them is tainted by sources controlled by the US state department. China will save the world from capitalism or we will all die.

If this post was reversed and posted by some liberal on mander.xyz, and a hexbear came into the comments and said

“so y’all Western simps?”

The replies would not be pointed, supply evidence, or otherwise actually informative replies as you have below this comment right now

There would be 5 comments saying ‘whataboutism’ because you liberals have no ground to stand on, so you deflect

When we make posts like these, we have reasons for doing so beyond the vibes

We believe things for reasons, because they survive rigorous analysis and form accurately to the world as observed

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

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.

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.