I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
I’m afraid that’s far from where the mythology ends. There were 14 presidents before Washington under the government of the Articles of Confederation, we don’t talk about them because we might question circumstances under which that government was ended, which was basically a Federalist coup in response to an Agrarian Uprising and a cash grab by the rich. We don’t talk about why Georgia was founded as a white’s only state, why the Declaration of Independence came suspiciously on the heels of a British Court case bringing into question the legality of slavery in British territories, or how the concept of whiteness was linked with freedom of religion back in the days of Bacon’s Rebellion. Seriously, I just deleted like a whole other paragraph so I wouldn’t swamp ya.
might wanna start here. Real History: Myths of the Founding Fathers (FULL) Michael Parenti - YouTube
Slavery is never even mentioned as being at all relevant to the American Revolution.
My US History class started with the revolution (no mention of anything more than a couple years before) and only started talking about slavery in the lead up to the civil war. You’d have thought it was something that only appeared after the revolution, they act as if it was a completely unrelated issue, even though it was one of the leading causes.
But if you teach kids in school “The US was founded to stop Britain from taking our slaves away” instead of “No taxation without representation” they want to burn the whole place down and start over.
Oh yeah, the way we we’re taught about the American Revolution and that time period just erases like a general undercurrent of uprisings. We’re taught what fulfills the narrative and everything else is left by the wayside. Even stuff we fess up to like Native American “relocation” is more like a limited hang out that lets them gloss over some of the more wild laws and one sided violence that was and still is perpetrated.
Does this mean the America’s revolution against England was never justified?
Probably not. I mean fuck monarchies and all that, but that myth of a righteous revolution is definitely bullshit. One of the big reasons behind the increase of taxation was to pay for the defense of the colonies against other European powers while the colonies themselves were trading with them. I don’t think there was really any “good” guys among the players between the Brits and the rich Colonists.
didn’t the english bourgeois revolution happen like a century earlier too?
Yeah, somewhere around there. That’s less outside my wheelhouse though. I’m still trying to unlearn all the US mythology I was taught as a kid.
Does this show up in the journals or correspondence of any of the founders?
So I’m not aware of it, but there’s a lot I’m not aware of either. There was a growing clash that was brewing between the colonies and England. People of the colonies were largely seen as uncouth-ish because of their slave owning ways while also England was starting to have to rely on slaves in their armies in the Caribbean ( it think) that they would then free because the colonists were unreliable. And so there was a lot of back and forth going on at the time around ending slavery, some because it was seen as below the standing of the people of England, some just to piss off the colonists. Somerset’s case led to a handful of copycats, but probably one of the biggest events around slavery leading up to that time period of the Declaration was Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation.
I think one of the big things to remember about this time is that it’s not like now where everything is happening at the speed of the internet, which people often forget. Communication wasn’t nearly as fast so things had to occur at much longer time scale. We kinda fall into a weird way of looking at the past as a number of dates and not really think about how many events had to happen over a period of time for the build up of human interaction that lead to those events. A bit like libs with the Russian/Ukraine conflict only beginning when Russia invaded.
btw I got a lot of this from Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. It’s an incredible read on uprisings of the enslaved and how it ties into the American Revolutionary period. He starts looking at things about 100 years before the declaration and covers so much stuff that school had never even touched. Interestingly enough it kinda pairs pretty well with the pirate show Black Sails because of the importance of the Caribbean uprisings.
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The 13th Amendment, still in effect (and therefore defended) is the “I’m not racist, but…” of the US constitution.
I’m sorry, but arguing that the history of a country that was built around a mythology of manifest destiny and white supremacy is irrelevant to the country’s current actions of white supremacy and manifest destiny is pretty silly.
But if you’d prefer something more relevant. There’s always The Jakarta Method.
k. let’s just do the last 20 years.
the death of a million+ people in Iraq and Afghanistan. the destruction of the Libyan state and immiseration of the people there. the social murder of a million+ people (mostly old, poor and black) domestically due to letting covid rip to
make line go upsave the economy. the social murder of millions more internationally to protect bill gates’s intellectual property. the social murder and immiseration of countless people every year by treating housing and health care as commodities. the bolivian coup & subsequent empowerment of fascists there that murdered tens of thousands. the school of americas-trained death squads running guatemala. the coup in honduras in 2009. the blockade on cuba & venezuela that’s murdered probably close to a million (if 90s iraq is any analog) and immiserated countless more. the us-backed brazilian coup that empowered christofascists there to burn the amazon and do their own genocide there.and it’s not like 1873 to 2003 was any different, so maybe get your head out of your ass