Lies they teach you in HIstory class

[sneakypenguin]

Lie #8:
USA is founded on Christian beliefs and principles, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence were all Christians.

Umm really I hear this all the time but where are these people? I know not all where christians but reading all the documents and letters amongst each other God, morals, Christianity, are all throughout them. So to declare that the US wasn't founded on "Christian" beliefs seems to me a bit off.

Most of the founding fathers were either pantheists or believed that God does not interfere with us, so them putting in Christian "beliefs" in the DoI would be odd. Also, them writing texts about God and so on, on their own is a different thing.
Besides, Christianity can't call dibs on "morals". It is possible for the founding fathers to just be decent human beings and wanting good behaviour(even if that sounds quite controlling).

When you say most of the founding fathers can you cite more than one or two. I mean reading lit from back then and to me it appears religion=life. It seems to be a new trend to say the US wasn't a Christian nation but dang the norton anthology lit books I had in sophmore lit almost every piece of writing was based around religion. Thomas morton of merrimount (sp) being the exception that comes to mind. Maybe it's in how we see things but when I look at that period in American history I see Christianity (in some form or another)in most everything.

 

[sabotstarr]

Umm, Lie one is wrong. They are left and right wing, they're just opposite in names and methods. Just because they have a couple of similarities doesn't mean they're not opposites (for example they're both governments!)
Lie two is also wrong. Europe was under soviet yoke for longer than just stalin, and even so 'better' is not something that can be measured in body counts. Also you're forgetting perspective, it was better for say Jews bacuase just about anything was better than the nazi's.
I was never taught 3 or 4 so I'll keep quiet on them.

no, stalin also killed many jews, but because he killed so many and in not so sinister ways(he just overworked them in sub-zero temperatures) he comes off as not being such a bad guy.

 

[Agayek]

That did always confuse me yes. You see I think they were trying to combine two things that don't fit together very well. Anarchy in a pure sense is a society where there is no government whereas Communism has a government to enforce that everyone gets equal protions. Also as opposed to Communism, people have to work for what they get so no, in anarchy not everyone has the same because not everyone does the same work.

That's just it though, Communism, on paper, is Anarchy. Karl Marx's original vision was that the government, once the proletariat had risen up and seized the government, would evenly distribute the wealth and ownership of all public goods. At that point, the government would no longer be needed because people would share these public goods/wealth and a classless society would arise. This society would have no need for government, since everyone was cooperating fine.

In practice, however, that simply does not work. It goes against base human nature to assume that everyone will be altruistic, especially those with power, so a Communist revolution has never reached the point where the government can dissolve, which leaves us with the totalitarian state commonly seen.

 

[headshotcatcher]

I have one lie to add to the list, though it is just as much biology as history.

Birds did not evolve from Therapod Dinosaurs (such as raptors or compsognathus). The theory was based purely off speculation based off generic, external appearances. Internal evidence such as hip structure (and therefore how breathing occurs since the pelvic boot in the saurian hip is thier answer to the diaphram a birds vastly complex breathing system is a modification of) and even the chronological evidence (earliest birds predate dinosaurs) are big red flags in that theory. *sniff* I could never enjoy Jurasic Park as a kid because I spent most of the movie picking up the pieces of my exploding brain...well OK, it was still awesome...but it hurt my brain.

Exactly the point I was trying to make, and as far as the Birds Evolving into Dinosaurs thing is concerned, I could give a ton of examples to things like that where the Scientific community either falsified data or made assumptions that were wrong.

Then what did they evolve from? Dino's like Pterydactyls? Or Archaeopteryx? (which I thought was a well established theory already?

They did not evolve from therapod dinosaurs this is a common misconception. They share a common ancestor.

Thats not what I asked

 

[Brett Alex]

That did always confuse me yes. You see I think they were trying to combine two things that don't fit together very well. Anarchy in a pure sense is a society where there is no government whereas Communism has a government to enforce that everyone gets equal protions. Also as opposed to Communism, people have to work for what they get so no, in anarchy not everyone has the same because not everyone does the same work.

Ah, see, maybe its not a lie, maybe its open to interpretation. In the Manifesto, Marx never wished for strong government. Idealistically, he presumed the people would be willing to share things out equally themselves. This was where the Bolsheviks split from traditional communist values, stating that provisional and strict governmental control needed to be set up to create a transitional phase between aristocracy and true communism because the people could not be trusted to do it themselves.

In essence, the Anarcho-Communist society (Referring to Nestor Mahkno's work in the Ukraine here), said "bollocks to that, we can too trust the people," Pretty much, it was everyone getting equal things (hence the 'Communism') because thats what everyone wanted, and they didn't require a government to force them into it (Hence the 'Anarcho').

After all, the word 'Anarchist' means 'absence of judges', and loosely came to mean absence of government. Now it carries connotations of selfishness, lawlessness and depravity that aren't technically accurate.

 

[Robert0288]

Stalin killed everyone and anything he wanted. Massacare of 14,000 Polish army officers and Cadets in Katyn forest, Death marches to Sibera, Gulags, Mass internal purges, Cutting off food supplies to ukraine and watching a country tear itself to peaces.

All sorts of nasty things, though he was fighting the Nazi's so that made him a good guy....

 

[lostclause]

snip

I've already elaborated on that post. I'll edit that fact into the original post.
I think we subscribe to slightly different classification systems, that's all. Interesting point about communism and anarchy though.

 

[TheSunshineHobo]

In a capitalist economy the rise and fall of the market Is inevitable. Any form of capitalism, be it demand-side, socialist, supply-side, or laize fair, it will rise and fall. governments can intervene to lessen the blow of a crash, but they cannot stop them. All economies feature some form of a rise and fall system. Canada uses welfare capitalism which is one step to the right of socialism and America uses a supply-side doctrine which is a little more right than Canada, as such Canada has more government intervention than the US does, but it still suffers from the effects of a capitalist economy.

That is just the thing, it is the government interference that got us into the problem in the first place. They think they can get us out of debt by printing more money. Now with the bailouts but that is a whole other matter. Also there was a time when our money was backed by gold but not any more meaning our money has no true value.

The Great Depression was caused by a lack of involvement, as was our current crisis. The gold standard was not the end all be all either. The gold standard limits the global economy drastically. If we were to go back to the gold standard the amount of money available globally would be less than the amount currently circulating in the US. It is true that governments couldn't simply print money when in a recession, but it also mean that governments can't stimulate the economy during a recession. If a country did get hit hard the government couldn't do anything about it. The gold standard relies on the price of gold. What if the price plummets? Sorry, your cash means nothing. The gold standard is just as weak as any other monetary system.

 

[Agayek]

Um... yet another wrong. The civil war happened because the Southern states seceded. This happened because they were opposed to Lincoln's views. Which of Lincoln's views were they most opposed to? Slavery. They feared he would end it. They feared his other views more, but slavery was #1.

No.

They seceded because they believed the federal government did not have the right to make that decision. If memory serves, it was actually a legal move in the Constitution. The states had reserved the right to secede from the Union if they so wished.

Did slavery play a major part in that? Of course. The slaveowners (which were a very surprisingly small amount of the population) did not want the government to dictate they can't own slaves and ruin their cheap labor. The rest, something like 90%+ of the population down there, fought because they didn't want people who had nothing to do with them to dictate their lives. Lincoln couldn't allow that to stand and so Fort Sumter went down and the Civil War began.

 

[minarri]

Lies #45-509: Anything Japanese textbooks teach regarding the Pacific War. What massacres in Manchuria? They didn't "invade" Korea, they "entered" it. etc. etc. etc.

 

[dwightsteel]

Lie #7
The Pilgrims were fleeing a land of religious persecution (England) to establish a land of religious freedom and tolerance.

Yeah, hanging and crushing people to death for being 'witches' is really tolerant.

They weren't escaping persecution from England. They were mostly from Holland and Norway. And they weren't really persecuted. People in those countries didn't really care what you believed. In fact, they left because they wanted to get away from people they thought were promiscuous heathens.
That and most people confuse the action of the Pilgrims with those of the Puritans.

The Boston Tea Party wasn't an act of patriotic rebellion. England actually lowered the price of tea at the time to compete with smugglers, who were dominating the tea trade at the time. The Tea Party was done by smugglers to send a message to the Crown. The message? Quit fucking with our enterprise.

Paul Revere made it less then half way before he was caught by the Brits. The ride was completed by a doctor named Samuel Prescott. He was the person who warned Boston of the impending British attack.

 

[lostclause]

no, stalin also killed many jews, but because he killed so many and in not so sinister ways(he just overworked them in sub-zero temperatures) he comes off as not being such a bad guy.

What I'm saying is that he did not advocate genocide and those Jews were not killed merely for being jewish (you might say the charges were due to his anti-semitism but that's another argument). Thus you can easily see how, from a Jewish, gypsy or Slav perspective, life under Stalin was better.

 

[The_Angry_Haruhist]

Um... yet another wrong. The civil war happened because the Southern states seceded. This happened because they were opposed to Lincoln's views. Which of Lincoln's views were they most opposed to? Slavery. They feared he would end it. They feared his other views more, but slavery was #1.

Actually, Lincoln was a moderate when it came to slavery. While he personally disliked slavery, he only wanted to prevent the spread of slavery across the Union, not dismantle it.

And state's rights were the underlying issue in the Civil War, a state's right to endose slavery and hold the right to nullify federal laws (Your can thank Jefferson for the that idea).

 

[Charisma]

FACT:

God didn't create the heavens and the Earth.

Obama did.

 

[Cortheya]

Christopher Columbus didn't fucking discover North America. He thought he was in the Indies south of Asia. The first people from Europe to discover North America were the Vikings.

I knew that from a young age....people like to believe that a single hero did something great

 

[chiggerwood]

:|[/quote]

Yea, I think I remember something about that. Also,in the US we claim that WWII started in 1941 when Europe puts the date at 1939,while Hitler gained power even before that.[/quote]

Hitler gained power in 1933, there was full scale war in Europe in 1939, in 1941 the U.S. was attacked by Japan. which brought the U.S. into the war.

 

[magnuslion]

Christopher Columbus didn't fucking discover North America. He thought he was in the Indies south of Asia. The first people from Europe to discover North America were the Vikings.

More to the point, its kind of hard to "discover" a land that has an indigenous people. otherwise I would go and "discover" the Bahamas and claim them in the name of Liony-Goodness Land.

also, the reason Jefferson and Washington both got involved in the Revolutionary war had to do with the fact that the Crown limited expansion into Indian lands, and both of them had huge investments in land speculation.
and although as an American I am bitter about this, I also accept the fact that every other country is just as fucked up, in different ways.

 

[Jenkins]

Christopher Columbus didn't fucking discover North America. He thought he was in the Indies south of Asia. The first people from Europe to discover North America were the Vikings.

wrong.

the first people to find north America were native Americans

im nitpicking haha