Lies they teach you in HIstory class
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I was taught that the US pledge of allegiance was started by the founding fathers and that it always had "under god" in it, which was added in the 50's. The pledge was really started by Francis Bellamy for any country that wanted to use it. It never mentioned the US before we put it in there, either.
The various arguements on this forum as long as those that occur when similar questions have been raised largely demonstrates why there are so many problems and "lies" in historical education. Simply put we opened too much of a door for people to insert politics and political correctness into it, leading in many cases to arguements about which lie is correct where the actual truth is no where to be seen.
Let me give you an example: People are argueing about the indians here, I haven't read ALL the statements in the last 11 pages (so this might be repetitive), but let me explain it to you.
For the record I live in Connecticut. I have worked for TWO Native American tribes (Mohegans and Mashantuckets) as well as visited a number of local landmarks and museums dedicated to colonial history, and the places where a lot signifigant events went down (like the Battle Of Fort Shantok) and places of note where local legends like Chief Uncas rode his horse over a waterfall (known as Uncas' leap).
Generally speaking like a lot of history and events involving the US we like to portray outselves as bad guys, decrying ourselves as horrible racists for example, while oftentimes presenting those we victimized in an unusually racist fashion with a paticularly retarded perspective that we somehow exploited.
For example, before I go into this I want to make something abundantly clear: All Native Americans are NOT the same, most of the White Vs. Indian stuff started here on the East Coast and the East Coast indians were NOTHING like the Midwest/Western/Plains indians that many people use for the streotypes.
The east coast indians lived in permanant dwelling called "Longhouses" and farmed. They very much understood the concept of land ownership and farming. There were enemities over land and such between tribes like the Mohegans and Pequots before whitey ever landed. What's more the native Americans down here go to lengths to make a point of this. The Mohegans having had one of the entrances to their casino made up to look like the inside of a Longhouse (and naming their steak resteraunt "The Longhouse") and the Mashantucket Pequots having actually constructed a traditional village inside of their museum to show people what things were really like.
Trust me, the natives didn't help feed the pilgrims and teach them local farming techniques/crops because they were a group of nomads who wandered around with no concept of land ownership. Of course people get all this confused with other more popular tribes and it's quickly exploited for political reasons and to inspire shame.
At any rate, things were peaceful for quite a while. There were tensions with indians viewing whites as another tribe and stealing women and such (taking your wife from another tribe was a way of life and a custom designed to avoif inbreeding) but nothing that exploded into massive scale violence.
The real problems started when the various European powers started to seriously engage in their D@ck waving contests in the New World. In search of manpower everyone tried to get as many tribes on their side as possible. The French were unusually good at this, but some like the Mohegans sided with the British colonists. Once things like "The French and Indian War" went down though things were irrevocably changed, as instead of neighbors and a "potential problem" Indians became elevated to "enemy". The French went home effectively, but their native allies? Well they WERE home and left behind to deal with the very POed victors.
To be honest with you, I'm not 100% happy with how we eventually wound up treating guys like Uncas (who fought the Mashantuckets for us... you should see the way the Mashantucket Pequots portray him in the movie they made for their museum... heh) but they did get greedy and start demanding/trying to force more than they agreed on.
See one thing about East Coast indians, as you can find out by looking at old deals that occasionally crop up in modern land disputes by the casinos and such: they were out for the best bloody deal they could get. "Here, take this shiny beads for those 200 acres of land?" no offense but all stereotypes aside, these guys were neither stupid or retarded. Some of the allied breakdowns too place simply because of people (being people) getting too bloody greedy too fast. Had Uncas slowed down and backed down a bit, history might have played out a bit differantly where it all started.
I say I'm not happy with how we treated Uncas, because despite everything he did a LOT for the colonists, fought a lot of battles, and lost a lot of men. Nobody could ever accuse him of not holding up his end of the alliance, and I think it could have been salvaged.
As far as simply "eradicating" the Indians, well let's just say that your musket wielding colonist was not exactly a T-101 going berserk in a police stattion. Especially down here on the East Coast, when some of the nastier stuff got going the natives had just about everything the colonists did. You look at the remnants of some of thse centuries old walls people built to protect against Indians and such, and you realize it wasn't a one sided slaughter. People were worried. What's more there never was a genocide, the Mashantuckets and Mohegans for example both survived (duh) they were just removed from being a major and numerous force.
When cr@p went down on the east coast, you had the indians start fleeing west. This lead to a lot of tribes coming into conflict with other tribes over hunting lands and such, and lots of indian-on-indian violence. Followed by periodic counter attacks on the whites seen as being responsible, followed by more direct aggressiveness to hunt the indians out of any area we moved to ahead of time, which of course lead to more backlash... etc... Yes this did lead to a certain "Vermin" mentality where traders used biological weapons and such to try and get rid of them.
The point here is that not all Indians had the mentality of nomads. The pilgrims did more or less pull themselves up by their boostraps to establish the infrastructure they had, and to broker the deals that lead to them becoming so heavily entrenched.
Contrarty to many politically correct portrayals white colonists did not say "thank you for saving us Squanto" and then right after Thanksgiving gut-shoot him and send the corpse back to his tibe wrapped in plague-soaked blankets.
Desicians were made on all sides, and truthfully things could have changed greatly if a few crucial ones had been differant. For example, how would history have played out had so many tribes not rallied behind The French because the French were offering them a better deal?
Had peace been maintained between Uncas and the Colonists how would things have changed then?
Oh yes, and one final point:
Robbing the Indians was never a real issue on the East Coast except perhaps as far as living space goes (and even with that there was plenty of it for a long time). When this all went down the colonies were considered a failure because unlike the Spanish in South America there wasn't much in the way of gold. Even silver would have been fine. The indians with all the silver and turquiose and all of that are much further west, and by the time they started being dealt with you had a lot of established attitudes, and robbery did become a motive.
In general you weren't going to get much by say robbing a Mashantucket burial ground.
Of course for a lot of reasons (many of them political) Indian tribes have begun to try and blend themselves into a sort of "meta culture" showcasing the best elements of all tribes while downplaying the negatives of various groups. This is what things like Schemitzen are all about and why they can be fairly contreversial.
A key point about the museums and such down here is that the Indians the colonists had contact with and where all of these events sprung from are NOTHING like the stereotypes, or the guys you see in movies which are typically based (again) on tribes well away from the East Coast.
The East Coast Indians were fairly solitary farmers (not nomads) lived in more or less permanant dwellings (Longhouses) and prepared for the differant seasons as opposed to moving to avoid them. The mentality was entirely differant.
Let me give you an example: People are argueing about the indians here, I haven't read ALL the statements in the last 11 pages (so this might be repetitive), but let me explain it to you.
For the record I live in Connecticut. I have worked for TWO Native American tribes (Mohegans and Mashantuckets) as well as visited a number of local landmarks and museums dedicated to colonial history, and the places where a lot signifigant events went down (like the Battle Of Fort Shantok) and places of note where local legends like Chief Uncas rode his horse over a waterfall (known as Uncas' leap).
Generally speaking like a lot of history and events involving the US we like to portray outselves as bad guys, decrying ourselves as horrible racists for example, while oftentimes presenting those we victimized in an unusually racist fashion with a paticularly retarded perspective that we somehow exploited.
For example, before I go into this I want to make something abundantly clear: All Native Americans are NOT the same, most of the White Vs. Indian stuff started here on the East Coast and the East Coast indians were NOTHING like the Midwest/Western/Plains indians that many people use for the streotypes.
The east coast indians lived in permanant dwelling called "Longhouses" and farmed. They very much understood the concept of land ownership and farming. There were enemities over land and such between tribes like the Mohegans and Pequots before whitey ever landed. What's more the native Americans down here go to lengths to make a point of this. The Mohegans having had one of the entrances to their casino made up to look like the inside of a Longhouse (and naming their steak resteraunt "The Longhouse") and the Mashantucket Pequots having actually constructed a traditional village inside of their museum to show people what things were really like.
Trust me, the natives didn't help feed the pilgrims and teach them local farming techniques/crops because they were a group of nomads who wandered around with no concept of land ownership. Of course people get all this confused with other more popular tribes and it's quickly exploited for political reasons and to inspire shame.
At any rate, things were peaceful for quite a while. There were tensions with indians viewing whites as another tribe and stealing women and such (taking your wife from another tribe was a way of life and a custom designed to avoif inbreeding) but nothing that exploded into massive scale violence.
The real problems started when the various European powers started to seriously engage in their D@ck waving contests in the New World. In search of manpower everyone tried to get as many tribes on their side as possible. The French were unusually good at this, but some like the Mohegans sided with the British colonists. Once things like "The French and Indian War" went down though things were irrevocably changed, as instead of neighbors and a "potential problem" Indians became elevated to "enemy". The French went home effectively, but their native allies? Well they WERE home and left behind to deal with the very POed victors.
To be honest with you, I'm not 100% happy with how we eventually wound up treating guys like Uncas (who fought the Mashantuckets for us... you should see the way the Mashantucket Pequots portray him in the movie they made for their museum... heh) but they did get greedy and start demanding/trying to force more than they agreed on.
See one thing about East Coast indians, as you can find out by looking at old deals that occasionally crop up in modern land disputes by the casinos and such: they were out for the best bloody deal they could get. "Here, take this shiny beads for those 200 acres of land?" no offense but all stereotypes aside, these guys were neither stupid or retarded. Some of the allied breakdowns too place simply because of people (being people) getting too bloody greedy too fast. Had Uncas slowed down and backed down a bit, history might have played out a bit differantly where it all started.
I say I'm not happy with how we treated Uncas, because despite everything he did a LOT for the colonists, fought a lot of battles, and lost a lot of men. Nobody could ever accuse him of not holding up his end of the alliance, and I think it could have been salvaged.
As far as simply "eradicating" the Indians, well let's just say that your musket wielding colonist was not exactly a T-101 going berserk in a police stattion. Especially down here on the East Coast, when some of the nastier stuff got going the natives had just about everything the colonists did. You look at the remnants of some of thse centuries old walls people built to protect against Indians and such, and you realize it wasn't a one sided slaughter. People were worried. What's more there never was a genocide, the Mashantuckets and Mohegans for example both survived (duh) they were just removed from being a major and numerous force.
When cr@p went down on the east coast, you had the indians start fleeing west. This lead to a lot of tribes coming into conflict with other tribes over hunting lands and such, and lots of indian-on-indian violence. Followed by periodic counter attacks on the whites seen as being responsible, followed by more direct aggressiveness to hunt the indians out of any area we moved to ahead of time, which of course lead to more backlash... etc... Yes this did lead to a certain "Vermin" mentality where traders used biological weapons and such to try and get rid of them.
The point here is that not all Indians had the mentality of nomads. The pilgrims did more or less pull themselves up by their boostraps to establish the infrastructure they had, and to broker the deals that lead to them becoming so heavily entrenched.
Contrarty to many politically correct portrayals white colonists did not say "thank you for saving us Squanto" and then right after Thanksgiving gut-shoot him and send the corpse back to his tibe wrapped in plague-soaked blankets.
Desicians were made on all sides, and truthfully things could have changed greatly if a few crucial ones had been differant. For example, how would history have played out had so many tribes not rallied behind The French because the French were offering them a better deal?
Had peace been maintained between Uncas and the Colonists how would things have changed then?
Oh yes, and one final point:
Robbing the Indians was never a real issue on the East Coast except perhaps as far as living space goes (and even with that there was plenty of it for a long time). When this all went down the colonies were considered a failure because unlike the Spanish in South America there wasn't much in the way of gold. Even silver would have been fine. The indians with all the silver and turquiose and all of that are much further west, and by the time they started being dealt with you had a lot of established attitudes, and robbery did become a motive.
In general you weren't going to get much by say robbing a Mashantucket burial ground.
Of course for a lot of reasons (many of them political) Indian tribes have begun to try and blend themselves into a sort of "meta culture" showcasing the best elements of all tribes while downplaying the negatives of various groups. This is what things like Schemitzen are all about and why they can be fairly contreversial.
A key point about the museums and such down here is that the Indians the colonists had contact with and where all of these events sprung from are NOTHING like the stereotypes, or the guys you see in movies which are typically based (again) on tribes well away from the East Coast.
The East Coast Indians were fairly solitary farmers (not nomads) lived in more or less permanant dwellings (Longhouses) and prepared for the differant seasons as opposed to moving to avoid them. The mentality was entirely differant.
Now you are missing my point here: Why I bring up Prague, and along with that, all the other uprisings in Hungary, Ukraine and especially Poland. I mention them because they show that soviet enforced socialism is a hellhole to live in, just as living under a swastika would have been. Of course the Warsaw pact crushed the nationalists, since it wanted to remain a united super alliance. Actually you prove my point: these oppressed nations had with their independece dissolved the warsaw pact. They lived in misery with no freedom, they wanted a better standard of living and freedom, the soviets didn't want them to have such treacherous anticommunist ideas and went ahead and oppressed them some more. It's a no-win situation for the people.lostclause said:
Then, about national socialism and job guarantee. The economic system was very similar in 1938 Germany and the soviet union. Unemployment levels were near to nil. In Germany, because the angry short man with a funny moustache wanted everyone to work in favor of the german war machine, the wermacht. In factories machines were replaced by manpower, employing nearly everyone. In the soviet union, everybody were stuffed to a workplace, they were given some tools and stuff and were told to work harder. It didn't matter what and how they did, as long as they were there. Both countries consentrated on heavy industry, manufacturing weapons, tanks, planes, bombs and all sorts of other things that go boom. Light industry, household appliances, everyday items etc were neglected, because they didn't serve the great leader's (or party's) master plan for world domination through an armed conquest.
In both systems, numbers looked good on paper, but in reality, in Germany, non-mechanised production lines could not answer the growing need for more things that go boom(repalcing the machines was a short term solution). In the soviet union people didn't do their job properly, since the outcome didn't matter. And because of the lack of competition, the products could be horrible and they would sitll be bought because they were the only ones on the market.
True, NSDAP used their work reform as a wave to surf to power, but in reality it was all a socialist style employment structure fraud.
Bonus joke: In the Soviet union, the wages are crap, but luckily they don't pay it.
It works for the The South Will Rise Again folks. It's interesting to consider that if the war were to be re-fought for some reason, the North would still win for the same reasons it did before: greater financial resources and greater industrial capacity.Cheeze_Pavilion said:
This is beginning to morph into a cold war debate but countries were being tied to the superpowers by this stage. There are documented cases of both sides using asssassinations, corruption etc. to ensure countries would follow their lead. Only France got away with disobedience from America because people would be shocked if De Gaulle was killed but in say africa or Latin America no-one cared. But this is beginning to get off topic.Spitfire175 said:
Ah yes, I forgot about German re-armament but did that extend to the rest of Europe? Then again they didn't have as long as the Soviets did to implement their system so maybe that question isn't really relevant. I wasn't aware that the Soviets were especially concerned with armaments (at this stage, staying away from the Cold War). Didn't they mainly concern themselves with either collectivisation or heavy industry to help agriculture (tractors I think were an important one)?
Again, I'm not talking about the cold war here, I'm talking about differences and similarities between Nazi germany and the soviet union. I'm not saying anyhting about wether the deeds were necessary or moral, of course they are all wrong. I'm just simply trying to point out that it's not explained as easily "it's a matter of perspective" which one was worse. And now I'm talking about for the people, not the numbers the politicians and generals wrote down. Both were horrid forms of goverment, where the people didn't have a chance to live as they pleased.(a normal life). You just go and see Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, the lot. Immensly beautiful places, wonderful people, but all run down, full of gigantic concrete blocks, much of the cultural heritage destroyed, many families separated and scattered.lostclause said:
"Same crap, different moustache"
Yes, the germans were quick to expand their industry. The scoda works in czehoslovakia, the gunworks in Rumania, Renault works in france, the FN workshops in belgium, all put to good use very swiftly.
And also yes, in 1938-9, the soviets were heading for war on full speed. After uncle Joe accidentally 3 people in a massive food shortage, the agriculture was left alone from 1934 and 1936 on, war was in sight (Stalin had palns already) and the people ate enough not to starve. You are right, the soviets produced lots and lots of tractors and were more interested in wheat that bullets, but after Germany revealed her new battleship "Deutschland" class, and thus wiped their butts with the versailles treaty, Stalin pressed the emergency armament button. And during the course of the war, Stalin hit the "super armament button" with a maul, and the soviets had found their thing: making things that break things.
From that on, the soviets never really went back to consentrating on agricultural or domestic products, etc. We all know the AK-47 and all of its offspring, the T-series tanks, MiG and Shukoi Fighters and Tupolev bombers. People didn't matter in either of the systems, production numbers for tanks did.
Exactly. Libertarians tend not to openly state their political position at first. They instead try to assert some broad consensus (like "Hey, dont you guys hate the bailouts!") and then when people say "Sure do!" they respond "See, your all Ron Paul supporters like me. Let's go masturbate to Ayn Rand."Cheeze_Pavilion said:
In this case it was, "Hey, look at how evil and leftist history class is."
So we responded, "Yes, it's full of accurate facts."
(Also, why do they think lefty's love Stalin? If anything, we hate Stalin more than right-wingers do because he utterly mutilated, raped, and butchered an idea that we (often) have sympathy for (Marxism; even if we dont all agree with it 100%).