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I came up with this question initially while pondering the Balkans; iirc one pundit once said of the region "they produce so much history, they have to export it." Then I started thinking further on history that's still loaded to this day, that still stirs up passions, like how you can probably get a shouting match going in Johannesburg by taking a side as to whether the Afrikaners or the Zulus arrived first at a given chunk of territory. India is pretty famous for this too; one American academic wrote a huge book on Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire in the 1700s, and one little tiny passage that mentioned doubts as to Shivaji's paternity got his book banned, and the offices he studied at in Mumbai burned to the ground. Now Americans, a lot of folks say we have zero sense of history, and to a degree it's true that Americans don't tend to have 500+yr strong opinions about individual battles, but I submit there are still a number of topics that can get people's hackles up, and figured it's worth a thread. Here's the cutoff: name some historical event or personage where, in the right setting, you could start a physical fight in an American bar by taking the wrong opinion. So for example, let's take Robert E. Lee. I'm pretty sure that in the right parts of the South (or Southernized rural America outside the South) you could get legit punched in the face in a bar for calling him a traitor. And on the flipside, I'm pretty sure that if you went into a majority black bar in Mobile and asked those around you to toast Robert E. Lee on his birthday, folks might start throwing punches. The Civil War, writ large, is probably the largest source of these, but feel free to cite specific persons or disputes about the Civil War that stir up the most emotional poo poo. But let's also ponder events outside the War of Northern Aggression and/or War to Own People, and for kicks let's open it up to even non-US history, since there are a few key external issues some Americans are still sore about, like how I witnessed Irish-American US Marines throw a fit when a British veteran officer of The Troubles came to give a counterinsurgency lecture to our unit. Let us ponder, what pre-1980 history still gets Americans all stirred up to the point of smacking a stranger with an MGD bottle?
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Feb 2, 2018 19:05
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The Alamo in Texas. People get really pissed if you point out it was a bunch of slaveholders dying pointlessly for their right to own slaves in defiance of a treaty they signed promising not to institute slavery in Texas.
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Feb 2, 2018 19:26
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Pointing out that the Soviet Union did the bulk of the work in WW2 and the Americans mostly did mop-up duty in Europe.
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Feb 2, 2018 20:11
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Live near the Great Lakes and talk about Canada's military success during the War of 1812
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Feb 2, 2018 20:48
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Go to an Italian American / Knights of Columbus gathering and tell them Columbus was a fraud.
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Feb 2, 2018 23:18
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Point out on the forums that the Korean war saved South Korea from the plague that destroyed North Korea, and the south is reaping the fruits today.
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Feb 3, 2018 20:03
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Starbucks frappuccino bottle, but still counts.
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Feb 3, 2018 20:04
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I've been trying to think of issues from the Revolutionary War that are still really raw, but not coming up with a lot. Most Americans vaguely know that Benedict Arnold was a traitor for whatever, but I can't imagine a scenario where loudly exclaiming "drat but I love Benedict Arnold" is going to get you anything but quizzical stares. George Washington is an interesting case too; to one degree I'd say he's really well-liked, but I can't easily envision starting a fight over GW. You could bring up the fact that he owned slaves, but that would just get a tepid, "sure, but..." Arguably Thomas Jefferson is a more emotional issue, since he's less of an idealized figure and more a widely-lauded political one, though his scandals are pretty well-accepted knowledge. I suppose that in the right circumstance you could rile folks up by saying that we should get rid of everything named after Jefferson and all the statues to him, but that's about it.
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Feb 3, 2018 20:31
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Whitewashing history and denying the american indian genocide
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Feb 3, 2018 22:55
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Americans will do anything to avoid discussing that time they spent a couple centuries successfully committing genocide on several dozen ethnicities across an entire continent. Canadians too.
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Feb 3, 2018 23:01
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seiferguy posted:Go to an Italian American / Knights of Columbus gathering and tell them Columbus was a fraud.
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Feb 3, 2018 23:08
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Lumpy the Cook posted:Americans will do anything to avoid discussing that time they spent a couple centuries successfully committing genocide on several dozen ethnicities across an entire continent. Canadians too. The American genocide of the Canadians was truly a dark chapter in US history. Yeah, USA is basically what Nazi Germany wanted to achieve
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Feb 3, 2018 23:25
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:
Saying that England's greatest Prime Minister was Pitt The Elder instead of Lord Palmerston.
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Feb 4, 2018 08:02
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I don't know if this counts, but someone said online when the Iraq war was ramping up that the Monroe Doctrine justified any potential US invasion of Iraq. When I said that was moronic he posted an extract from some Tom Clancy novel where a guy got paralyzed, then killed by an assassin in a bathroom.
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Feb 4, 2018 09:00
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anything re: whites doing Native American genocide, whites putting japanese-americans in camps, slavery, the land whites stole from Mexico, various colonial atrocities like in the Philippines basically anything that makes white people uncomfortable
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Feb 4, 2018 09:23
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stone cold posted:anything re: whites doing Native American genocide, whites putting japanese-americans in camps, slavery, the land whites stole from Mexico, various colonial atrocities like in the Philippines be mildly open to discussing the potential of reparations for slavery. edit: say al sharpton is a good man
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Feb 4, 2018 09:45
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That or something about communism that contradicts half remembered parts of Red Dawn/Reagan speeches or fourth hand accounts of the Black Book of Communism. Admittedly, most Americans don't know enough about American foreign policy that you would get a blank stare if you mentioned the ridiculous imperial poo poo we have been pulling in Latin America for 2 centuries. It is a difficult question because Americans generally only know random largely made up bits of history from movies. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Feb 4, 2018 |
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Feb 4, 2018 11:22
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Starshark posted:I don't know if this counts, but someone said online when the Iraq war was ramping up that the Monroe Doctrine justified any potential US invasion of Iraq. When I said that was moronic he posted an extract from some Tom Clancy novel where a guy got paralyzed, then killed by an assassin in a bathroom. I was too young to really pick up on it, but wow, America went loving crazy for a few years after 9/11. Nosfereefer posted:The American genocide of the Canadians was truly a dark chapter in US history. Yeah, USA is basically what Nazi Germany wanted to achieve Oh yeah, and it really ramped up during the 19th century, by the 1830's the US army was no different than the Einsatzgruppen. Even the tribes that agreed to every hosed up demand still got wiped out in poo poo like the Sand Creek massacre or the Marias massacre.
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Feb 4, 2018 11:59
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Just start calling presidents war criminals.
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Feb 4, 2018 12:58
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Lincoln was a cowardly appeaser gently caress who could have ended the war in a month but dragged it out because he had dreams of being seen as a peacemaker. His plans for partition of America, as well as invasion of Haiti and Cuba make him, without a doubt, the worst president in history, and that's before you get around to the multiple times the Union Army freed the slaves and then were made to march them back to the rebel lines in chains under a flag of peace.
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Feb 4, 2018 13:16
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:let's open it up to even non-US history, since there are a few key external issues some Americans are still sore about, like how I witnessed Irish-American US Marines throw a fit when a British veteran officer of The Troubles came to give a counterinsurgency lecture to our unit. Haha, seriously? What did they do?
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Feb 4, 2018 14:24
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"Dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was an evil act, a massacre of civilians."
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Feb 4, 2018 15:04
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Phyzzle posted:"Dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was an evil act, a massacre of civilians." "Um, we were killing even more civilians with conventional terror bombings, so shut it peacenik"
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Feb 4, 2018 15:26
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I imagine you might get into a scuffle for arguing that the American Revolution was started by petulant, ungrateful assholes who didn't want to pay the bill for the wars the Crown was fighting for them.
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Feb 4, 2018 17:36
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Orange Devil posted:Just start calling presidents war criminals. There was a Daily Show where Jon Stewart (correctly) called Truman a war criminal for the a bombs then the next night he had to apologize and say "Obviously I didn't mean a US President could be a war criminal." I had gained so much respect for him for the original argument and I lost all of it when he walked it back.
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Feb 4, 2018 17:37
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The American view of history is basically a story about how we've been the good guy underdogs fighting for freedom in a series of wars leading to the current day with not much else happening in between, so anything that contradicts that view tends to get people riled up. Wars that we started and genocides we've committed tend to get skimmed over if not left out entirely. The Spanish American war, for example, is ground down into a lesson about how yellow journalism is bad (but empire is so, so good). You'll get exactly one day in school about the Trail of Tears and nothing else about the efforts to wipe out Native Americans (though you'll get plenty of comments about how both sides were bad because the Natives also attacked Americans). Manifest Destiny is still treated as this glorious quest to control the land sea to shining sea and oh where'd all those Native Americans go well no time for that let's get into what you really came for: WORLD WARS! They're bad and lots of people died, but also they're extremely cool and we won both of them. The Germans did the worst thing ever and committed genocide, and that is something that goes against all of our values as freedom loving, compassionate Americans, and that's where all of world history ends.
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Feb 4, 2018 17:45
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This seems relevant: https://twitter.com/NPR/status/960187191426146304
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Feb 4, 2018 17:49
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WampaLord posted:There was a Daily Show where Jon Stewart (correctly) called Truman a war criminal for the a bombs then the next night he had to apologize and say "Obviously I didn't mean a US President could be a war criminal." Same here. It infuriated me because he had made a well-reasoned step-by-step moral argument (while arguing with that awful Kramer dude about his role in the financial crisis IIRC) to arrive at his conclusion, but he never felt the need to go back and re-examine his argument and tell us which one of his principles he'd decided actually he didn't believe in anymore because he didn't like the conclusion it led him to. It was wilful cognitive dissonance.
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Feb 4, 2018 18:05
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Zore posted:The Alamo in Texas. People get really pissed if you point out it was a bunch of slaveholders dying pointlessly for their right to own slaves in defiance of a treaty they signed promising not to institute slavery in Texas. How many slaveholders fought at the Alamo? The Yucatan was also in rebellion against Santa Anna, were they also fighting for slavery?
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Feb 4, 2018 18:14
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I don't know if this exactly counts (no punches were thrown), but my American history lecturer gave a paper in America on the Vietnam war. The person who opened the conference said in his speech, "Why does the Vietnam War continue to haunt America?" And the lecturer answered, "Because you lost." Apparently his paper got shat on from a height by the people at the conference.
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Feb 4, 2018 18:19
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Say gently caress the troops and argue about how dumb and incompetent the US military is/was. Americans don't like the government, but the military is still well-liked and is the most respected institution in the US.
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Feb 4, 2018 19:04
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Kenzie posted:Say gently caress the troops and argue about how dumb and incompetent the US military is/was. Americans don't like the government, but the military is still well-liked and is the most respected institution in the US. Heck, just be insufficiently forthcoming about "thank you for your service" when someone says they're a veteran. It's never going to not be weird to me, as in Israel most people I know have either served in the military because they had to or have really good reasons not to have done so.
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Feb 4, 2018 19:07
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pointing out that france was absolutely essential in winning the revolution and that the colonists would have had absolutely ZERO chance on their own. edit: and as previously mentioned, the USSR won WW2 between the end of '42 and the beginning of '43, long before the US had any troops in europe and before any serious volume of supplies from lend/lease had arrived. american involvement in europe had much more to do with limiting the USSR than defeating germany. RaySmuckles fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Feb 4, 2018 |
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Feb 4, 2018 19:12
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Anything that puts white people in a bad light gets denied vehemently or whitewashed out of history entirely. The white right and the white left both do it, which is why you'll never hear about organized labor and american socialists' support of the chinese exclusion act.
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Feb 4, 2018 19:32
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Lobster God posted:Haha, seriously? What did they do? Shortly after this retired British colonel finished his lecture on Counter-Insurgency, a half-dozen new lieutenants came rushing down to the Battalion Commander directly (a person so far above them they normally wouldn't speak to him personally). I didn't catch their whole group rant, but they no-poo poo referred to the invited retired colonel as a "Limey" who had "killed good Irishmen".
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Feb 4, 2018 19:32
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Peven Stan posted:Anything that puts white people in a bad light gets denied vehemently or whitewashed out of history entirely. Or pre-Civil War American workingmen's parties cooperating with "agrarians" (read slave-owners) against abolitionists. There's really not a lot of opening for nuance, it's all got to be Manichean or you lose your audience.
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Feb 4, 2018 19:39
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Peven Stan posted:Anything that puts white people in a bad light gets denied vehemently or whitewashed out of history entirely. i dunno, i feel like it takes only the bare minimum amount of digging to recognize how racist the organized labor movements were. it was one of the major barriers to unification, the other being skilled/unskilled. but that just comes with an understanding of the times and their overriding ideologies. organized labor wasn't racist, EVERYONE was racist all the time and in a BIG way. explicitly racist ideology was one of the major aspects of white culture for centuries and only very recently has that begun to be challenged. to be white was to be violently bigoted which is why its just silly to judge historical figures through the lens of modern morality. the differences between their circumstances and ours are incomprehensibly vast. basically everyone 20 years ago and beyond was wrong about everything just as we are now and will be subsequently viewed as such in the future.
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Feb 4, 2018 19:46
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The ones where you accuse them of committing crimes op, especially if you say their relatives had a hand in it
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Feb 4, 2018 19:49
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RaySmuckles posted:i dunno, i feel like it takes only the bare minimum amount of digging to recognize how racist the organized labor movements were. it was one of the major barriers to unification, the other being skilled/unskilled. I rest my case
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Feb 4, 2018 20:05
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Not to be flippant, but Capitalism?
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Feb 4, 2018 20:30
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