Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-110.20.227.171-20141127105940/@comment-4621372-20141214192036

No such thing as an honest textbook. Every society on Earth, every country on Earth, and every textbook on Earth, puts it's own spin on history. Any American textbook will spend ages on the valiant struggle against communism and evil in the Cold War, but not one of them will mention in any depth the events in Cambodia, or East Pakistan, or Guatemala, or the Congo. They'll all talk about how we funded the British to fight the Nazis, but they won't mention the atrocities commited by the British on innocent Africans during colonialism. They'll talk about how we "liberated" Greece from the Communists, but they won't mention that we did that by putting former Nazis in charge. They also won't mention that those "Communists" were in fact just leftists who were elected, democratically, into power. They'll talk about how despicable the North Korean invasion of the south was, but they won't mention that fact that the South Koreans we fought next to were most Japanese collaborators who helped to arrange for the systemic rape and murder of thousands.

And keep in mind, these are some of the best textbooks on the planet. America's school system is abysmally bad, but when it comes to history, we're one of the more honest nations on the planet. The Japanese pretend WWII never happened; the Chinese claim that the Great Cultural Revolution was a minor chapter in history (yeah! Only 50 million people died!); the British still have some weird "White Man's Burden" ideal of colonialism; the Russians are just making crap up by this point; and every nation in the Americas celebrates the life and discoveries of a man who wiped out thousands of people, destroyed their culture, made their men into slaves, sold their women into prostitution, and raped their children.