September 01, 2006

• Do you think your history is any different?
• Yeah no shit read, "The People's History" by Zinn and you will see a crap load of "removed" material.
• Do you think your history is any different? It's different in that pete's particular state is more about ignoring acknowledged history than changing it. And if you want to find out the real facts, you can. (You be still be drowned out by empty rhetoric, but that's besides the point.)
• Do you think your history is any different? Umm . . yes. ? 'Cause I'm not Chinese? Excerpts from "A People's History of the United States" by Zinn. But the key difference is "changing acknowledged history", not presenting differing, or previously unpresented history. Show me the equivalent American counterpart to removing Mao from Chinese history textbooks and I'll say "yep, that's the same thing". "New history textbooks remove chapters on FDR and The New Deal in favor or a light read about privatizing municipal resources", that would be the same thing. NYT link has more of those word things in it. On preview: Damn you, Louis!
• Come to think of it, ignoring and deleting probably amount to the same thing. Carry on...
• Seattle General Strike of 1919 I never heard about that prior to reading Zinn. The entire shut down of a US city is pretty important. There is one. That is just off the top of my head. I read the book and have it at home, so if you want me to dig in and try to find every relevant piece of history that I was never told in class, I can do that, but I don't want to. Most of the significant ones revolve around socialist/communist movements, class struggle, and race. And this seems very much in line with what China is doing, a quite omission.
• quiet even
• We have always been at war with East Asia.
• I never heard about that prior to reading Zinn. Okay, but that's never having heard about it. What about the pieces of history that every preceding class was taught that has been removed/changed?
• I remember spending an inordinate amount of time in grade school learning about the invention of the cotton gin and its ramifications. Of course, that led into a magnificent semester-long unit on the Civil War which was the only good thing my fifth-grade teacher ever did. As Eli Whitney used to say, "Keep your cotton-pickin' hands off my gin!"
• Hey, wait a sec, there's a LOT of history to learn! We can't be expected to memorize the dates and major players of every fartass work stoppage and long lunch break that takes place in the People's Republic of the Pacific Northwest, you know. I'm kidding! C'mon, I'm just kidding! Put that stick down, Pete! hey! Ow, quit it! Ow! OWOWOW!
• What about the pieces of history that every preceding class was taught that has been removed/changed? You mean like how you could go to the Hall of Presidents and listen to Lincoln go on and on about the Civil War but never mention that whole slavery thing?
• OK...the Mao thing is bigger and more blatant than any of the revisionist history of most other countries, but almost all states have tweaked the facts to make themselves look better. I take all the history I've been taught with a huge grain of salt because I know much of it is bullshit. Sure, the names and dates are probably factual, but things like the reasons for starting wars and revolutions are often, if not always, revised depending on what side of the conflict you were on.
• I wonder if they used an MAO Inhibitor.
• *rolls eyes, stifles giggle.*
• I think Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen is more germane than Zinn's People's History of the US, as it is concerned with deliberate omissions and whitewashings in widely-used high school history textbooks. In my opinion, it's an interesting book that isn't written well; Loewen's prose style grated on my nerves after a while. But if he's right, there's really a lot that American high school students are absolutely NOT being taught, and it seems to mostly be in the name of bolstering patriotism - by not making Woodrow Wilson look bad in spite of his thoroughgoing racism, for example. In other cases, it seems like omissions are made or interpretations are cast on events when a true account would glorify terrorism or socialism. At least, that's Loewen's case.
• I've used Loewen's book quite a few times in my classes to point out just what verbminx said. I also try to get them to understand that there's no such thing as non-ideological or non-biased history. Even a list of people and dates is biased because of who gets included as "important" and who doesn't.
• Agreed, but isn't that always the case? In every culture / society / age? What this story is, is a one-click switch from "Yay Mao" to "Mao who", along with being completely upfront about changing history to suit their needs. I still think that's what's different. Plus, I'm dead sexay!
• "The wobblies who?" "America in the philippines?" "Pinkertons who?"
• In life nobody dared to shoot Mao dirty looks, but now he's dead we carve him from our history books.
• Am I not being clear? I think perhaps once again I have failed. I meant to say, we request the pleasure of your presence for a brief, friendly chat.
• History would have been different if Mao had been pronounced with a long "a" rather than a short "a". Mao would have been "Mayo". How's it going, Mayo? Want some more mayo, Mayo? HAHHAHAHA. Sincerely Chiang Kai Shekel.
• Perhaps the difference is that in China the process is centralized, and comes from on high, resulting in a more monolithic ideological base, and in the US, it's less centralized (at least at the grade and high school level) because it's based on a bunch of textbook adoption committees' and school boards' decisions? And that they do it not from a "we have to keep everyone in the party line" standpoint, but from a "we must protect the children/foster patriotism" standpoint? I agree that it's different, petebest.... I'm just trying to figure out how to articulate the difference. And you *are* dead sexay
• Hmmm... I agree with you, meredithea, about the changes in the US not being made by a central authority. What is and is not in textbooks is usually dictated by the community standards of a few states, and TX is a big one. However, I think "we must foster patriotism" IS "the party line" where textbooks are concerned - at least on the conservative side. It seems to be the stuff more of interest to progressives that is left out, or maybe that's just Loewen's bias? (I read an unschooling page the other day where the writer was rambling on about how schools "indoctrinate children into political correctness," and I was like, what, try to teach them about WEB DuBois now? why is that a BAD thing?)
• The other way this is different, is that it's Mao, by many accounts, one of the greatest megalomaniacal psychopaths of the last century. From a forthcoming biography, "Mao's Last Revolution" by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals(Harvard University Press): "[At] the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution...Mao, in one of his speeches struck a chill among his fellow Communist leaders when he seemed to contemplate with equanimity a third world war in which perhaps half of humanity might perish, but after which there would be global socialism." The book is reviewed here in the latest edition of the Economist.
• The other way this is different, is that it's Mao, by many accounts, one of the greatest megalomaniacal psychopaths of the last century. That's it, thank you StirfryBard - there was something about even if the takeover of a town in history was acknowledged and then overtly removed from US textbooks it just wasn't the same. Y'know Mao, Hitler, and Stalin were all vegetarians. Or so I'm told. Let me check that textbook . . .
• I remember hearing tell of some dude woth wooden teeth crossing the Delaware, but they never taught us about him in school. ;-P
• (For Monkeys outside the USA, I'm referring of course to Johnny Appleseed.)
• Appliscist!
• sewing the seeds of pomme through the ranks.
• Applisauced!
• Y'know Mao, Hitler, and Stalin were all vegetarians. Yes, it's true, petebeet, history is written by the vegetarians.
• Actually history was taken advantage of by the vegetarians. True players like Napolean, Luther, Alexander, Caeser, Khan, etc etc were healthy meat eaters. See what happens when you skip your steak. Meat prevents assholiness.
• So you're saying Napolean wasn't an asshole?
• It's just not right to play cat and Maos with the history book.
• Actually Lara I don't know enough about him to comment outside of making a dig at vegetarians.