:"And I’m still getting hate mail about how FDR rounding up a hundred thousand people to throw them in prison camps is just ripping off X-Men… Thanks American education system!".
Thursday, March 20, 2014
QotD: It's Not Alternate History Edition
Larry Correia on complaints he receives from people who are hatin' on his hatin' on FDR in Warbound:
:
I laugh, so I do not cry.
ReplyDeleteHe who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future. -- George Orwell
ReplyDeleteThere's a reason that real history isn't taught in the skewls today.
The only place on the Intrawebz where you find Larry Correia and Lord Byron referenced together.
ReplyDeleteWow! Teh stoopid hurts...
ReplyDeleteTeddy's brother put people in camps during WW1?????
ReplyDelete:-)
LCB: Yea, it was in response to the Kaiser's Suicide Zeppelin raids on New York.
ReplyDeleteFrom Niven's Man-Kzin Wars VII:
ReplyDelete"My first-year politics tutorials this week dealt with Nazi foreign policy and the lead-up to the war. I decided to loosen things a bit and just generally chat... How strange that university politics students should never have heard of the little ships that took the British Expedionary Force off the beaches in May 1940. Or de Gaulle. Or a Spitfire. No knowledge of any of it... This was the stuff that was supposed never to be forgotten thirty, forty years ago. Next week we do the Holocaust..."
Letter to the author, October 10, 1991
A number of other chapters have similar facts at the start. Considering a bit part of the storyline is the UN having 'sanitized' history so people will think properly, reading some of this makes you think a lot of politicians and teachers take this as a 'how-to' manual instead of a warning.
I'd laugh except I'm afraid once I started I won't be able to stop.
ReplyDeleteThis is right up there with, no wonder the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, considering what we did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hey, it was the Germans who bombed Pearl Harbor! I saw it in Animal House.
ReplyDeleteAnd after that, the US invaded D Day and ended the war.
ReplyDelete-On a serious note, I wonder how much video game has actually helped in overturning some of the ignorance of WW2? How may kids would have even known of the Russian front otherwise?
What are X-Men?
ReplyDeleteAs a medieval history student (transitioning slowly into actual 'historian'/teacher), pretty much the entirety of public knowledge of my field is alternate history.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me I really need to be brushing up on history. My eldest is 8 and we send them to public school.
ReplyDeleteI need to be able to fill in the gaps and deprogram the lies.
My nephew is 8 also, in a private leftie feel-good school, so I wonder what history he's getting?
ReplyDeleteFDR got us into WW2 so he could intern the Japanese Americans and bomb the ones who couldn't make the boat.
As to sanitizing history, there's an exchange in Robert Silverberg's "Time of the Great Freeze between an American and a Britisher about George Washington. The American claims that he was a great general who beat the British in a war, and the Brit insists that the Americans asked to be free, the King gave them their freedom, and George Washington thanked him with a famous speech (Silverberg did not quote it, but I got the impression the speech was Washington's farewell address (And I was 12 years old!)
Joe in PNG. Well, there was "Hogan's Heroes," where Colonel Klink's ambition was to not be sent to the Russian Front.
ReplyDelete"Lies my Teacher Told Me" is a good book that fixes some middle-school/high-school history problems.
ReplyDelete"Lies my Teacher Told Me" is a good book that fixes some middle-school/high-school history problems.
ReplyDeletewhere Colonel Klink's ambition was to not be sent to the Russian Front.
ReplyDeleteShouldn't that be EVERYONE'S ambition?