Whitewashed History Exposed

 A Twitter thread by James Lindsay:

Critical Race Theory pushers always talking about how we teach "whitewashed" history but never mention how that's super complicated and that way more importantly we really, really, really teach communist-washed history. I never learned about communism in my education at all.

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Did you learn about Trofim Lysenko in school? Nope. You didn't. I didn't either. His "Soviet biology" probably killed more people than any other stupid idea in history, though. Tens of millions in the USSR, tens of millions more in China (which should have known better).

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Did you learn about the Holodomor in school? Or how the New York Times covered it up? And got a Pulitzer for it? Probably not. Millions of dead Ukrainians under Stalin's brutality. Probably never heard of it, though.

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Did you learn about Mao's crusade to abolish the Four Olds in the Cultural Revolution in school? Probably not. Destroyed the cultures of China, killed millions, ruined the country for his own power. Probably never heard of it.

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Did you learn about Soviet Vanguardism (Leninism) in school? I bet you didn't. I bet you didn't even learn what the gulags were, though you heard lots about concentration camps under other regimes. Communist-washed history.

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Did you learn who the kulaks were? I bet you didn't. I bet no one ever told you that they were high-competence farmers and others who Lenin and Stalin believed could possibly amass a peasant revolt and thus imprisoned or mass-murdered to retain their power.

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Did you learn about Cultural Marxism (Gramscism) or the tactic of entryism in school, whereby apparatchiks enter into some institution and slowly turn it communist from within? I bet you didn't. I bet you didn't hear about any of it in school at all.

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Did you hear about Pol Pot's "Year Zero" campaign in school or the absolute brutality that proceeded in the Killing Fields and throughout Cambodia under his tyrannical rule? Probably not.

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Did you hear even once about the Fabian Society and socialist gradualism? The Frankfurt School? Critical Theory and how it meant to take Marx's ideas and move them into the realms of sociology and psychology so as to demoralize a citizenry and open doors to communism?

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Let's not fall into "whataboutism," though. Did we learn "whitewashed" history? I don't know, some. I'm in my 40s, and we certainly spent a lot of time on slavery, Civil Rights, and the role black Americans played in abolition, Rev and Civil Wars, etc.

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Most definitely, people a bit older than I am would have learned rather whitewashed history, but CRT tends to live in this space where it believes what was going on in the 1950s is still how things are today. My US and Tennessee state history were fairly nuanced.

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Today, though, it's a completely different story. Talk to your kids if they were in high school in the past five years, especially in a big liberal city like Portland. To call what they learned "whitewashed" is asinine. Even my own kids learned much richer stuff than we did.

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Of course, it's a complicated point because a lot of black American history was struck from American history by progressive edict back in the day (Wilson and FDR both, apparently), probably because the Democratic Party before the Civil Rights Movement was openly very racist.

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We had special units dedicated to the various contributions of different racial groups in all of the major wars of American history, though, and I recall spending a lot of time discussing around the film Glory to this effect re: the Civil War.

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Being from East Tennessee, we have a lot of pride in the area having been part of the Underground Railroad and learned a lot about that. It's also Cherokee country, so we learned a lot about the Trail of Tears and Jackson's ignominy. In the 1980s.

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So, I don't really buy the Critical Race Theory lie that we "teach whitewashed history," at least not as they try to sell it, and compared to the communist-washing of history that progressives have foisted upon our education, it's nothing. Nothing at all.

 -RW