It saddens me to hear that kids in the US don’t learn about the fuckups of their ancestors, as this might “upset” them. My kids here in Germany learn about the Holocaust and they take trips to concentration camps so they learn about the past. Not to guilt them or shame them, but to teach them, so history doesn’t repeat itself. (And we’re not even native Germans, we’re east European immigrants.)
The problem here is conservatives call learning about our past mistakes “woke” and do everything in their power to remove this curriculum from our schools. For some reason, they look at it as “trying to destroy our great nation and traditional values” instead of “learning from our past to be a better country going forward.”
Except military, which they teach A LOT, we spent maybe 5 days on the crimes we committed against Native Americans, but an entire month or more on the Revolutionary War. Hell, we spent longer on learning about “world religions” than we did all our mistakes. Plus, any WW1/WW2 war crimes committed by our side is not taught whatsoever.
I’m probably going to get mega canceled here but I think a good portion of it is that the Holocaust is history.
A lot of what we don’t talk about is how we treated the Native Americans because we’re STILL shitting on them from on high. For example, the Dakota Access Pipeline is the same old shit, different century.
Also talking about how we’ve treated people of color, and any discussion around chattel slavery, ends up being “uncomfortable” because an awful lot of people in this country don’t seem to see any problem with it and would be perfectly happy if we could toss out the civil rights acts and go back to having separate water fountains.
TLDR: it’s ‘history’ in Germany because ya’ll arrest people giving nazi salutes, but in the US wearing a KKK robe is “free speech”.
