this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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I went to school in the UK. We had to learn a whole lot shittiness that we did in the past. It's sort of funny because I'm ethnically Chinese and I moved to Canada later on. Whenever something bad that the British did came up, I would always be made fun of.
I moved back to the UK from Canada again at a later date and we were watching a video about more bad stuff the British did as apart of our curriculum and I immediately felt flush with embarrassment. Then I remembered that everyone around me was British too.
I sometimes wonder if the Americans that chastise the Chinese for wiping out history like Tiananmen Square are those that advocate for wiping out Black History Month and wanting to wipe contribution from minorities on their websites right now.
To be clear, I think that Black History Month should just be apart of American history. Like integrated into the curriculum and books and stuff. However, you can't trust Republicans to just wipe it out entirely. They "say" they will and just never get around to doing it properly because Heaven forbid you feel a bit uncomfortable while learning things.
The reverse isn't much better. I'm Dutch, and if you go to Indonesia, outside the cities there will often be people pointing out what awesome things the Dutch built "for them". It's super weird when the people your country exploited and abused start thanking you.
Indonesian person: "Oh, the town well, yeah the Dutch built that for us, but we can't maintain it, so now we walk down to the other well to get water. The Dutch were so nice to us. "
My brain: "Yeah, I can see how that totally makes up for a century and a half of murderously harsh exploitation and killing 200.000 indonesians when you tried to be independant"
My mouth: "Oh, that's... nice?"
Now, I get that everything the Dutch did kinda gets snowed under compared to what the Japanese and the Americans did in the span of a few decades, but I grew up when our history books moved from a half-page "And then there were some police actions in the East Indies, and suddenly there was Indonesia" and towards a somewhat more realistic picture.
People get nostalgic for order and predictability that came at the point of a gun. “At least we had food and everything wasn't falling apart!” Plenty of Russians I’ve been around remember the “good old days” under authoritarian “communism” and were unhappy with the turmoil and unpredictability when the USSR collapsed, and they’re the same ones that are happy with Putin’s and trump’s authoritarian methodology and threat of violence to enforce compliance.
So people absolutely can have a fondness for their abusers, especially if freedom from them leads to unpredictability and poverty.
A lot of former Soviets liked the old system because in spite of the oppression and corruption most people had their needs met. After the fall of theUSSR many no longer could make their ends meet.
Folks do it with Rome so its nothing new, the carcus of empires are far more noticeable than the corpses of the folks used in the foundations.
*carcass
The one time auto correct would be useful, leaving it though. Prime example of phonetic spelling.