Ask Lemmy

Most of the people on the Mayflower were businessman. Very few were the legendary “Pilgrims” - who were less fleeing persecution and more the fact that they couldn’t persecute others anyway.

The entire narrative we teach in school is about the Pilgrims is bullshit.

Most US history educations are going to give you very sparse details about the brutality of the genocide of Native Americans. Smallpox blankets were real. Treaties were treated as suggestions rather than anything binding - we still don’t really honor them today.

A substantial cause of the Revolutionary War was that England wanted to reserve areas for Native Americans. Not even out of the goodness of their heart, but because it was fucking expensive to send and kit soldiers because colonists kept fucking with the tribes. All of those Intolerable Taxes and shit were kinda needed to fund the fact that colonists kept sticking their dick in a beehive and had to get epipen-ed by the Crown.

The Civil War was 100% about slavery. The “states rights” bullshit was fabricated in the decades after the war. There has been a full century of deliberate assaults on the real history of slavery and the Civil War in the United States. The unique character of its brutality (race based chattel slavery is not like what was practiced by other civilizations) is underplayed. (“B-b-b-but the first slave was an Irish guy owned by a Black man” or other bullshit - deliberately conflating things like indentured servitude with chattel slavery.)

The modern American police force is basically a direct descendent of slave patrols. The brutality against black men is also a long legacy - they made purses out of Nat Turner’s skin, and probably even ate parts of him.

Slavery didn’t really end. During reconstruction and afterwords, communities passed bullshit laws to re-enslave black people. It’s very easy to make an argument that the “war on drugs” in the US is a way of maintaining slavery, because the 14th amendment explicitly has a carve out that slavery is permitted if you are convicted of a crime.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used to justify the Vietnam War, was a false flag. The idea that soldiers returning from war were spat on or harassed was something very deliberately propagandized. Not that it didn’t happen, but not to the extent it was portrayed.