Historic Propaganda

[Mirc]

POLL COMING!

Yes, it does not belong in the History forum. It's not something about a past event that is considered history, it's about the current world. If however this becomes a discussion about history, which it might become, we'll kindly ask a mod to move it.
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Simple question, complicated answer: Do you think that, in our days, in the free world (and by this I mainly understand America, Europe and the places influenced by them), alteration of historic events in order to favor/disfavor a country, state, or civilization happens? If so, how often, and in which way? Again, I'm not exactly talking about North Korea.

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Please, let's keep this a discussion topic. Argument your opinion, and let's think well before giving an answer.

__________________________________________________

Explanation of the options:

(Vote just one of the following three)
- It doesn't happen at all. We are always told the truth about history.
- It happens sometimes, but it's not significant
- It does happen, VERY often actually.....
(Vote for as many of those as you want)
- It happens through schools
- It happens through books
- It happens through websites
- It happens through newspapers/movies
- It happens through politics (and politician's declarations)
- It happens through other sources
(Vote here if you have a different opinion than the one expressed above)
- My opinion is very different, it's not exactly "it happens/it doesn't happen"
- I don't know/I don't care
- King Bulgraawaswwso of the Radioactive Monkeydom always tells the truth!!

__________________________________________________

Please don't vote for all the options.

And again, let's make it a discussion topic.

__________________________________________________

I will express my opinion later.

 

[Verbose]

alteration of historic events in order to favor/disfavor a country, state, or civilization happens?

That's going on. What I might be leery about is to what extent it is conscious, due to an active decision to slant things, "propaganda".
Of course these things always have most effect when people stop thinking about it and just accept things as stated.

 

[Irish Caesar]

It happens very often, and it happens through all those sources and others. We as Americans have deified our presidents; they have temples in our capital, their faces are on our currency, we have cities and even a state named after them. However, we gloss over the bad that they did. Lincoln freed the slaves, so any mention of him being a white supremacist is well hidden. The War Between the States was fought over slavery, as far as the elementary school line goes, so any analysis into the economic or political things going on is going to be looked at with a less-than-neutral eye.

As for other countries, it happens there, too. We see it on this forum: Americans see Israel as the only hope for the Middle East, Europeans see them as bloodthirsty war criminals. I assume media perception of Israel and Palestine is different in the American and European continents, and propaganda is clearly heavy in both for people to believe these things so fervently.

And it's in the popular culture, too. In 2003, the American government renamed a popular side dish to avoid using "French" in the title. Silly, but the same stunt was pulled in WWI when sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage."

Just a few examples; of course it happens all the time.

 

[Masquerouge]

Historical propaganda happens all the time. It starts at school. Because you can't seriously exhaustively teach history, you have to make choices deciding what teachers should teach and what they should ignore. And the selection will hardly be fair. Also there's the fact that winners write history. See Carthago, for instance. All we know about Carthago comes from... the Romans! So yeah, we know a lot about Baal and child sacrifices - but that's because we only heard that from the civ who most hated them...
Then the media. Well. Again, since you have a limited time to tell your story, you'll make choices - editing this and that. Then your goal is not objective truth, but entertainment. So let's get rid of the boring stuff! And finally you're here to make money. So wouldn't it be better for this movie's success, if the team that captured the Enigma machine was American instead of Brit?
And finally, politicians. This is so obvious here I'm not even gonna explain

 

[Guangxi]

happens a lot. kind of ineveitable, history is written by the victors.

 

[Whomp]

I'm not sure about history books per se because I've been enlightened by non school related history more than the classes I took.
I think it's difficult for classroom books to give stories of events and people with their warts and all. There's a fixation on heroes and acts of government (being as PC as possible) rather than what was really behind some of the acts and actors that are potrayed whether it's their religion or lack thereof, racism or self interest. So in order to please everyone, they have been stripped of controversy and nearly everything of interest of what really happened is different from how the textbooks tell it.

Here's one example: In classroom books students are informed that the Dutch bought Manhattan for $24 worth of trade goods but not one class room book points out that the Dutch paid the wrong tribe for Manhattan. Undoubtedly, the Canarsees, native to Brooklyn, were quite pleased with the deal. The Weckquaesgeeks, who lived on Manhattan and really owned the land, weren't so happy. For years afterward they warred sporadically with the Dutch.

Same could be said about current day Middle East.

 

[happy_Alex]

POLL COMING!

Yes, it does not belong in the History forum. It's not something about a past event that is considered history, it's about the current world. If however this becomes a discussion about history, which it might become, we'll kindly ask a mod to move it.
__________________________________________________

Simple question, complicated answer: Do you think that, in our days, in the free world (and by this I mainly understand America, Europe and the places influenced by them), alteration of historic events in order to favor/disfavor a country, state, or civilization happens? If so, how often, and in which way? Again, I'm not exactly talking about North Korea.

__________________________________________________

Please, let's keep this a discussion topic. Argument your opinion, and let's think well before giving an answer.

__________________________________________________

Explanation of the options:

(Vote just one of the following three)
- It doesn't happen at all. We are always told the truth about history.
- It happens sometimes, but it's not significant
- It does happen, VERY often actually.....
(Vote for as many of those as you want)
- It happens through schools
- It happens through books
- It happens through websites
- It happens through newspapers/movies
- It happens through politics (and politician's declarations)
- It happens through other sources
(Vote here if you have a different opinion than the one expressed above)
- My opinion is very different, it's not exactly "it happens/it doesn't happen"
- I don't know/I don't care
- King Bulgraawaswwso of the Radioactive Monkeydom always tells the truth!!

__________________________________________________

Please don't vote for all the options.

And again, let's make it a discussion topic.

__________________________________________________

I will express my opinion later.

Screw that, the radioactive monkeys have a King!

ALL HAIL KING Bulgraawaswwso​

 

[Stylesjl]

History is always distorted. The American Civil War is one example. another example is WWII. The Americans constantly pride themselves on being the main force that defeated Nazi Germany, when it was really the Soviet Union (enemies of America) that did most of the hard work. Although the Americans can credit themselves to shortening the war AND making sure Western Europe didn't fall under the Iron Curtain.

 

[Atropos]

1. Which history? By that I mean: Are you referring to academic history or popular history? This would determine my response.
2. Popular history: Heavily distorted, although not in the sense of conscious propaganda. The reason is that history courses tend to try to teach 500 years in one semester and the results are always grim. This is NOT because history is written by the victors. If history were always written by the victors, Robin Hood, representative of the defeated Saxons against the victorious Normans, would not be a cult hero. Distortions in favour of the underdog are at least as common.
3. Academic history: Also heavily distorted, but since they aren't reliant on a single textbook, academics will tend to be familiar with a variety of different biases which cancel each other out. Also note that a political orientation today need not correlate with a particular position on a point of controversy regarding medieval history.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

POLL COMING!

Yes, it does not belong in the History forum. It's not something about a past event that is considered history, it's about the current world. If however this becomes a discussion about history, which it might become, we'll kindly ask a mod to move it.

Bias is widespread on almost everything, but I think it's less effective these days because there are so many sources of information. It is a lot harder for someone to skew the facts when access to them is so easy.

 

[Catharsis]

Of course there's no propaganda these days. Now get back to work and naught bad will come of you. The government is here to protect you.

 

[azzaman333]

The winners write history, so there is always a bias in favour of their ideas.

 

[Tee Kay]

Ever since people learned to lie, there have always been bias in history (or everything else for that matter). Naturally there are always aspects of history which are unfavourable to them, so they choose to hide, distort, fabricate, or simply ignore that part of history.

Or maybe there are views of history which are more widespread then others eg views of Western media is widespread but people in western-influenced country rarely hear about news from Russian, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese perspectives. Or maybe some details of history are forgotten and only a vague recollection of them remains.

Best way to protect ourselves from historic propaganda would be to look at different sources, to look at the whole picture. Maybe we don't want to read or hear the other side of the story, but by doing so we will gain a much better understanding.

 

[Azash]

Yes. Like a poster on another board said, "The greatest propaganda achievement of the 20th/21st century was to convince us it doesn't exist."

However, propaganda isn't always run exclusively by the government. Getting a few diehard nationalists of a suitable political alignment and putting them in charge of some major semi-political institutions is a clean method. Sometimes, the propaganda doesn't even originate from the government, eg. FAUX News.

 

[Neomega]

It happens very often in fictionalized movies and tv shows

 

[puglover]

Biases are everywhere, but I wish the professors at my local college weren't so bent on attacking my country and religion.

 

[happy_Alex]

Biases are everywhere, but I wish the professors at my local college weren't so bent on attacking my country and religion.

How do you define an attack on your religion?