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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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The story of the boy who cried wolf has two sides. It's not just a lesson for the boy not to lie, it's a lesson for the villagers too. Just because people who lie about wolves exist doesn't mean wolves don't exist.

Also most historians think the German atrocities in Belgium during the first world war did happen, even if they were exaggerated at the time.

What about Japanese war crimes? Did those never happen either? What about Unit 731? Why would the United States make up fake war crimes only to become complicit in them later by trading the data produced by the research in exchange for immunity?

Notably none of those examples needed laws to jail people for questioning them nor were placed at the center of the American civic religion.

Ask what is most sacred in a society, and thats the most likely place you'll find the big lie.

You don't need to worship Newton's laws of motions BECAUSE they are amongst the largest revelation of pure truth in history. They hold regardless of your belief.

Likewise we do not need to worship Alexander or Napoleon for them to be major main characters in our history, revered despite being basically glossed over in our schools.

When it comes to Christ however, suddenly your faith really matters, because unless you believe he rose from the dead he stops being the greatest man in history and instead becomes a Schizophrenic unfairly denied a lawyer who'd put forth an insanity plea.

Thus it's really telling that this historical event and this historical event alone, unique amongst even genocides, it is DEMANDED that schools teach it happened AS MORAL MATTER, that unbelief is the ultimate sin.

We don't treat Holomordor this way, nor the killing fields, nor the plight of the Armenians, Hell in America and Europe you can argue that the Native Americans actually didn't have it that bad, or that slavery was the equivalent of the Russian serfs or just having a job, without being imprisoned in Austria or Germany.

Thus it's really telling that this historical event and this historical event alone, unique amongst even genocides, it is DEMANDED that schools teach it happened AS MORAL MATTER, that unbelief is the ultimate sin.

We don't treat Holomordor this way, nor the killing fields, nor the plight of the Armenians, Hell in America and Europe you can argue that the Native Americans actually didn't have it that bad, or that slavery was the equivalent of the Russian serfs or just having a job, without being imprisoned in Austria or Germany.

This doesn't really compute. Claims about Armenians or Native Americans or the slavery in the US never had been a politically important topic in Austria and Germany. After the war, the arguments to the effect "Nazis were actually good guys / or better than the other guys in charge now / and all claims of their wrongdoings are lies" were politically important.

The equivalent question in the US context would be, dunno, debates about teaching evolution and creationism in the schools? There have been substantial efforts to have only one of the two included in the curriculum by disagreeing partisans. Extremely partisan behavior can be observed: many an internet atheist argued that teaching evolution is the truth, thus it is moral imperative to teach it happened (and equally imperative not to teach creationism). If given the power, some people would mandate it by law. Despite their moral posturing, the scientific evidence from archeology through biology to genetics is overwhelmingly supportive of the evolution.

The fact that dissent is suppressed is a piece of evidence, but not a conclusive one.

Edit to elaborate:

The question "why is saying this unpopular thing illegal when saying all those other unpopular things isn't illegal?" has more than one possible answer.

Germany actually recently did criminalize denying genocides in general and has also recognized the Holodomor as a genocide.. Holodomor denial is, unsurprisingly, already directly criminal in Ukraine, and the general denial of Communist crimes is criminalized in several Eastern European countries. By your logic, this should make you equally, or almost equally likely, to question whether the said Communist crimes happened.

The new push(well, one of them) in American school curricula is the crimes of communism, too.

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