Even at school, you cannot avoid a biassed view of history. Most of the time textbooks are written from a very political point of view depending on the region, ideology or alliances of the country.
We learned about how Christopher Columbus found America when I was only in year two (British school in the middle east) so six year old me not having any background info on the matter believed that it was empty land that Columbus discovered. Not once were the natives mentioned. I was about 9 when I realised the reality of what we had been taught. I thought to myself was it supposed to have us approach history from a certain point of view. I convinced myself I was overthinking because in the end we were only six and it sounds odd for things to be so intricately planned out like that since the age of six.
This however continued, when we think of both world wars we think of the horrible things done by Germany. Of course, the actions the nazis took are unacceptable but I am sure Britain too bombed cities that didn’t cause any threat. There are no winners in war, only survivors. War is always a loss for either side so why do we have such a one-sided view of it? I think it all links to what we were taught.
Here is another incident. We were learning about the war in Asia and the Japanese empire now of course Japan did harm to many Asian countries but why was the nuclear bombing not mentioned what so ever in that lesson? If I personally hadn’t known out of my own knowledge the events then I wouldn’t have known that Japan was bombed by the US and there was very little life left where the nuclear bombings happened. The bombings killed between 29,000 — 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians.
After that lesson, I had no doubt that all of those History lessons are supposed to form our point of view from early on. For some unknown reason realising that hurt me on a personal level. We are encouraged to speak up and never accept anything but freedom, only to be manipulated by everyone and everything.
sources: Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
That's all, for now,
have a good one x
