Bad History Takes
@bad_histories
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Debunking the worst history takes on the internet. DMs are open to submissions. Run by @JasonLHughes , a "gay, activist nerd who can't change his own oil."
Joined May 2022
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Alright so you have found this account (I'm so sorry). You probably have some questions. First off, if you see a bad history take on any platform, please send me a dm with either a link or (preferably) a screenshot. This is the best way of making sure I see your submission. 1/9
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Japan wasn't colonized in any meaningful sense by "Western" powers at any point in its history. European merchants were present in Japan during the period depicted and they even owned some land, but they were very much subject to the will of local daimyo and later the shogun. 1/
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Hate to break it to you, but the Portuguese were not "good" colonizers. They were heavily involved in the enslavement of indigenous peoples and the transatlantic slave trade. And that's before we get to the Portuguese Colonial War.
Colonization is bad no matter who does it.
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No.
Did Hitler and the Nazi’s know something about lost Ancient History that we don’t?
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Counterpoint: Witches aren't real and judicial murder is bad actually.
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He was never accused of sexual assault, even by the racist bastards who tortured and murdered him. His "crime" was supposedly flirting with a white woman. It is quite unlikely physical contact was made, but even if physical contact had been made, he didn't deserve to die.
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Yeah, so Tibet, India, and Vietnam would like a word.
It's so, so easy to criticize the US without making stuff up.
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Oh boy. So at no point could Sparta be considered a superpower, which has global connotations and was first coined in the 1940s, or a nation. And it's position as a regional hegemon lasted roughly 30 years until they were rekt (to use a highly technical term) by the Thebans. 1/9
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You might be shocked by this, but that is not a genuine photograph of Jews in a Nazi concentration camp.
Some concentration camps did have (usually makeshift) swimming pools on their outskirts for SS personnel and their families. Because even mass murderers enjoy relaxing.
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The Nazis utilized military brothels during the Second World War that often "employed" teenagers.
And the Nazis very much engaged in human trafficking while committing their numerous crimes against humanity. Which also involved children.
This might shock you, but Nazis bad.
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Got to love it when Ian Miles Cheong replies to a stupid take with an even dumber take. Very impressive.
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Uh. They did. People did write things down.
And just because you haven't heard of Gregory of Tours, the Venerable Bede, Alcuin of York, Einhard, Notker the Stammerer, Liutprand, etc. doesn't mean they didn't exist or weren't important.
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Also, Tituba wasn't a servant girl. She was an enslaved woman. And she only "admitted" to being involved in witchcraft after being beaten by Samuel Parris. We can also surmise that she wasn't a witch because. You know. Witches aren't real.
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Because we aren't historically ignorant racist pieces of sh*t and don't get our political ideology from the aesthetics of anime girls.
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Nicholas II wasn't a "chad." And the fact that close to half of Nicholas II's "chad" traits are related to aesthetics demonstrates how shallow most monarchists' perception of the world is.
Also, Nicholas II very much did not almost win WWI. 1/3
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And due to the Meiji restoration and rapid modernization, Japan was able to escape the worst parts of "Western" imperialism and became an imperial power in its own right. Which went... uh... not great for anyone involved to put it mildly. 3/
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1. Native tribes hunted buffalo, but did not bring them to the brink of extinction via mass slaughter, unlike white settlers and the US army (source below).
2. The US absolutely broke treaties with Native tribes. Even SCOTUS recognized that in US v. Sioux Nation of Indians. 1/9
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So first off, black people have existed in most of those societies (though usually in small numbers).
Second off, Sub-Saharan Africa has been home to many advanced civilizations. Black people have plenty of fascinating history. You're just ignorant and racist.
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How is that a delusional take? Even if you don't fully agree with the person in the screenshot's framing, it is a reasonable take. Even historians who are highly critical of the treaty make considerably more nuanced arguments than "it was too harsh and caused WWII." 1/9
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Eventually the Portuguese were expelled and only the Dutch were allowed to trade in Japan, and their movement was very limited. Now then, Japan did have to deal with American, British, French, and Dutch gunboat diplomacy in the 19th century, but Japan still wasn't colonized. 2/
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Well I'm sure most people didn't know that because it wasn't. Tariffs were, at best, a secondary issue. The Slaveholders' Rebellion was primarily about slavery. And the secondary issues were all connected to the primary issue.
1/3
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Hitler wasn't a socialist and those Stalin numbers are off by, at the very least, a factor of 6.
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The Soviet Union did, in fact, invade countries at multiple points in its history.
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Many African civilizations have figured out how to make a wheel. The most obvious is Egypt, but I'm guessing the op doesn't count Egyptians as African due to skin color. And the op will ofc ignore Saharan chariots and wagons bc they were introduced via cultural diffusion. 1/5
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Alright. So, my thoughts on Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon.” It was bad. And not just due to historical inaccuracies, it was also a poor cinematic experience. If you’re truly curious about the film then you should wait for it to come out on a streaming service. Value your time. 1/25
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Oh. Oh no.
Well there's no way the video is going to get worse from here... 1/2
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I mean team meetings were kind of the whole point behind that Roman Senate thing. You could have picked so many other empires but you had to choose one of the few that actually had team meetings. Amazing.
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Well, I haven't posted anything in the last couple of days so let's share some history memes. Reply with your best/worst history memes.
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I initially didn't think someone could actually believe that, but then I saw the rest of his tweets...
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Well. I didn't think Ian Miles Cheong could get any dumber. But here we are.
Anyways, please open a history book. Any history book. You don't create a massive empire by losing.
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You should be ashamed. Of yourself. At least 400,000 Muslims served in the British Indian Army during the Great War and about 1,000,000 Muslims served in it during World War II. But ofc you don't care about that because your patriotism is performative and a thin veil for bigotry.
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Wow. Imagine being such a loser that you idolize Nicholas II of all people.
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Maryland was never one of the "boys." It wasn't even one of the states the Confederates pretended to control. West Virginia explicitly split from Virginia to leave the so-called Confederacy. The Confederates controlled little more than half of Missouri and Kentucky at any point.
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Yeah so that wasn't why the Spanish conquered the Aztecs. The Aztecs had a writing system, though the vast majority of both Spaniards and Aztecs were illiterate. And while modern ideas of sanitation came much later, Aztec sanitation was generally better than Spanish sanitation.
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Arguing that Alexander III was a foreign ruler is a bit of a stretch. He was Greek speaking and partook in Greek traditions. Napoleon was Corsican. And Corsica was under French control when he was born so calling him foreign is a stretch. And Georgia was a Soviet Republic. 1/9
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Why... why on earth would the Nazis do autopsies of the people they murdered?
And obviously it would have been difficult for the Allies to do autopsies on most Holocaust victims and there would have been little reason to do so.
And not all Holocaust victims were gassed.
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Wow, it's almost like borders change over time and aren't always represenative of the people who live within them.
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Uh. No. There were definitely worse things done during WW2.
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Humans definitely hunted mammoths. We have archeological evidence. They probably would have used a mix of spears, traps, and clever hunting strategies. Most of ancient history is not, in fact, bs.
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Wow, it's almost like those are completely different things...
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*sigh* I sure do love it when a sitting US senator spreads misinformation.
No, the Nazis weren't socialists. To make them socialists you'd have to bend the definition of socialism so far as to make it unrecognizable. Socialism isn't just when a government does something. 1/3
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Speaking of which, the Meiji restoration and relations with the "West" before the restoration are a very interesting topic. I'd recommend checking out Joshua Provan's (
@LandOfHistory
) "Wild East" for more info on Japanese relations with the British. 4/
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One of Rome's biggest strengths had been its ability to integrate foreign peoples. The integration of non-citizens into Roman armies had been a practice since the Republic. The problem in the "late" Empire was not the foederati themselves, but Rome's mismanagement of them. 1/
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Ah yeah. The Nazis. Famed for treating their POWs well.
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It was/is. Ethnic Russians didn't just magically appear in places like Circassia, Siberia, or Crimea. There were people there before the Russians. And the Russians committed genocide and/or ethnic cleansing against those people.
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Ah cool, so you think migrants coming to Spain is a good thing because you think D Day was a good thing.
You do think D Day was a good thing right? Right???
Oh no.
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Saying colonialism didn't occur in South America is absolutely wild.
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Cute philosophical statement on the pointlessness of war. But the Confederacy ceased to exist. It failed all of its political objectives. It lost by any reasonable definition. Even if we do the "everyone loses in war" bit, Confederates lost a lot more than everyone else. 1/4
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Hold up. I'm way too sober to respond to this one.
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A common criticism of Hitler's strategy during WW2 is the failure to fully ally with Ukrainians and other Slavic nationalist movements against the USSR. Which he didn't do because, shocker, he hated Slavs. It's one of the main tenets of Nazism.
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The Romans did not have a concept of race and we have no real evidence for large shift in the "racial" makeup of the Roman Empire.
And if you think going to war with and slaughtering "actual" civilizations makes you a barbarian, I have some bad news about the Romans for you.
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Good to see that Russia also has a legitimate legal claim to *checks notes* Morocco.
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Wow, Ukrainians hate a mass murderer responsible for the deaths of large numbers of Ukrainians?!?!? How ungrateful...
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The Nazis were about as close as you can get to evil incarnate. They killed millions upon millions of people and caused the deaths of even more. They didn't need to be "cranked up" by Hollywood.
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So... countries become republics when monarchs lose? You're not exactly making a great argument for monarchy here.
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Netflix didn't "turn him gay." While we can't say with certainty that Alexander and Hephaestion were lovers, it's a semi-common view among historians with some support from ancient texts. And we have even more evidence for a romantic relationship between Alexander and Bagoas. 1/6
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Well a lot of Muslims actually died fighting for the British. I think the least you could do is allow their descendents to pray at a memorial commemorating all soldiers who died in defense of Britain, not just the white ones. Bigot.
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I... I don't think that word means what you think it means.
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Ah yes. I'm so anti-American for *checks notes* disliking a secessionist movement that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and sought to keep millions of Americans in chains. Makes sense. I truly am the American Taliban.
@PaddyHenry1775
That's right. I hope everyone saves that tweet.
Our enemies are anti-American.
They are anti-Confederate BECAUSE they are anti-American.
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There are a lot of issues with this one, but... Ireland? Really? They were neutral with a decently solid bias towards the Allies, despite having been a British colony for the previous few centuries.
And Sweden and Switzerland were also pretty solidly neutral. 1/3
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I will admit, atomic bomb deniers are a new one for me.
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So it is important to note that 27 million Soviets died. Not 27 million Russians.
Russians probably made up around half that number, but all of the USSR's constituent republics suffered heavily during the war. And all of the republics contributed to the Soviet victory.
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Living in Florence in 1469 was quite expensive and poor people did in fact exist. Renaissance Florence was not some ideal paradise for the average person. It was an incredibly stratified society.
Life is difficult for many people right now, but that's always been the case.
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"Name a single thing fascists did that liberals haven't done."
Ummm... the Holocaust?!?!?
1/3
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Ukraine did not fight for Hitler.
Did some Ukrainians collaborate with the Nazis? Absolutely. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians did.
But the number of collaborators was dwarfed by the millions of Ukrainians who served in the Red Army and fought the Nazis.
1/4
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Now then, was Sparta heterosexual? Weird question but in short no. Was it a "gay drag & pedo utopia?" Odd way of putting it but no. Sparta almost certainly had unequal man-boy relationships. There are some questions about how physical they were due to the writings of Xenophon. 2/
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So B&B is actually somewhat correct. Not every German soldier during WW2 was a Nazi. But that's missing the point. The Wehrmacht as a whole was an evil institution that played an essential role in the Nazis' genocidal projects. Individual intentions could only matter so much. 1/6
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Why do people always think they'd be upper class in historical societies? Odds are you wouldn't be. Decent chance you die in childhood. And in Rome you would most likely grow up to be a farmer or a slave if you survived. Stop idealizing living in the distant past. Life sucked.
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Saying "we should have never left" suggests the US troops had the option to stay.
The US invasion attempts did not go well to say the least.
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They did offer to peacefully settle the "land disputes." The Finns counteroffered and wanted the negotiations to continue. Then the Soviets invaded. And suffered about 5 times as many casualties as the Finns. And increased the likelihood they would side with Germany. Genius. 1/3
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I feel like I'm having an aneurysm. Wtaf am I looking at.
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The Holodomor wasn't made up by Ukrainian nationalists. We have first-hand accounts. It did happen.
And while Japanese internment was definitely bad, it was not worse than the deaths of millions.
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Yeah so quick question: why was the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia being bombed?
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Country names can change. People can call their own countries what they want. The British Empire no longer exists. You don't get a say in what other countries call themselves. Grow up.
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Well, the US actually fought the Barbary Wars against the Barbary states (which were technically Ottoman tributaries) in the early 1800s. That was after Washington's presidency tbf, but he supported the creation of a navy primarily intended to fight the Barbary pirates.
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*sigh*
The Tulsa Race Massacre did in fact happen because of the color of people's skin.
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Ah yes. Because when I think of ideologies that have stood the test of time, I think of fascism, which was famously very long lived. After all, the 3rd Reich lasted for a thousand years.
Wait, I'm receiving a note.
*reads note*
Oh... oh dear.
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Hitler wasn't actually a racist, he was just into national segregation (and if you're against that, you're the real racist), is certainly... a take.
Anyways, Hitler very much hated black people. He just had less opportunity to do bad things to them than other groups.
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So if you think that that number sounds a tad high, you are correct. It would require 3-4 people being sacrificed continously every minute for 4 days. The logistics of such a feat would have been daunting even with the use of modern firearms, much less by priests with knives. 1/5
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The Nazis also painted themselves as victims. "We're just reversing the injustice of Versailles. We're just protecting ourselves against Judeo-Bolshevism. We're saving the Aryan race." Etc.
It was all nonsense of course, but many, if not most, Nazis had a victim mentality. 1/3
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