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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Tangential question. What do Americans think of their soldiers being in Korea and Vietnam? Does it strike as odd to the median American? These two countries posed no direct threat to the USA.
they don't, it's completely left out of most American education. if it's there it is a brief one-sentence mention
Americans and think don't go well in the same sentence. We tend to only think of the world as America, and everywhere else. I still catch myself doing it sometimes, America is a hell of a drug.
Yall got some sus education if you only had a single sentence about both the Korean and Vietnam war, and its not like I went to a rich school either (far from it)
was only talking about Korea, at school (not university/college education). sure maybe it was enough to be a paragraph but I doubt it.
Im talking in terms of high school, albeit I took AP history, but its not like they dont teach about Vietnam and Korea in school, at least in my own experience.
I took AP US History and did pretty well in it and, well, the Korean war was mentioned but it was discussed almost not at all. Vietnam was mostly discussed in relation to the domestic reaction to it with the media coverage, as well as some discussion of "Domino Theory". Even My Lai hardly got mentioned.
you're probably right that I overstated my case and exaggerated a bit but what was taught a couple decades ago was thin and pretty dire
Nah, you’re exactly right. And I’m tired of people coming into these threads saying “my bare bones high school level ap course covered this because I recognize the topic you’re saying.”
If you think that’s true, go read a bunch of actual history books and see how complete you think that education still is.
If i had to say what they dont teach very much, it would be asian and african history before the 1500s for the most part, unless they had interacted with european settlers at some point in history.
Ironically I went to a good high school and we did cover that, but when it came to relatively recent US history, the curriculum was spotty and superficial. I got the sense that teachers wanted to avoid controversial topics and debates.
It's like with ancient African/Asian/American empires, you have a certain psychological distance and can discuss it casually. With recent American history, especially when the history curriculum is necessarily half economics, it can get "controversial". And I'm sure there was more one "gifted" kid aching to do the bit from Good Will Hunting...
It varies; I took AP history, but we only covered history up to WWII really. We had like 2 weeks dedicated to post-war, and never even really made it to anything about the Korean War
I do the same shit with Canadians about us having soldiers in Saudi Arabia, Africa, etc. They don't care and seek to justify it totally and immediately.
I actually was in Canada for a bit and the impression that I got was that of a sense of banality where people did not know how buddy-buddy Canada has been with the US.
I was not "political" at that point. But the people I knew used to believe that Canada was similar to the US but with the "derangement" separated from the substance.
Yeah, you got it 100%.
Canada is just the USA with a roughly 10 year policy lag and none of the global geopolitical power. Most Canadians see this and develop a superiority complex. They think "at least it's not as bad up here" or "at least we're not as brutal as them". Class consciousness and worker solidarity is basically non-existent. We're truly a puppet state.
By God are we working hard to close that gap
By the end of Vietnam most Americans were solidly against it, and I believe “Vietnam was a mistake” has broadly been the belief since then, but mostly because it got American soldiers killed, not because of the horrors they committed.
People opposed the draft. Vietnam itself didn't see much more opposition than any other conflict America decided to stick its nose into, they just didn't like the idea that they or their family members might be expected to go fight in it
except by the conscripts, who first made the ground war untenable by organizing and direct action and then made the air war untenable by organizing and direct action
I think the Viet Cong and the NVA had something to do with that as well. But sure, I was speaking about stateside though
In terms of vietnam, at the start, americans were mostly neutral, didnt think strongly of it. Towards the end many americans were heavily against the war. Regardless, having a bias as I would be a child coming from families directly affected by the war, the U.S granted many people from affected countries immigration rights to come to the U.S. mainly Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia (and especially cambodia given how Polpot took it a step further in the wrong direction).
1) The median American’s default is simply 🇺🇸 👍
2) The (bipartisan!) think tank version is: the U.S. is the world’s police and that’s a Good Thing because we have Good Intentions (™, ™)
3) For the most part, the question is not asked outside of explicitly leftist circles