Lefty says LA Riots aren't happening
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It's kind of a weird thing. The French Revolution happened, but the majority of Paris, let alone France, barely noticed. It didn't change their lives personally.
The great depression caused all sorts of havoc, but that was for a small minority. The majority continued living fairly ordinary lives.
When I taught history, that was the hardest thing to explain. Stuff that makes history books rarely effects the majority of people around it. MIT created computer science, but even the majority of students using the computers weren't doing much with it.
Bram Stoker was noted in his obituary as the publicist of an actor. He also may have written some unimportant horror novels that nobody in the theatre business has read.
So these people have a big historical thing, and say it can't be happening, because they're not personally being effected. Then they say a speech by a guy who will likely be forgotten is for history. They want history to work their way, and not the actual way.
Well, now hang on a minute. The French Revolution was something everyone noticed especially Paris. The Reign of Terror was done intentionally to torture and harass the general population of France, including going to towns and committing mass executions.
The Great Depression is also a massively wider event that effected everybody in multiple ways, even in ways they might not have noticed.
Fundamentally, you're right, but I think the French Revolution, Great Depression, WW2, the Dust Bowl, and events like that are really massive. It's like saying Mao's Famine didn't effect many people. It really did. Sure, the moon landing and the Korean War are better examples which emphasize your point
There was an entirely new textile and way to sell it during the French revolution. Ads for it were plastered all over, and people swarmed to buy it for clothes or drapes.
Most people during the 30's remember movies than the job market. Unless someone has said there was a great depression, they wouldn't have noticed. Meanwhile, my relatives were buying apples for 20 kroner and hoped it stayed that cheap.
We didn't actually know about Mao's famine until 30 years after it happened. Only when looking at the census, and how cities went from millions to thousands did anyone ask. Even then, after interviews and documentaries, it's still unknown what fully happened. A hundred million died, and the country with Billions didn't notice.
We are fundamentally disconnected from history because we are too busy living our lives.
That doesn't change that the Revolution still effected people. Especially when the government showed up to commit massacres.
That's just not true. Not only from joblessness, but from the general collapse of the economy. Everybody saw everybody going through hard economic times. For example, if I had no information input regarding the 2008 Great Recession, I would have still known that there were bad economic times from the amount of people that begged me to give them food and shelter. I got to see the abandoned neighborhoods, and that was a recession. The thing about major economic shifts is that you'll absolutely get a feeling for them in the general population because it's one of those historic events that actually does have the most direct impact.
They noticed, but the issue is that they're not allowed to talk about it. You can't just have a whole town lose 30% of it's population, and their primary meat source come from grave robbing, and say nobody noticed. If you're eating your own dead children, you tend to notice.
The atrocities were noticed, but it's a crime to talk about them or bring it up, not to mention it's horrifically painful for those who survived. Not noticing is not the same as intentionally lying and covering up what happened. The events were well documented, but they just weren't publicly made available.
A good example of this was when (in the 1980's) a mass grave of over 100,000 people was discovered outside of a major Chinese city (I forget the name). Nobody knew who they were or what happened until the government investigated it with some surviving witnesses to the event because the corpses weren't that old. Turns out they were a mass grave during the civil war when the CCP attacked a Nationalist town using civilians as human shields, marching them as bullet sponges into Nationalist machine guns to cover their infantry assault. Considering a huge swathe of the city died, and that it changed hands, it was clearly noticed. But it was covered up after that because it makes the government look really bad.
Not noticing is not the same as lying, covering up, gaslighting, or forgetting.