[Serious] How are Japanese students taught about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Are you seriously equating the 14,000 year history of social and territorial conflicts between indigenous peoples to the systematic cultural genocide that reduced their numbers by 90% and reduced their land (in North America) from this to this? Is the struggle of related groups in a vast network of trade, diplomacy and cultural history equivalent to enacting laws that withhold the food and supplies needed to people locked away like POWs on slivers of shitty land in they don't agree to send their children to schools intentionally designed to strip them of familial and tribal ties and turn them into second class citizens fit only for manual labor? At the risk of Godwinning myself, did you know that Hitler was a fan of playing Cowboys and Indians as a child, and that he purposely studied the policies of the US government towards American Indians? Can you guess what he learned from it?

Yeah, no group is innocent of violence against other groups, but even if you could make a coherent argument that the guilt of others cancels out your (in a general sense, not you specifically. God forbid you think any of this is directed personally at you.) own deeds, then that low-level conflict is endemic to almost all cultures. What Western European cultures did to indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia is on top of their going to war with each other for thousands of years before.

Nobody's blaming you, specifically you, for those things, but anybody who lives within a society that has profited off the oppression or exploitation of others should be willing to acknowledge that cultural violence and help work towards the reconciliation and healing needed by both sides. If you don't think Western civilization lost something in colonization, consider the following: How many of the advancements of the ancient world came from the exchange of goods and ideas along the Silk Road? As that trade network grew, so did the breadth and depth of human knowledge, by the cross pollination of thought between Europe, the Middle East, India and China. Now imagine how much more varied and vibrant our global culture could be today if the American human tradition, a legacy of culture, art, music, philosophy, agriculture, textiles, governance, and language developed separately since before Çatalhöyük had been integrated instead of assimilated.*

*I am aware that disease was a killer of large swaths of native populations even before they ever saw a white man, but those diseases were accidental transmissions, followed by very deliberate rape, enslavement and conquering.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent