Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
I don't think that's fair at all. Here's a simple example:
Where are all the slaves in fiction set in pre-abolition Europe, (except for the parts that are set in ancient Roman era or before)? Nobody has slaves. Maybe in some stories the locals are treated poorly, but the word slavery isn't mentioned. There are essentially never any foreign slaves, even though the word 'slave' comes from the word 'slav', because that's just how common it was to enslave slavs at one point in European history.
Where are all the English movies about slave trade? Where are the African movies dealing with the fact that most of the slaves were gathered and sold by other Africans? If anything, I would say the Americans are doing the most to confront their history with slavery.
There's also a ton of other stuff countries don't like to deal with. Here's an example from Finland: Did you know the Germans (likely) got the idea for building camps to hold "undesirables" from post civil war Finland? Yeah neither do most Finns. It's an extremely glossed over part of our history, even though about 1/3rd of our civil wars total casualties were results of those "POW" camps. The conditions in those camps were often horrid. The women (or sometimes girls in their young teens, put in those camps for things like wearing pants, because that was a "red" thing) were often systematically raped, food was scarce and arbitrary executions common. Finns also had some of the worst POW camps in WW2.
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I am sure that there a plenty of other countries that are terrible at really looking at the realities of their past (I mentioned Canada...Japan is another one that is really struggling with their WWII narrative).
But in the US, the Nation doesn't really feel that they have come to a resolution about slavery, it feels like the Civil war hasn't been completely resolved. An interesting fact is that there is no national memorial to slavery in the US (Like the Vietnam memorial). They have
tried, but no luck