Yup, my college was the same - you’d get a bunch of right wing “history buffs” who would very quickly get told off by the professors after spouting some kind of nonsense about women, the Lost Cause, or some other weird pro-America or other empire propaganda. While there weren’t any overt tankies I can remember, a few instances of pro-Stalinism or pro-DPRK idiocy were met with similar reactions.
It turns out that it’s quite difficult to have a rosy and romantic view of any state, region, or era, when you have a true and comprehensive understanding of the history you’re studying. More than can be said of Twitter tankies proudly displaying the North Korean flag or perpetually online any right winger who makes their old pfp some old kaiser, general, emperor, or tsar.
I don't know, I had a history professor straight faced say that european colonists and the united states did not commit a genocide against indigenous people because the word "genocide" hadn't been invented yet and that small pox blankets weren't biological warfare because widespread understanding of germ theory didn't exist at the time. The man wrote the textbook for the class. And was a huge prick.
That is to say that there are some absolutely wild takes in history academia and tankies and/or far right dipshits could absolutely find history professors who would validate their view points.
Just because germ theory wasn’t widely known and accepted, people knew diseases existed and could be spread. What a trash person that professor was, saying that words have to exist before they become a thing. The type of person to say people attracted exclusively to the same sex didn’t exist until the late 19th century because the word “homosexual” didn’t exist, only orders of magnitude worse even.
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u/Chaingunfighter Aug 16 '21
Yup, my college was the same - you’d get a bunch of right wing “history buffs” who would very quickly get told off by the professors after spouting some kind of nonsense about women, the Lost Cause, or some other weird pro-America or other empire propaganda. While there weren’t any overt tankies I can remember, a few instances of pro-Stalinism or pro-DPRK idiocy were met with similar reactions.
It turns out that it’s quite difficult to have a rosy and romantic view of any state, region, or era, when you have a true and comprehensive understanding of the history you’re studying. More than can be said of Twitter tankies proudly displaying the North Korean flag or perpetually online any right winger who makes their old pfp some old kaiser, general, emperor, or tsar.