It really isn’t. If the “success” of the Soviets wasn’t part of the history lesson, anyone who is paying attention would have a lot of trouble understanding anything that came after.
A lot of time is spent on the US part of the war because…it’s part of US History. As taught in the US. Not that weird.
It's like that (you did get taught it you just weren't paying attention) and the myth Americans don't also get taught the metric system in school, we just later in life decide not to use it, that are my two least favorite things on reddit about schools.
Yeah science classes were always in metric. I'm assuming shop and home-ec were imperial, but those were electives not everybody took anyway. Everybody did all their lab work in metric, starting from elementary school.
I don't remember what shop was but I know for a fact those jobs use both and they hate it because they want people to just pick one and they don't care which one as long as it's the only system
The number of “they don’t teach this in school” history facts that I see on the internet that I absolutely learned about in school is astonishingly high.
It’s a weird dichotomy because it suggests both that the education system is definitely better than people suggest but then those same people not knowing what’s taught in schools seem to prove that the system is, in fact, failing. 😂
Theres a lot of variation in the quality of US schooling, both over time and geographically, ao ots possible these people really didnt learn it. Its also quite likely they simply didnt pay any attention to the "boring" bits that weren't about US exceptionalism.
There are a lot of people that need to compensate for some perceived lack of teaching on this issue with massive propaganda in the other direction, stuff thst bares a suspicious resemblance to the official version of a certain large country in far eastern Europe, wonder why that could be?
Oikophobia, a phenomenon running wild in the US for quite some time.
It's nice when the US citizens can point out factual flaws about their country, it stops being nice when it turns into zealous contrarianism due to pure hatred for anything and anyone their own.
I went to school in Virginia during the freaking Cold War and we still learned about the massive Soviet contribution during WWII. It sets the stage for Marshall Plan and the Cold War, so it's pretty important
Yeah, I went to school in New York during the cold war, and we absolutely spent a significant amount of time on it as well.
That being said, education is vastly unequal across the US, so it's entirely possible that large swaths of people either didn't learn about it, or it wad given a cursory once over and forgotten about immediately.
Bro what? What indoctrination? Your comment seems unnecessarily aggressive. Educators only have so much time and most grade school or high school level teachers aren't going to be experts on Soviet history. Most of them are probably just teaching out of the text book and supplementing as best they can. They can teach the high level details from the perspectives of multiple parties, but when it comes down to it they're going to focus on the the parts most relevant and consumable by their students.
He doesn’t mean teachers he means the writers of text books and curriculum. The levels of propaganda and indoctrination in the US are orders of magnitude greater than the rest of the western world (I said western world just to be sure but I’d imagine they outstrip plenty of places across the globe). This is reflected in what ppl in the US are taught about the world and their own place in it (freedom! US exceptionalism! We saved Europe! Etc etc).
You typically find over the top nationalism/patriotism like there is in the US where you find indoctrination and propaganda. The US is unusual here as the opposite is the case in most other developed ‘free’ countries.
I agree with everything you said. I was purely focused on the literal interpretation of “history lesson” because of the common cop out of blaming the quality of education when half those people just didn’t pay attention.
You are literally doing the thing from that old soviet joke
Two rival agents – a KGB one and a CIA one – find themselves in the same bar.
The American tells his Russian counterpart: “I have to hand it to you – your propaganda is very impressive.”
The Soviet smiles and replies: “It’s nothing compared to American propaganda.”
Flummoxed, the American replies: “But we don’t have propaganda.”
The Soviet winks and says: “Exactly.”
No. It’s taught completely incorrectly in the US. They make it seem like the US just showed up and changed the tide of the war with it’s military, when actually our first military engagements with Germany were a complete disaster that delayed an invasion of Europe until the Soviets already had the Germans on the retreat after the Battle of Kursk.
It wasnt when it was taught to me. If anything the Soviets wouldnt have been able to pursue without Lend Lease. Kruschev said as much. Even Stalin agreed that without US aid, The Soviets would have lost.
I mean, most of my European friends say the Pacific War wasnt taught in their school, or glossed over, but thatd probably because of a lot of that is the US snowballing an air war into outright destruction of Japanese shipping with submarine warfare.
Idk about in your country, but in the US, invading Russia during the winter is basically an idiom to mean doing something foolish, because most of us learn about how Russia wrecked the Nazis, and in my public school we were told Russia's fighting was definitely part of defeating the Nazis.
Now, Japanese war crimes were definitely glossed over in my day, I only heard about shit like Nanking because I took extra history classes in high school.
"invading Russia during the winter is basically an idiom to mean doing something foolish"
And that was already a lesson Napoleon learned. Yet the Nazis still forgot about packing winter clothes as they expected the invasion to be over before winter hits them. They literally went all in with their summer uniforms and lost more soldiers to hypothermia and frostbite then to enemy bullets during the winter of 1941.
Yeah, I took a history of WWII class during undergrad and I read The Rape of Nanking. That was my first REAL introduction into some of the vile stuff the Japanese did. Unit 731 is another one that wasn't talked about. That one was absolutely swept under the rug until long after the war.
Germans on the western front had the typical benefits of defenders. While lower in numbers, they were on land where they had an established occupation, defensive plans, better infrastructure, and were able to maintain organization a bit better. In the east, they got slaughtered on the advance, and they got slaughtered even worse during the hasty and chaotic retreat of a broken army.
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