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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15358 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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Look at the education system. "In high school, you get 155 hours on Hitler, 3 minutes on Stalin, and nothing on Pol Pot. Nothing on Mao. Barely a mention of Fidel Castro."

Look at the cinema industry. A million movies about the holocaust, one film about the Holodomor.

Ask random normies about Hitler, and they will tell you that he was evil because he tried to exterminate the Jews. Ask random normies about Stalin, and chances are they won't even know who he was.

Yougov: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Worst_World_Leaders_poll_results.pdf

68% have an unfavorable view of Stalin, with only 26% undecided (a subset of which presumably have not heard of him).

Edit: stefferi beat me to it.

My public K-12 education had 0 hours on Hitler. It had no WW2 history at all. We went over Japanese internment quite a bit. But somehow not the theaters of war or Hitler. Which seems like an obvious gap.

I remember WWII history, but far less of it than Holocaust.

"In high school, you get 155 hours on Hitler, 3 minutes on Stalin, and nothing on Pol Pot. Nothing on Mao. Barely a mention of Fidel Castro."

Come on, man. Just give this claim a basic sanity check. An American high schooler will have an hour of history a day and about 180 school days per year. This claim would indicate they spend most of a school year's worth just on Hitler. This isn't happening. They're not spending that much time on WW2 as a whole, let alone just Hitler.

Florida and many other states have a mandatory two-semester Holocaust class.

I'm not finding evidence of this, though obviously it's possible I'm missing something. States mandate that the Holocaust be included in the educational curriculum, among myriad other topics, but I'm not finding anything specifying mandatory classes focused specifically on the Holocaust.

First of all, "155 hours" is an obvious hyperbole; there are not literally a million holocaust movies, either.

Secondly, it's not just history class. The Diary of a Young Girl and Night are staples of English courses. I was assigned the latter, as well as We Are Witnesses.

EDIT: I just remembered we also did the play version of The Diary of Anne Frank, and watched the movie.

The same site also lists Animal Farm and Nineteen eighty-four as staples of English courses. I agree that Orwell intended Nineteen eighty-four to be a general warning against totalitarianism but both when it was published in 1948 and now it is seen as primarily anti-Communist. Animal Farm is straightforwardly anti-Communist.

FWIW, the anti-Nazi lit I was exposed to in school was mostly of the refugee memoir variety (The Silver Sword and I am David) which doesn't represent the USSR very positively either. We also read Animal Farm and we looked at excerpts from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when we were studying "Why translating serious literary fiction is hard."

Especially since according to woke we also have to spend inordinate amounts of time on slavery and the wrongs done to minorities and other minorities. There isn't enough time for that and 155 hours of Hitler.

We did spend a lot of time on Hitler relatively speaking, but I also remember reading animal farm in history class and spending almost equally large amounts of time on the evils of communism.

Idk, I got a day long lecture on Stalin twice and Mao once. Admittedly multiple monthlong units on the Holocaust make it add up to a similar fraction.

I also would expect random normies to know who Stalin was, and if poorly educated default to describing him as ‘Russian Hitler’ or similar.

Yeah, I would be astonished if random normies didn't know who Stalin was. That's not even being highly educated, that's "did you graduate high school" material.

While I am undoubtedly living in a country prone to see Stalin as particularly unfavorably (though I doubt the scientific factor of the quotes above), this prompted me to go find an actual poll on the topic. In a YouGov poll of 1000+ Americans, 68% view him as somewhat or very unfavorably (58% very unfavorably), 6 % as somewhat or very favorably, and 26% don't know. So, while there's a contigent who don't know him, "asking random normies about Stalin" does clearly show they do know who he is and view him (very) unfavorably.

Hitler unsurprisingly is better known and even less favored, and there are some other world leaders who surpass Stalin (Kim Jong-Un and Saddam Hussein), but interestingly Hitler isn't even the least favored of the figures asked - Osama bin Laden is.

There has also of course been a push for more remiscining on the evils of Stalin around the West in the recent years due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine leading to new visibility for Holodomor and comparisons of Putin to Stalin etc.

I can't speak to that posters experience but my high school world history classes (late 00's-early 10's) definitely covered Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Castro.

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