Having just watched two shows on PBS, After the Mayflower, dealing with King Philip's War, and God in America, tracing religion in American history, I've concluded that historical studies are dead. At least as PBS produces them. These specials apparently were not sweating accuracy. Compared to After the Mayflower, America's history books a hundred years ago were fair and balanced in their takes on the European conflicts with American Indians. We won't even discuss the God in America series. Both are obviously slanted, both obviously concerned with indoctrination and even brain washing. Watching how Jews were treated in German cinema in the 1930s seems almost level compared to how the English settlers were treated in this fillet of fact disguised as a history show about early American conflicts with the Indians.
I know that all of history is based on one's perspectives. But the bias often has been innocent, the factor of one's geographic limitations or the mere boundaries drawn by ignorance of the facts. But the pieces today are deliberate; the refusal of After the Mayflower to name even one Indian atrocity, to show a single dead English settler by reenactment, while giving long and tortured accounts of atrocities done to the Indians, including heart wrenching portrayals by the actors, can only mean one thing: the viewer is meant to hate the Christian English settlers, and celebrate the heroic and perfect Native Americans. Add to that the overall narrative of the special that assumes the American Indians were always good, honest, trustworthy; all of the English were lying, corrupt, racist, and imperialist, and there simply is no other choice. In God in America, the same is true. Only this time it is any attempt to hold to traditional Christian values and world views that is to be hated, and those kind and compassionate non-Christians who only yearn for a society of tolerance, peace, and John Lennon songs are to be cheered. Our tax money at work. Well done PBS.
Maybe the problem is that you have believed the Thanksgiving myths and haven't bothered to study what really happened. Native Americans may actually see things differently than the ones who took their land saw it.
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