Consider the massacre at Wounded Knee, December 29, 1890. There is no argument that men, women, and children were slaughtered that day cruelly.

At the time, there were medals of honor given to many of the men who fought there:

http://www.history.army.mil/moh/indianwars.html

As time went on, a popular poet, Stephen Vincent Benets, mentioned Wounded Knee in his popular poem "American Names" in 1927:

http://www.whatsoproudlywehail.org/30days30poets-stephen-vincent-benets-american-names

The phrase from this poem was used by Dee Brown in the title of his excellent, ground breaking, and culture shifting work, "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" in 1970:

http://www.amazon.com/Bury-My-Heart-Wounded-Knee/dp/0805086846

What is notable in regards to your question above, is that this work is extremely critical of the American Government's behavior towards Native Americans, yet remains almost required reading in many American High Schools.

However, it remains that those medals of honor still stand. But there are recent rumblings to have those medals rescinded:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/18/massacre-wounded-knee-medals-honor-rescinded

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-huffhannon/wounded-knee-medal-of-honor_b_2664709.html

http://blog.woundedkneemuseum.org/p/rescission-of-medals-of-honor.html

So it is a shifting, evolving truth.

Western nations tend to have greater commitments to free speech, official censorship channels do not have the same power here as in other countries like Russia and Turkey. Therefore, there isn't a "Western historians do not accept" type situation as you suggest because a truly critical eye can dominate in the academia of the West over official pronouncements on sensitive topics. While elsewhere, official pronouncements cannot be criticized without fear of punishment or censure.

This doesn't mean the West has fully addressed past national crimes, it just means critical speech and dissent is more tolerated than in other nations on sensitive topics, generally speaking.

Edited for grammar

Ok, this thread has been up for like two hours and I've already had to delete over 50% of the comments.

If you are going to post in this thread (at all), please read our rules, and understand that what we are after here is a LOT more than a wiki link to an event perpetrated by the West that isn't as prominent as you think it should be.

But understand what the OP is asking, and understand what it is that we value here. Some additional questions to ask yourself before posting:

• Is this particular event contested by Western historians?
• Do Western governments have a policy of punishing academics or journalists who mention the event?
• Do western school curricula provide 'apologetics' for past atrocities etc?

Not so much as history as still happening: Australian aboriginals and the appalling treatment and ongoing struggles. We have a third world nation in our backyard and its ignored, denied and swept under the carpet. Cuba has a charity effort going in in the outback,(http://famvin.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Charity_-_Province_of_Australia, altho it does not show details, they help 'the poorest of the poor") half the population still don't think there's a problem with the half assed "apology" offered by the Rudd government and there's still debate around the authenticity of a stolen generation. Even with that stolen generation coming forward and sharing details, public figures (Andrew the douche bolt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Bolt#Stolen_Generations : probably not the best but i'm not linking to his drivel ) will deride it and claim it didn't happen/ wasn't on any scale. [actual stories here: http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/stolen-generations-stories]

Very very little is taught about the particularly disturbing Palawan/prevlan genocide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanian)[even the wikipedia has understated, by half, the population which is generally know as about 30,000 and seems to be attempting to direct into the disease did it angle, And the irony of the topic in this regard to original source is not lost...] in Tasmania and its glossed over regularly, and blamed on disease. This of course is a common thing and probably a reality too, but it was not the demise of the people. As a Child i heard many, MANY stories of the genocide committed by my own relatives, shamefully. They are NOT in the history books, but I assure you, they did happen, and the land grab that ensued is almost justified with such classics as "they had no fences so no ownership" ( a line from a teacher in HS) 'Land rights" have been recently ceded: but mostly in the last twenty years or so, and the government claims it spends "$100,000 per Aboriginal on native land" which they may technically do on paper, but if this was the reality, why the charity, why the poor and wheres the money? (http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2012/05/the-denial-of-private-property-rights-to-aborigines/) Sure: its in the books. Sort of. But history isn't just books, it's people, and unfortunately, the state of the Aboriginal people, Today, is the proof in the pudding. Edit: links and expansion and Spellzgudz

Really, none. "Western historians" are just fine being critical of the West. This is one of those times when it really is, "we're right and they're wrong".

For example, in Japan there's massive resistance to recognizing Imperial Japan's atrocities. It's a huge source of ongoing friction between Japan and its neighbours, and the US shares a great deal of the blame for it. When they took over the administration of Japan, they believed it was more important to rebuild Japan quickly than to make them accountable for their crimes. The Soviet Union was advancing and the US didn't want them to gain a foothold in the Pacific, and that required getting Japanese society back up and running in a hurry. So they suppressed knowledge of Unit 731 and the Rape of Nanking and exonerated the Emperor. They couldn't wait for the Japanese to come to terms with their crimes, so they hid them.

Thing is, the US freely admits that now. It's not a secret; it was an intentional, strategic decision made by MacArthur and friends and has long been declassified. So too the sordid history of colonization in the Americas. So too American misadventures with overthrowing governments and installing dictators. It's all in the open.

The Tuskegee experiments, if done in the USSR (they almost certainly did similar things), would never have come to light. It was a closed society. Here, they did. Same with MKULTRA, the My Lai massacre, or any of the other crap they pulled. There's really no drive to suppress history in the West in the same way there is in Russia, China, Japan, Turkey, etc. If there was it wouldn't work, and that's by design.

Hopefully someone can give us some more information on these Russian and Turkish 'historians'. What is their agenda? Are they heavily influenced by their own government and media?

Just about every major Western nation has committed an atrocity of some kind. In the age of free information, mass media (and Reddit) though, it's pretty much impossible to contradict hard evidence.

The problem is, if you repeatedly deny something happened, you keep it in public consciousness, it's kind of like a historical Streisand Effect. Most leaders understand this and realise it's better not to dent their credibility for the sake of something that happened years ago. Instead, such events tend to get shoved under the carpet instead of outright denied.

This isn't always a bad thing, if we are to move on as a society we can't keep blaming each other for the past. We have to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors.

EDIT: Grammar. I tried to type and eat at the same time.

In their book Shattered Sword, Tully and Parshall makee the argument that the contemporary Western view of what transpired at Midway was wrong. They argue that this view mostly transpired due to one primary figure, Mitsuo Fuschida. Mitsuo Fuschida was a flight commander on the Japanese carrier Akagi, flagship of the Mobile Force (Kido Butai, the carrier wing of the IJN). After the war, he met with many Western historians and promoted a view that the US Navy's strike hit within five minutes of an intended Japanese strike on the US carriers, among other details. This led many people to believe that the US won the Battle of Midway as an underdog that managed to get his punch in at just the right time.

However, the official Japanese history of the war, the Senshi Sosho, tells a very different story. Unlike Western historians, they had hard data on the actions of the IJN during this period. This came in the form of flight logs that detailed when planes were to take off and land, and the pilots as well. And the testimony of the surviving sailors and pilots corroborated with the data that they had-namely, the Japanese planes were not about to launch an attack on the US fleet. In fact, there was a communication to pilots of the Akagi around the time of the attack, telling them to take a break and drink some tea!

This is one of a few errors that Western historians have made about this battle. Another is the idea that the Aleutian operation was meant as a diversionary attack while the Japanese took Midway. Many historians criticize Yamamoto for creating a diversion separated from the rest of the fleet by 2,500 miles, but the AL Operation was actually a totally separate action-namely, it wasn't a diversion. The Aleutian Islands and Midway were both to be captured to extend Japan's defensive perimeter. The Japanese, confident in the superiority of their fleet, actually split up their forces prior to what would be the first of their major defeats. And in case that idea seems ludicrous, consider that Yamamoto had already detached his two newest carriers on a totally unrelated operation, resulting in neither one being available to Midway (due to the Battle of the Coral Sea).

As for the reasoning of this? Tully and Parshall again point to Mitsuo Fuschida. As the flight commander of the Akagi, he would seem to be a trustworthy and critical source of information. Thus, many other Japanese personnel were not questioned by Western historians as they saw no need in doing so when they already had probably the best source they could get. In addition, unlike German or Italian, for example, Japanese is a rather difficult language to learn as an American. So it was more difficult to gather this sort of information than it was in the European theater. So you can really hardly blame the Western historians for not fully comprehending the battle-after all, the Senshi Sosho was only completed in the 1970s, way after the battle. Then again, back during the war, it was the IJN that was waging war with only their side of the story-and look what happened to them.

Another bit that was (until recently) accepted as the gospel truth by the West was the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920. For a long time, partly due to WW2 and the Cold War, the West assumed that the war had been won by Weygand, the French general. In Davies' White Eagle, Red Star, written in the 1970s, he essentially dispelled this notion, using Polish sources-in fact, the war had been won by Poles, and the Western contingent had basically been cut out of the command loop from the get go.