This is a laundry list of bad history tropes that usually pass through this sub in ones and twos. This is like playing 'bad history bingo' and hitting all the squares at once.

I'll take a crack at responding to this comment in a thread whose title begins with 'shitlibs' (stay classy).

First, the 'is history being rewritten' part of your question. Yes. History is always being rewritten. Science has also changed; that's why we have chemists instead of alchemists. The issue isn't that history changes, it is whether what is being written is true. Historians in 19th century Europe who thought that racism was science and colonialism was totally fine have a perspective which, while understandable in their historical context, is different from the conclusions we reach now, especially when taking into account the impact on those being colonized.

The saying 'history is written by the victors' has kind of turned into a trope/joke in this sub due to how often it is posted, but it is still very true.

Since traditional histories have tried to either silence uncomfortable topics or make them seem like ‘it wasn’t so bad’, attempts to give a full (and sometimes painful) accounting of history comes across as ‘revisionist’ to some people. Revising history is not the problem; letting bad history stand is.

I don't mean to try and start a mud slinging contest or to attack OP. I've seen these claims A LOT from a lot of different sources and people, enough so that I feel the need to ask the experts.

For future reference, I’d suggest the following: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that which is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. If their claims are true it shouldn't be hard to prove. Facebook memes do not historical evidence make.

The user in that post doesn’t even hint at their sources. They’re not trying to present an argument with evidence, they’re going on a diatribe to preach to the converted.

Also, as a general rule on Reddit, long, single paragraph, walls of text should always be suspect.

1. The claim that white Europeans weren't really as involved in slavery as people are led to believe because a) Africans were largely responsible for the African slave trade and/or b) Islamic nations were much worse about it than Europeans.

Africans who engaged in the slave trade were complicit, but complicity is different from having much of the responsibility shoved off onto them.

Slavery was a business. Europeans did not conquer most of inland Africa until the late 19th century (1880s onwards), by which time the Atlantic slave trade was basically over. What European states had were 'factories'; military trade outposts along the coasts and on important islands. From here, Europeans traded with African states. The latter would go to war with their neighbors and sell many of those they conquered. This is not unlike how ancient Rome paired war with slavery.

African states would sell slaves for weapons such as guns (fueling further expansion), alcohol (because it tastes good), and textiles (such as Indian fine cloths), among other goods.

Europeans bought the slaves, brought the goods which they traded for the slaves, took the slaves across the ocean, forced them to work, often raped and otherwise physically abused them, and enriched themselves greatly with the trade.

Does this wash the hands of Africans who participated in the trade? Of course not. However, how this can be characterized as Africans being 'largely responsible for the African slave trade' escapes me, aside from the author creating/accepting this myth (ironically) out of white guilt.

I'm less well versed in slavery in the Islamic world, so I'll point you towards this post by /u/SunAgainstGold.

2. The Inquisition and the Crusades were justified by Islam expansionism.

Justified is a very strong word. It had moral implications. It isn't the same thing as trying to establish a causal link; it is saying that a given outcome was good. Keep that in mind when someone tries to call them justified.

On this topic, I’ll link to another post which deals with this trope in more detail, here.

3. Islamic countries have committed more and worse genocides than anyone else.

Based on what? The Armenian genocide? OP says that it killed 2 million. Let’s take that figure.

Hitler killed over 6 million Jews, gypsies, and other minority groups as a part of an ethnic extermination program.

The Belgian Congo was the site of millions more deaths, going on to inspire the novel Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad.

Honestly, this entire argument is distasteful because the point isn’t to talk about the real suffering that was caused by human rights abuses done by Muslims. The point is to take the corpses from those massacres and shield American and European atrocities with their bodies.

4. The Native Americans exterminated themselves via natural disease vectors and cannibalism. Also they sacrificed children.

This does not stand up to even basic scrutiny. The bubonic plague killed off a major part of the European population in modern times. Yet the population bounced back. So, why didn't it?

Let's look at the case of Cuba. The pre-Columbian popuation is estimated at a little over 100,000, as seen here. First, disease massacred them in numbers often estimated to be about 90% their pre-contact populations. Second, survivors were organized in oppressive labor systems such as the encomineda (commendation) system, which 'commended' Amerindians to white colonists who were supposed to take care of and Christianize their charges in exchange for labor. They were brutally worked to the point that many hung themselves or ran away. So many died that in less than a century, Spaniards were already raiding Yucatan and other mainland regions for new sources of labor. This is partly why African slavery started picking up; they were working their indigenous laborers to death and needed new sources of labor.

Once the encomienda system was abolished, what happened? Well, in the case of Havana, to pick one well studied example, many indigenous peoples were segregated off into the neighboring town of Guanabacoa. White property owners then bought all the land around Guanabacoa. Meaning that they had to work, under brutal conditions, for whites despite their abuse under encomienda being officially over. Disease, overwork, and suicide combined to cull the population to low levels. Poverty and a society which treated non-Spaniards as inferior also encouraged them to breed whiter every generation. The Recio family, one of the richer Havana families, seems to have had some indigenous ancestry, possibly due to a bastard between one of the rich male heads of the family and a local indigenous woman. They then made sure that child married socially inferior, but whiter, partners from back home in order to whiten themselves as much as possible.

Mejorando la raza, 'bettering the race', is still used as a saying in many parts of Latin America.

So, devastated by diseases, crushed by poverty and exploitation, unable to get assistance in preserving their culture, and encouraged to whiten their kids to save them from the pain of discrimination, the Taino passed into memory in Cuba.

In what became the United States, disease hit hard, but so did laws like the Indian Removal Act, which forcibly uprooted indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands, including forced marches in which many died. Combine this policy with them often being 'given' rocky, unfertile, poorly irrigated lands, so as to make it seem like a fair trade for the land they had lost. Land that was often respected by treaties which the US government honored or ignored as it saw fit. Then, if oil or gold was discovered, new reasons would be found to further restrict their holdings or move them altogether.

As /u/Snapshot52/ pointed out in our recent podcast, the US government also took kids away from their families to forcibly teach them to be like white people. Here is a late 19th century cartoon which explicitly makes the point that 'consent' for this 'education' was not necessary and is obviously indebted to Kipling's idea of the 'White Man's burden' to raise up non-whites.

Now, with that said, indigenous peoples did bounce back. Where does he think Mexicans come from? Or Bolivians? They're largely people of indigenous descent, some more obviously so than others. Many have preserved their language and culture.

The Spanish on the mainland sought to conquer and culturally assimilate the indigenous peoples as subjects. The United States simply pushed natives out, moved settlers and slaves in, rinse and repeat.

While it is true that disease did cause a great deal of damage on its own, as Snapshot52 points out, overstating the role of disease is often a part of attempts to push the guilt for the deaths of Amerindians onto fate or nature and off of the hands of those who kicked them off their lands, killed them, reduced them to small enclaves or wholly assimilated them. So, again, an ironic dose of 'white guilt' from the anti-white guilt crowd.

7. Asia was completely unstable and uncivilized until "secular democracy" came along.

I haven't seen this one addressed much so far, so allow me to take a swing.

Hogwash. Absolute, utter tripe.

First off... "Asia?" We're going to have to get a wee bit more specific than "Asia." Because that is - I'm sure we're all aware if we take a step back and think for a second - a pretty big and diverse place! But given my own area of focus, let's just concentrate on what the initial claimant likely meant when they blithely reference an entire continent, and assume East Asia... which is still ridiculously overbroad, but hey, we've got to start somewhere.

Let's talk civilization, problematic a word as that is. The Yellow River Valley is considered one of the foundational culture-hearths of humanity... and unlike Mesopotamia, The Indus River Valley, and the Nile River Valley, it's still widely understood as having developed virtually independent of significant exchange with the other hearths. The Zhou Dynasty predated the founding of Rome as a city-state by 300 years, and wasn't even the earliest archaeologically-confirmed civilization of China (that distinction falls to what is traditionally known as the Shang/Yin Dynasty, and archaeologically known as the Erlitou Civilization, ca. 1600 BCE). The Han Dynasty alone accounts for almost the entire span of the Roman Republic and Western Empire, and was understood by outside traders and merchants who dealt in its chief export (after which many civilizations named the country itself: silk), as being in every way at least Rome's equal. And those are just two "recognized" dynastic lines that rules a unified China. Two out of 11 (12 if we count the Xia mythos). Heck, while we're at it, Japan is still on its first and only dynastic line.

Moreover, by virtually every technological "marker" save the last century-and-a-half, China has far outpaced the West or the Islamic world. The early Warring States Period of them 6th c. BCE saw the construction of the first crossbows more than a century before they were ever mentioned by the Ancient Greeks. While the rest of the world was using papyrus, clay tablets, or vellum paper was invented and put into wide use in the 2nd c. CE - produced to cheaply that China was using toilet paper centuries before anyone in Europe had ever heard of the material. At least ostensibly it wouldn't he until the Battle of the Talas River in 751 CE that the Arabs would "steal" the secret of papermaking. Block printing and moveable-typeface logically followed in late Tang, sometime prior to the 868 printed publication of the 金剛經 (Diamond Sutra). Paper money also, with experiments as easly as the mid-Tang and it really being rolled out during the Mongol Yuan Dynasty of the 13th and 14th centuries. Both the magnetic compass and weaponized gunpowder are also claimed by the Chinese, invented during the Song Dynasty. The compass, of course, would prove fundamental to the great Chinese voyages of exploration and trade under Admiral Zheng He in the early Ming Dynasty, while gunpowder would prove so formidable that the Song would drag the Mongol conquest of China out until from 1232 to 1276 - a truly stunning amount of time, given that the conquest of Kievan Rus took them 3 years (1237-40), Bulgaria took them a year (41-42), Anatolia in a year (1243), the Abbasid Caliphate another year (1258), and would prove the only nation targeted by Genghis personally that he did not see through to completion or near-completion. Speaking of the Mongols, they do what no one managed to do before of since - politically and economically unite almost the entirity of Asia through force of arms. Alexander, the Caesars, and Napoleon have got nothing on the Khans.

Chinese civilization would impact other East Asian peoples in a way so fundamental that it dwarfs the relatively surface-level changes wrought by Westernization and so-called "secular democracy." Under the t-shirts, jeans, and pop music in Korea, Japan, China, etc and you'll find the same underlying skeleton of civilization that has existed for thousands of year - Daoist, Confucian, and Mahayana Buddhist traditions that are the underpinnings of all of those civilizations - filial piety, valuation of collectivism vs. individualism, high-order societies, a reverence for the past, and a worldview that is on many levels fundamentally circular rather than straight.

I'm only scratching the surface here, but the fact of the matter is by the time to "West" managed to turn its attention to the grat and ancient civilizations of East Asia, it had just so happened to do so at the one, single historical moment that they had eclipsed the East technologically. And that just so happened to be a period of time of particular East Asian insularity and weakness (the Chinese call it the 百年國恥 - the "Century of National Humiliation" - and with good reason). Moreover the collective, selective amnesia of the West has strongly tended to do the opposite of the claims presented in the question - glorifying its own achievements and either minimizing, downplaying, or appropriating the developments and mile-markers achieved by other civilizations (see: Gutenberg "inventing" the printing press...) It conveniently forgets that, while it has gained at least temporary ascendency, it's only been in the past couple of centuries that anyone would think that the West was superior in any way... and for the vast stretch of human history, Europe has been a third-rate, backwards sewage ditch utterly eclipsed by its eastern neighbors, both near and distant.

Finally, in terms of stability and civilization, it is highly, highly questionable that either of those would register positively on East Asian civlizations when the whole is taken into account. The West has far more often been an agent of wanton destruction and destabiliztion for its own profits, than of some benevolent harbinger of civilizing influence. The British subjugation and occupation India, the British in China (see: the Opium Wars), the Americans in Japan (both 19th and 20 c.s), the introduction of German socialist philosophy into Russia, China, Korea, and Vietnam, the "proxy wars" of the Cold War ... the list goes on and on... but hey, the got nukes, blue jeans, and 300 channels on the TV... so... fair trade?

So rather than patting ourselves on the back about how well we've done, what some call "white guilt-tripping" is more like taking off the rose-colored glasses for a minute and seeing the world and its history through non-European eyes.

I am not going to touch on the subject of "white guilt" in this comment. However, I will address claims 4 and 5 to demonstrate there is a factual basis for these claims.

4) The Native Americans exterminated themselves via natural disease vectors and cannibalism. Also they sacrificed children.

The idea (and the statement) that Native Americans exterminated themselves "via natural disease vectors" is absolutely ridiculous. This statement insinuates they purposefully did so or were too ignorant to realize what was killing them, which both are equally untrue. Native American populations responded to disease outbreaks just like any other population on earth, both prior to and after colonization. Contrary to the "Virgin Soil" theory, the Americas were not some disease-free paradise that allowed for these foreign European disease to rip through unchallenged. Native Americans had to combat diseases native to their continent and, after colonization, had hundreds of years of reoccurring epidemics from these newly introduced pathogens.

Granted, the majority of the Native American population did die because of these disease. But it is important to note disease was not the only contributing factor that lead to the extremely high population loss. Here is sourced information about the genocide(s) committed by the United States. And here is further information from another comment I made about diseases. As for the cannibalism and child sacrifices, everyone else has touched on them enough to give an accurate answer.

With regards to the Virgin Soil hypothesis, the primary issue I have with it is that it is used as a scapegoat. Doing this begins to exaggerate the real impacts of disease and mitigate the impacts from other sources.

I usually refrain from getting into numbers regarding population when speaking about the Americas because it is still a widely debated topic. However, the general consensus, even among Native scholars, is that 85-95% of the Indigenous populations accounting for the entirety of the Americas died around the time colonization began.

That is a bit broad, though. It is important to realize that some places through North and South America did rebound. Native Americans had diseases of their own and reacted just like any other population to waves of disease. The thing to understand, though, is that when European diseases came, some places suffered major declines, but they have circumstances that accompany those declines. Mexico, for example, had Indigenous civilizations with highly populated urban centers. These places were hit hard by disease, along with famine, warfare, displacement, and essentially total destruction. And because Mexico/South America were among the first to be colonized, reports of the destruction came out of these circumstances. This led to the belief that 95% of the population died - because it essentially did in that limited geographic area - and this belief was applied to the Americas as a whole, but with disease being the main culprit in the narrative.

Some Native villages experienced disease, but bounced right back. Some did not experience the high mortality rates. Some were completely devastated that they might as well be considered extinct. We might be able to get some exact numbers, but it pretty difficult to get even appropriate measurements. This post but /u/anthropology_nerd describes it pretty well with some further reading. If you want me to come up with some, though, I can get back to you with it. It'll take a little bit of research.

We would not have seen the kinds of population declines that we did if it was purely disease that was introduced. A population will grow and be healthy if they have access to a steady and clean supply of water, an abundance of food, and sustainable social structures. If these things are maintained even with the introduction of disease, a society can withstand the effects. But if you throw in what the Indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced - all out war, enslavement, razing of their cities, and disease, you disrupt all of the necessary components for survival.

5) The U.S. incorporated some Iriquois traditional into the U.S. Constitution.

This claim is still debated nowadays, but there is clear evidence that the most likely influence on the U.S. Constitution from the Iroquois would've been from Benjamin Franklin. He spent a significant amount of time with the Iroquois and commented on it in several of his writings that demonstrate the impression he had on his mind regarding it. This thread links to several comments made on it by other users that are quiet relevant to the claim.

Additionally, here is my presentation the research I've conducted into it from a previous thread.

Vine Delora, Jr. speaks about it in Tribes, Treaties, & Constitutional Tribulations. Chapter 2, page 10 describes that in April of 1754, hostilities between England and France broke out and George Washington was dispatched to counter the French. In mid-June, the British officials advised the colonies to make a treaty with the Iroquois. Delegates were sent and met in Albany, New York. The delegates adopted a "Plan of Union" which included a governing structure for the Atlantic seaboard. According to Deloria:

It was at this conference that Benjamin Franklin pointed out the smooth functioning of the Iroquois Confederacy and urged his fellow delegates to adopt similar policies.

The British rejected the Plan of Union, but it is noted that a paradigm was established that patterned all subsequent discussions of a similar matter, including the formation of the Articles of Confederation that was adopted in 1777, apparently reflecting the Albany proposal.

Deloria cites Grinde and Johansen (1991) and Jose Barreiro, "Indian Roots of American Democracy," Northeast Indian Quarterly, vol. 4-5; and Gregory Schaaf, "Frome the Great Law of Peace to the Constitution of the United States: A Revision of America's Democractic Roots," American Indian Law Review, vol. 14.

Additionally, this Congress Concurrent Resolution acknowledges the contributions from the Iroquois Confederacy with this Indian Country Today article explaining it.

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Additional References:

• American Holocaust (1992) by David E. Stannard.

• Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (2015) by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, Alan C. Swedlund.

• Rights of Indians and Tribes (2012) by Stephen L. Pevar.

5. The U.S. incorporated some Iriquois traditional into the U.S. Constitution.

This is generally true. Ben Franklin, among others, had studied the Iroquois Confederacy's governing model, where the Six Nations of upstate New York each kept their own governments, and sent representatives to the Grand Council to present a united front. Franklin supported such a model for the American colonies [as early as 1751.] (http://www.smithsoniansource.org/display/primarysource/viewdetails.aspx?PrimarySourceId=1198) The reason for this is, there was no central government for the colonies pre-independence. Rather, all of them answered to London in one form or another in totally different ways.

In 1776, Delaware and Pennsylvania were property of the Penn family and Lord Baltimore's family owned Maryland outright. Massachusetts was under direct royal control, thanks to the Intolerable Acts. Virginia was ruled by the de facto aristocracy of second and third sons who had recreated the English social system in the New World. And Georgia, recently settled, was under the competent administration of its royal governor and assembly.

This contribution was later recognized by the U.S. Congress by H.R. 331 in 1988.

For good further reading on this, Mann's books, 1491, and 1493, provide a good overview, as well as a fascinating, readable look into pre-contact and post-contact Indian society. For something a little denser and more academic, check out Miller, American Indian Constitutions, 159 Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 33 (2015).

Previous answer that deals with the crusades that you'll find useful:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lz2ix/i_saw_this_article_about_the_crusades_posted_on/

I'm going to address this right away:

We approved this question because it is one that is based on genuine interest in the subject matter and education is the purpose of this space.

However, I feel the need to remind everyone planning to comment here, that we have rules in place that explicitly state that all answers must be

• in-depth

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