What's the hardest truth you've had to swallow when you became a fan of history?

That's what I meant by personal gain. It's pretty horrible to think that he did it all for money. I wonder how he viewed the Guals. I haven't read his diary.. He clearly didn't think much of them regardless.

Nazis were actually the bad guys.

FIGHT

>g*uls
>people
Nice try, Vercingetorix

why? seriously.

The average person with a history degree is more misinformed and ignorant of history than an illiterate redneck who can't spell his own name

Explain?

>

t. redneck

You're hurting my feelings. I worked hard for my degree friend.

Every philosopher I study I start to think his ideas are the closest to truth, until I read the next one. I realized I’ll never get out of this thinker of the week mentality.

>gulag
>holodomor
>stalin in general
>nukes
>eisenhower deathcamps
>brits bombing german civilians for no reason
>the rape of europe
>everything stalin did (thats right its here twice)
>finland
>lying about nazis and japs and thus making everything about them questionable
>decreased holocaust death estimates
>israel in general
>leaving the worst axis war criminals alone and thus making it questionable if they actually were what is said about them
>blockade of germany
>overall forcing germany into war
>molotov-ribbentrop
Do you need more?

this isn't true even in the slightest, the only problem that arises when someone has a history degree is that SOME of them take it to mean they're an authority on every aspect and period of human history.

Axis
>Started both theaters of war
>the holocaust
>unit 731
>death marches (both japs and germans did this

gg

>Ancient Rome was Nordic.

That secondary sources have an independent value as texts.

studying philosophy, realizing that many great philosophers never ended up marrying, or having kids.

and I heard Socrates wife was a huge bitch.

This one is rough user

Conquered people were not real people. Julius Caesar like everyone else was extremely tribal.

>Ideology and allegiance means nothing, might makes right.

Clearly you haven't read much history

gauls sacked rome way before
every time a huge blob of gauls would start moving around near italy the romans would shit themselves, so something had to be done eventually
sure, the reason julius caesar did it specifically was 100% self-interest, but the way he did it was probably in the top 1% of best possible outcomes

delete this

Human history is essentially driven by people taking from those they have the power to take advantage.

Byzantines weren't Roman

The 2nd most dangerous person in the world has read zero books

The most dangerous has read 1

I fucking hate how 50 000 Nazi soldiers accidentally tripped and fell into Poland thus forcing Germany into war

Every society will destroy itself

Holl up, what if Freud was right about death drive.

>reclaiming your rightful land from a bunch of slav barbarians is bad

The only thing that makes land rightful is military power and germans got btfo not once but twice.

"What do you want for dinner?"
"But what IS dinner? Would you say that lunch if held late is a dinner?"
"Please, not now Socrates"
"OMG so irrational I'm going to the Piraeus"

t. Cletus still buttblasted about the confederacy

Julius did nothing wrong.
It is done today idiot.
Get real.

This one fucks me up, especially the fact that the more unified the world gets, the more damaging the inevitable collapse will be.

>What's the hardest truth you've had to swallow when you became a fan of history?

Medieval History phd candidate, focusing on Byzantine Empire foreign relations, what I learned:

-Don't talk about crusades with right wing conservatives,
-Don't talk about Achamenid and Sassanid Empire with Persian Diaspora,
-Generally avoid talking with American Christians
-Ignore people who cite Dan Carlin, JJ Norwich, Lars Brownworth as if they are historians

The harshest truth was most of the public look at History quite romantically and try to fit 19th-21st century ideas about nationality identity religion gender etc into history. They really do have some hard time to understand why certain christians allied with muslims to fight other christians, because they come to history under the assumption of seeing europeans united under the banner of EVROPA and kick off brown shitskins.

"Hell is other people"

-Jean-Paul Sartre

...

You're doing God's work, user. And I mean that metaphorically or literally, whichever way makes you happier

Jesus is who he said he was.

>Being this retarded

...

Not really. He's reproducing value in an expanded form for the employing class and will never have freedom to follow his conscience in research.

Welcome, my son, to the machine.

same
i've studied Indochinese and Sino history for 7 years and some things people state to me is laughable

that all my heroes were probably just excellent propagandists rather than the pillars of morality they're portrayed to be

No system or ideology is free from human error and will eventually collapse as a result.

Your heroes are all hack frauds...you FUCK

Nothing really matters.
Post modrnism is correct

History Major doing Masters in historiography of Empires.

>Don't talk history with Nationalists, you'll make them butthurt.
>Don't talk history with Left-leaning people, they assume they know shit and you'll make them butthurt or ignore you completely.

Another hard truth is the depressing truth is that if you considered yourself a "History Buff" in childhood or High School and considered a career in history, applying for it in college or as an MA, you're quickly faced with how absolutely encyclopedic everything you knew ever was.

Every historian is flawed and biased no matter how much they strive for objectivity.

Your views will one day be outdated and scorned. If you're lucky they'll be considered quaint. If you're unlucky, you'll be the perpetuator of some kind of inequality or absurdity.

history only exist if there was someone who see it and pass it to other people
or leave something to be recognized in the future

Also doing my Masters. Just in my first semester, but surprisingly I don't feel all that terribly out of my depth yet.

I'm sorry you can't handle this, but a painful reality is sweeter than a narcoleptic dream.

that the majority of powerful empires and figures in history were formed by backstabbing and stamping out resistance rather than peaceful enterprising

additionally no matter how much evidence you present, someone will question the legitimacy of your argument.

It's for the best user... its for the best...

That individual intellectual work, particularly in the university is only capable of informing bourgeois hegemony against the class. And, therefore the point is not to understand the world, even for wage labour, but to change it.

Any honest scholar is a snitch.

no one is good

>Hey honey what's cooking
>*holds out plucked chicken*
>BEHOLD, A MAN!

that was diogenes retard

FUCK YOU.

LOOK AT THIS MAN AND WEEP.

Roman and Greek society is heavily romanticized, and we tend to focus on their positive contributions rather than the bad.

They were slavers, rapists, murderers, imperialists, and genociders. Just imagining families being killed, towns destroyed, children sold into slavery just angers me.

I absolutely abhor Islamic State, but Greek/Romans did many of the same things.

but at the same time, they were products of their environment, and everyone around them was way worse

>Don't talk about Achamenid and Sassanid Empire with Persian Diaspora

What's wrong with doing so? I remember having a long friendly talk with a family friend from Iran (Iran-Iraq war veteran) about stuff I learned in AP Global and don't recall causing controversy. Is it because of Reza Pahlavi?

I'm gonna guess because the diaspora are either Muslim or atheist liberal?

>Populism is simply the means by which monsters take the throne
>Monarchism is how the state decays and falls into stagnation and failure
>Imperialism is only a problem when it's handled poorly
>Most people are fine with submitting to an authority because of deep pathological scars in the majority of the population
>The endstate of the human race is a civilization of fatty blobs sitting in our mobile VR balls with tubes going up all of our holes, locked away in a fantasy world of our own creation, because all that anyone cares about is their basest desires and immersing themselves in sub par escapism when the need to hunt or work is removed

But the one that really keeps me up is the most singular truth I have found
>Our creations consume us

That its not over yet and we are far from an ideal society.

>Epicurus had a gaggle of hot chicks
>one he nicknamed mammaria

The goat philosophy

Everything you know about the past is really only the tip of an iceberg, and you won't ever have true understanding.
The easier it is to access information, the less valuable knowing it already is.
Selfish Survival and Greed for the your tribe is the biggest motivator that can be recognized.
The more trouble there is, the smaller you will view your tribe until there is nothing more than either your family or yourself.
The only constant is change.

>Everything you know about the past is really only the tip of an iceberg, and you won't ever have true understanding.

This is because of neccessity. You have to simplify to explain concepts, other wise you just spend years explaining history to people and they never graduate. There is always a deeper, and more complex narrative to be found. You can keep going more and more and more, and you will get a more complex picture, and never find an end to it.

You know nothing. The Gauls aren't a monolothic people. They tribes that Ceasar slaughtered asked to Romans/Allied tribes if they could settle in the allied lands and the Romans said no, broke a bunch of treaties, and slaughtered the Gauls. Completely unjustified. Its just like the US invading Iraq because Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan or whatever.

> historiography of Empires.
Sounds interesting. Could you elaborate? Is it like the historiography about Empires, or historiography in Empires? Is it about how historians view, say, the Roman Empire today or is it about Roman historians? (Just using Rome as an example of an Empire)

I also happen to consider myself a "History Buff" from childhood onwards. I'm currently doing a BA in history, and am hoping for a career as a professional historian in the future. However what did you mean by "how absolutely encyclopedic everything you knew ever was"?

Your research sounds interesting. Could you link any material? Give any advice to someone who wishes to study foreign relations in history? Also what is wrong with Norwich and Brownworth? I genuinly thought they were proper historians. But yeah, the problem of anachronistically reading modern ideology into pre-modern history bugs me. It is also a problem I've wanted to read more about, but I am unsure what I ought to search for to find it. Could you suggest anything?

Also curious about this.

just admire their rhetoric and will to power

Does it not feel liberating, knowing that all your "heroes" were flawed, complex individuals just like you? That there's nothing innately superior about them, and you could very well end up as one of them if the right opportunity came along?

This. It's more apt to say that the 105 - 115 IQ crowd vastly overestimates their intelligence more so than the 85-95 crowd, but that crowd is still dumber.

>Christianity, a foreign religion, caused the decline of Greco-Roman culture (see: Justinian) so the insistence that Christianity is the backbone of European culture is wrong and we owe much more in terms of science, theatre, art and music to pagan/Roman culture than to Jesus

>History always will repeat itself at some point in the future, both the good and the bad no matter how hard we try not to

That there is no way to prevent the death of a society. No matter how correctly it works, it will become a victim of it's own success, degenerate, decline and fall. Even when you can pinpoint the exact causes, there's the reality that the "bad" decisions that led to the decline were actually very logical and necessary answers to the problems being faced at the moment, so either way you're fucked.

Man, philosophers are so biased.
They always believed in their ideas.
That's the whole problem.

>What's the hardest truth you've had to swallow when you became a fan of history?

There are periods of history that we will never know the truth about
People forgotten forever

>There is always a deeper, and more complex narrative to be found.
Not if there are no historical sources

extreme left and extreme right ideologies produce the exact same result when in power

>idelogues set policies, without consulting experts
>policies either give more political power to economical actors (right) or more more control of the economy to plitical leaders (left)
>both breeding ground for rampant corruption
>corruption first step of collapse

As much as I hate to admit it, history has made me a centrist. Even when might makes right, the mighty who practice consensus are mightier for a longer period of time.

Shows that you don't know shit.

It's not about left vs right, whatever the fuck that means.
It's about the totalitarism and/or authoritarism.

"In a word, when you suppose anything to be or not to be, or to be in any way affected, you must look at the consequences in relation to the thing itself, and to any other things which you choose-to each of them singly, to more than one, and to all; and so of other things, you must look at them in relation to themselves and to anything else which you suppose either to be or not to be, if you would train yourself perfectly and see the real truth." - Plato

>histery ideologues
Fuck off, you absolute brainlets
>truths
Fucking undergrads.

I get you. Andalusian society has been romanticized too. Regardless, everyone was at that shit back then.

humans are brutal by nature and only a thin layer of civilization separates us from savages

eihter you're focusing too much on the specific words "left-right" instead of seing them as umbrella for how these "poles" were called in [insert period]

I did specify extreme, so I'm you needed a second layer with "authoritarism/totalitarism" but that seemed pretty obvious to me

>mfw when you make the exact point I was making
>thinking you're rebuking
>you probably have a disability

>idelogues set policies, without consulting experts
>experts

Actual experts, or managerial class soybois?

I am rebuking.
I'm saying that only ignorant people use the terms left and right seriously as a primary classifier.

I'd hate to be Plato for that sheer reason. You can't even flee Diogenes in the safety of your own home.