The American education system does not teach empire. This is not an accident.

 https://x.com/nxt888/status/2059500823470801277

Sony Thăng

@nxt888

The American education system does not teach empire. This is not an accident. It teaches the Revolution. It teaches the Constitution. It teaches the Civil War in a way that frames it primarily as a story of "national healing" rather than unfinished reckoning. It teaches World War II as the definitive American story: the sleeping giant awakened, the "arsenal of democracy," the liberation of Europe, the moral clarity of that specific conflict deployed as a permanent filter through which all subsequent American violence can be viewed as basically continuous with defeating Hitler. It does not teach the Philippines, where the U.S. military killed somewhere between 200,000 and 1,000,000 people between 1899 and 1913 during the Philippine-American War, a war most Americans have never heard of. It does not teach the Banana Wars, where the U.S. military intervened repeatedly in Central America and the Caribbean to protect the commercial interests of American corporations. It does not teach the full history of Iran: the 1953 coup that removed a democratically elected prime minister and installed a Shah who ran a torture state, because the elected prime minister wanted to nationalize Iranian oil. It does not honestly teach Korea, 1945-53. Guatemala, 1954. Vietnam, 1954-75. Lebanon, 1958 and 1982-84. The Congo, 1960-65. Cuba, 1961. Brazil, 1964. Dominican Republic, 1965. Haiti, across the 20th century. Indonesia, 1965. Greece, 1947-49 and 1967-74. Laos, 1964-73. Cambodia, 1969-75. Chile, 1973. Angola, 1975-1991. Argentina, 1976-1983. Nicaragua, the 1980s. El Salvador, the 1980s. Grenada, 1983. Panama, 1989. Afghanistan, 1979-92 and 2001–21. Iraq, 1991-2003 and 2003-11. Somalia, 1992-95. Sudan, 1998. Yugoslavia, 1999. Yemen, 2002-25. Venezuela, 2002 and 2014-present. Honduras, 2009. Libya, 2011. Syria, 2012-26. Ukraine, 2014-present. It does not teach these things honestly because a population that understood them would have a very different relationship to the word "freedom" when its government uses it to justify intervention. The ignorance is load-bearing. Remove it, and the entire moral architecture of American exceptionalism becomes uninhabitable. They know this. The curriculum is not an oversight. The curriculum is a choice, made deliberately, renewed continuously, defended furiously whenever teachers try to expand it. The most powerful weapon American empire has ever deployed is not the aircraft carrier. It is the history class.

3:03 PM · May 27, 2026

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