Did you also learn history from these type of videos? If yes, when and how did you get disillusioned?
The damage started from being a westerner. If falsehood does not hurt your material conditions then the narrative ends up being a social license to reflecting the above rather than brainwashing.
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
It’s really hard to convince a class of a narrative that contradicts their present material conditons (consider relationships rather than stresses)
Both of those are mostly watched by younger viewers to my knowledge, oversimplified especially. I would say they “pad the gaps” per se. History education is notoriously shit in the USA, so these type of channels are less Robert Conquest and more trivia night, if that makes sense. Oversimplified, Mr.Beat, extra history, etc. Mostly serve to be broud strokes about lessee known history, foreign history, or just general overviews for those that aren’t super well informed.
As for me, I did watch these channels when I was younger and definitely wasn’t as critical of them as I should have been, but I did grow out of it. Extra history and Mr.Beat are still decent if you’re curious about something that isn’t important. I think my biggest gripe is when they’re the most popular or even only source for something online. For example, the French revolution has some documentaries and some others, but by far the most popular English source on yt is oversimplified. Given my username, you can assume my feelings on him. Conversely there is extra history’s sun Yat-Sen series which is…decent, from what I can tell.
I will say, despite the numerous flaws, some information is still better than no information. I’ll let Samuel Clemens take it away,
"When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment (and Taine and St. Simon): and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte–And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such gospel so the change is in me–in my vision of the evidences.
People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens’s or Scott’s books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn’t altered; this is the first time it has been in focus."
-Twain In a letter to William Dean Howells [although to compare these channels to any of these great authors is not a one to one comparison]
I think the amount of “learning” the average person actually receives through a video medium is overstated and at most they get a new impression accompanied by information they won’t be able to recall later on.
Good or bad most online media- especially in video format, seems to only reinforce existing biases.
I think I have seen a mr. beat video maybe the name sounds familiar and the Oversimplified video over the bucket war. I mean the question I am going to ask here is define bad, agian I don’t know much about the channels. Are they bad because they are making up history or are they bad because they have a pronounced pro US pro Imperial bias?
They are bad because they conveniently skip over all historical contexts that may make the American or western side bad and use the same anti-communist propaganda points that the state media uses despite claiming to be independent.
They can be independent while still spouting propaganda, either out of malice or because they don’t know any better. I mean this is just part of the Empire’s propoganda cycle, its self replicating, people learn within the bubble so they repeat what they know and it goes on and on. I mean the worst I think I could say if they are omitting context instead of changing the fraiming is that they are poorly researched, but that is about on par with most states historical education.
Less damage than the bad history that is taught in schools.
