I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
So I’m not aware of it, but there’s a lot I’m not aware of either. There was a growing clash that was brewing between the colonies and England. People of the colonies were largely seen as uncouth-ish because of their slave owning ways while also England was starting to have to rely on slaves in their armies in the Caribbean ( it think) that they would then free because the colonists were unreliable. And so there was a lot of back and forth going on at the time around ending slavery, some because it was seen as below the standing of the people of England, some just to piss off the colonists. Somerset’s case led to a handful of copycats, but probably one of the biggest events around slavery leading up to that time period of the Declaration was Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation.
I think one of the big things to remember about this time is that it’s not like now where everything is happening at the speed of the internet, which people often forget. Communication wasn’t nearly as fast so things had to occur at much longer time scale. We kinda fall into a weird way of looking at the past as a number of dates and not really think about how many events had to happen over a period of time for the build up of human interaction that lead to those events. A bit like libs with the Russian/Ukraine conflict only beginning when Russia invaded.
btw I got a lot of this from Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. It’s an incredible read on uprisings of the enslaved and how it ties into the American Revolutionary period. He starts looking at things about 100 years before the declaration and covers so much stuff that school had never even touched. Interestingly enough it kinda pairs pretty well with the pirate show Black Sails because of the importance of the Caribbean uprisings.