this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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GenZedong
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I wanted to like this channel so badly. Their sophomoric modern takes cause me to question their historical accounts.
Virtually all of these YouTube history channels engage in liberal-imperialist propaganda when it comes to modern and early modern historical topics starting with the US war of independence, the French revolution, going through both world wars and the cold war, and now the Ukraine conflict. This is obvious to see, but what is not as obvious to people who may not be particularly well versed in history is that even their medieval/ancient era history videos are incredibly biased with a eurocentric and in particular for the medieval era anglo-centric view of historical events and figures.
They also have the tendency to be incredibly favorable toward certain asian cultures over others, in particular frequently adopting japanophile positions. The most insidious of these channels is K&G since unlike most of the others they do not adopt openly reactionary positions of the kind that other "history channels" do but rather they present as "leftist" and progressive (similar to Extra History) in the way that social democrats usually do. They use this pseudo-leftism to give credibility to anti-communist propaganda.
I would like to watch some YT videos that give good general and detailed history for different countries. Mostly ancient and medieval, specifically of East Asian, Central Asian, and Middle Eastern and African places. Not Eurocentric. Do you have any recommendations for any of these?
I would like that as well. I had a phase when i would watch a lot of these sorts of channels but i became disillusioned after i noticed that they all present history from more or less the same eurocentric perspective, and particularly when the topics strayed into the 19th and 20th centuries their anti-communist and pro-western and especially pro-anglo-saxon biases became very evident.
So unfortunately no, i don't have any perfect recommendations for you that are free of all eurocentric bias because most of the English language content that you find is made by people who received a western education in history and who use as their references western or western-aligned sources. This automatically leads to a specific kind of skew in the way they frame history even with the most well meaning and earnest content creators (those who are not acting as liberal propagandists but are genuinely trying to simply educate and inform).
However there are still degrees of bias, and you can usually tell which are more egregious by their production value. Those with better production value usually have corporate money behind them and tend to thus be more heavily propagandistic. So my recommendation is to be especially wary of when you see videos with fancy graphics. This doesn't mean that all of the history content you find is unwatchable, just that it should be consumed with a healthy amount of skepticism toward their perspective on history.
For instance i have found this channel to be one of the better ones out there and about as neutral as i've seen if you can get past the rather monotonous way in which they present history in their videos. And i guess this guy is ok too. For the most part ancient history is usually covered quite well (except when it comes to Sparta and Rome which are often idolized by reactionaries and used, particularly in the case of the former, to push racist narratives of "brave white Europeans" resisting the "barbaric asiatic hordes"). But the closer you get to the modern era the more your political ideology and cultural bias plays a role in how you view history.
That's about what I expected 😭
you can sort of trust when they're directly quoting a source. just the text of the source tho, not their interpretation or dramatization. occasionally they've been known to consult specialists but just look up 'kings and generals' on r/badhistory for a virtually endless supply of dunks. it's really bad.
it's not a very stringent subreddit but i don't see how kissinger apologia corrupts people nickpicking the ancient/medieval content of youtuber entertainers masquerading as documentarians.
we're not talking about a person we're talking about posts on the same subreddit from different people. by all means if the same poster did both i'd be less disposed to listen, but simply sharing forum-space with idiotic shit doesn't make everything there idiotic. i mean have you seen this website we're on?