"History is supposed to make you uncomfortable" is a popular saying among content creators and distributors who present uncomfortable history. It's snappy, sounds tough, and it's just not true. In fact, it makes the uncomfortable history much less palatable to a large number of people who really should be absorbing it instead of rejecting it. It does more harm than good.
History contains a lot that makes us uncomfortable. This can be true of one's own personal life story or the the story of a nation you inhabit or a group with whom you identify. Everyone makes mistakes growing up. Some mistakes are worse than others. This is true of individuals and of humans as a species. We done fucked up a lot. However, every decent thing that shows the way to a greater humanity is also part of history. History is simply the story of everything that we can recall, or are willing to recall.
Specific presenters of history might want you to be uncomfortable with events that they portray for you. The portrayal doesn't even have to be true. The shiny American myth of freedom and equality from the get-go is a carefully edited montage of cherry-picked events and documents combined with outright bullshit. On the other hand, the portrayal of our history as completely evil is almost equally selective of facts. Sad to say, the justification of colonization completely disregarded native peoples, which is hard to defend by today's standards. Humans in general are an opportunistic bunch, and the colonial powers were the most successful opportunists of their era. They came, they saw, they almost died out, they bounced back, and they steamrolled from sea to shining sea.
It wasn't that simple. Results varied widely along the vast coastline of the Americas under the assault of ambitious European powers. We can't know how it would have gone if European explorers had arrived in smaller waves more devoted to careful assimilation of and with the cultures they found cutting the hearts out of human sacrifices on blood soaked temple pyramids or depopulated by smallpox and measles from the first casual contact with a landing party.
In school in the USA in the 1960s and '70s, I was taught history as a story of good guys and bad guys. Even when the bias is not obvious, we judge the participants in the stories we're told. As more and more historians bring forward the stories of despicable acts committed in the course of our development as "the greatest country in the world," it may seem that history exists only to make you uncomfortable. Instead, your discomfort shows that you still have a shred of conscience.
Also in the 1960s and '70s, we were already getting some stories of the injustices essential to territorial expansion and the rise of commercial power in the colonies and later the United States. It started with sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans, slaves, and successive waves of immigrants. White people were still mostly good guys at this stage in the story's development, but the facade was cracking. It was still quite possible to be a fatuous liberal twat for too many more years. We're doing great! Keep it up!
I understand the backlash among the fans of European expansionism. They fear the reckoning. How can we balance the ledger if everything we're being told was unjust really was? How can we face ourselves if we acknowledge the evil of our own older relatives, not just long-dead ancestors? How can we face our own participation? It's much easier to get angry and deny it. Denial and anger usher in the grief of loss. A whole imaginary country is dying for these people. They've been fed binary thinking for so long that, if they're not the total good guys, they must be the total bad guys. That is unacceptable.
We're dealing with addiction here. We're dealing with deeply ingrained, perhaps even innate characteristics. The first step to recovery is acknowledging that you have a problem, and that there is only treatment, never cure. It's a hard step and a tough life. The thing is, the vast majority of us have something in us that acts like an addiction, even if it is not currently recognized as such. It goes way beyond a compulsion to consume something, whether it's food, drugs, booze, porn, or the pain of others. It could be an overdeveloped work ethic and the sense of superiority that brings. Think about it and come up with your own list. It will be a long one.
Various religions and programs have tried to attach recovery to a higher power. Some people thrive in this framework. Others twist it to nefarious purposes or just weave in and out of it without ever improving. You have to find your own way in the world. That may doom us, as the collective decisions of an already excessive population deplete resources through basic consumption and the added extravagance of warfare. Any attempt to compel public enrollment in a massive exercise in group therapy will be unavoidably tyrannical. People need to smarten up on their own.
History is history. A lot of it reveals uncomfortable facts. Uncomfortable people will act to alleviate their discomfort. Some will do it by seeking greater unity with all of those weirdos out there. Others will do it by trying to kill off every person and institution that confronts them. History will record how that turns out.
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