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Comment by yakshaving_jgt | Hacker News Reader

And if you were Russian you would know that it was the Soviets that defeated the Nazis and won the war.

And if you were Polish you would know that the Soviets were bad for invading originally, and the English were also pretty bad through their initial inactivity. In fact if you look at the death toll by nation, one could argue that the UK barely went to war at all. The UK lost what, 400,000 people? Compared with Poland's 5,000,000? And of course a significant portion of the pilots in the Battle of Britain were Polish, and the Enigma machine was cracked by three Polish mathematicians eight years prior to Alan Turing pushing the work over the line (and subsequently taking all the credit for it, at least in the eyes of the British).

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And they'd all be wrong. The Allies won the war. None of them did it on their own. Nor could they had they tried. The UK was going to fall. The USSR was going to fall. It took all of us to destroy the Axis.

My point is that every country teaches their own narrative to its youth, and of course it’s always only the parts of history that don’t make them look bad. English kids aren’t taught that the UK did nothing when Westerplatte was under siege. Swedish kids aren’t taught that Sweden profited and aided the Nazis by selling them natural resources. Australian kids aren’t taught much about WWII relative to Europeans as far as I can gather, as the curriculum centres around the ANZACs and Gallipoli.

I think people having pride (or indeed shame) in their own nation — whichever nation that may be — for historic military engagements is misplaced, and is really an example of exceptionalism. It’s not a small thing either; I think this sentiment significantly aided Vote Leave’s Brexit campaign. As another commenter pointed out — British people know that we won “two world wars and one World Cup”.

...and American kids aren't taught that the US was selling oil and equipment to the Japanese so they could attack China...the cabinet cutting off these supplies while the US President was away at a secret meeting with Churchill in Alaska triggered the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Both Churchill and Roosevelt had planned to continue supplying Japan so they could destroy China, the supplies were cutoff without their knowledge.

Once promised US oil was cutoff and the secret treaty signed in 1905 by Teddy and Japan was reneged on, the Japanese needed to invade the rest of Asia (starting with Indonesia) to keep their war machine fueled, bombing Pearl Harbor ensured they could do this with less US resistance in the Pacific.

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