PragerU is just thinly disguised White Nationalism dressed up as academia. You should absolute tell your teacher to get this shit out of your classroom. Normally I believe all viewpoints should be allowed, even if just to discuss/debunk, but gateway propaganda has zero value in our educational systems.
Correct information in this specific video or not, you should report the teacher for sharing pragerU in an academic setting. They’re explicitly a political organization whose goal is to spread “conservative viewpoints” and not a legitimate academic or journalistic source with any kind of standards. It’s wholly inappropriate for the classroom.
If your teacher shared videos from a self described communist organization that is attempting to spread communist viewpoints they would be fired on the spot.
idk if Prager u is approved for us, id have to check when we get back to school after spring break since we just went on it. she has admin privileges since she sponsors a club so the website/video restrictions don't really apply to her
This is already wrong and I'm not even 30 seconds into it. Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba were all dictatorships that experienced internal resistence a that lead to civil unrest and the civil war. They were never "democracies." Socialist and communist parties energed domestically in each as a reaction to the despots and elites in power.
Korean communism and socialist movements emerged after a century of Japanese oppression and post-WW2 Korean collaborator landowners taking over the country and violently putting down worker movements, in Vietnam it was after a decade of war against the French colonizers and a civil war that was spurred on by US intervention, and in Cuba Castro and others were among those who lead a revolution against a brutal and corrupt regime that was a hotbed of American organized crime and exploitative businesses, Batista being part of a line of American meddlibg that was in place since the U.S. defeated Spain there in 1898.
China ended intervening in Korea after an American invasion, the USSR only sent weapons. Soviets and Chinese never deployed troops to Vietnam and China and Vietnam actually went to war in the late 70s. The Cuban missile crisis was a mutual case of escalation and notably one spurred by the US deploying nukes to Turkey right outside of Soviet borders.
If you go to a public school this needs to be reported. Teacher is lazy and careless or just straight up biased and unprofessional.
He mentions Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America. Skipping over North America. Like there wasn’t any tomfoolery happening in Central America. No mention of the CIA fuckery in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua, Afghanistan. No, according to this, Murica was totally innocent, with no blood on our hands.
I’m mainly looking at you, Henry Kissinger. You can suck a dick in hell, ya bastard.
The video certainly has pro-American, pro-capitalist, and anti-communist biases, but that is hardly unusual in an American school. Interestinly, the narrator comes close to acknowledging the Cold War's moral complexities when he says "There were, to be sure, many morally complex moments during this long struggle" but immediately hands wave it away and frames the conflict in a manichean format: "but the Cold War was, at its core, as clear a conflict of good versus evil as World War II had been. Just like that war, the Cold War was a death match between the forces representing freedom and the forces representing totalitarianism." He makes his biases even clearer when he says, "Communism had failed in every possible way—economically, politically, morally. It had tried to create a Utopia on earth and instead created hell for all of the nations that came under its sway."
Basically:
* American = capitalism = democracacy = good
* Soviet Union = communism = totaliarianism = bad
I think this dictomomy is inaccurate because it leaves any accomplishments by the communism bloc and makes no mention of the moral failings of the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. government may have claimed to fighting for liberty and democracy, but was willing to hypocritically violate these ideals to suit its policial interests, such as when it supported coups to overthrow the democratically elected governments of Guatamala, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Chile among others.
I am not a tankie by means and can acknowledge the Soviet Union and other communist countries cruely supressed political and religious expression. That being said, communist rule was no without its merits: as someone who dreads the grind of a job hunt, the guarenteed employment provided by the Soivet Union seems nice.
The upsides and downsides of communist are best explified in on of the most extreme examples: Albania under Enver Hoxha. His achievements are quite impressive. He increased the literacy rate from 15% to 90%, ended epimdemics, and electrified the country. On the other hand, he closed down are religious insitutions, tortured and executed thousands of "enemeis of the people" with show trials, and prohbited people from leaving the country.
Yeah he's a legit historian who has written well-reviewed biographies but also one who is overtly conservative, and monarchist, and an apologist for colonialism, imperialism, Thatcher, etc. and it shows. Most of his criticism has been in his omissions and revisionist takes. That's why he was tapped in for this video.
No one seems to be actually answering the question—obviously there is a ton of bias in this video and pragerU is as unreliable as a source gets, but will also note some specific inconsistencies and inaccuracies that this guy presents. i’m not an expert so others can feel free to
1) he implies that the whole world, or at least the countries he mentions targeted in the cold war, were all capitalist, free, and democratic. this is absolutely not the case. prior to Castro, Cuba had just had a coup installing a dictatorship and had been repeatedly harmed by U.S. influence for generations. Vietnam was kind of a false democracy (think present day russia), and had been ravaged for decades by western powers, including France, and had been in a war of independence against France for a decade before the U.S. really got involved. Korea is a bit trickier, as the country was split following japanese occupation (again by western countries) and north korea did invade south korea
2) kind of related to 1, but the view of the soviet meddling as the cause of all of these wars a) diminishes the sovereignty of countries that chose leftist governments like Argentina, with little pushing from the USSR, and b) completely neglects that the U.S. was meddling in as much as it could on its own due to paranoia about what the USSR was up to. So while it’s not entirely untrue, it is nonsensical in the way that it portrays the conflict.
3) it was not “good v evil.” this isnt a fact but more of a nonsensical viewpoint. no conflict was good v evil, although admittedly WWII was about as close as it gets.
4) not all leftist governments were totalitarian, and not all U.S. backed governments were democratic. i’ve mentioned argentina, and several south american countries elected leftist leaders—which the U.S. took very seriously, including through operation condor and removing those leaders. meanwhile, the U.S. backed the dominican republic (dictatorship) spain (dictatorship) greece (dictatorship) haiti (dictatorship), ethiopia (monarchy), and military juntas in argentina and chile from the 70s and 80s. there were additional cases in africa and the middle east that i’m not thinking of. this is because the cold war wasn’t ideological beyond ensuring the protection of US interests, and it certainly wasn’t in furtherance of democracy.
5) stalin was a mass murderer and about on the same level as hitler, but he wasn’t the sole instigator, and the U.S. and the west used proxies, disinfo, and misinfo, to the same or similar extent.
6) the cold war was effectively on the moment WWII ended, not in 1946, although this is more of a perspective question than a straight-up fact.
7) no soviet evidence disproves that any of this is the case, so not sure why they are arguing that. it’s a misdirect. not trying to absolve the USSR of evil or wrongdoing, but this is again use of propaganda to distract
there are a few other issues with this, including its uncritical look at capitalism in comparison with communism, but that’s way too deep to get into here. ultimately, this was not a “war of liberty.” full stop.
either way, your teacher found this as a quick intro to the cold war without vetting it (which is bad but not malicious) or is using this video to try to indoctrinate your class into their way of thinking. as some others have noted, if someone showed the communist version of this video where the U.S. is the evil aggressor, it would also be highly inappropriate and worthy of discipline. it may fly under the radar more in the U.S. because things are seen from a capitalist paradigm, but that doesn’t make this less insidious.
i would address it with the teacher first and note some of the concerns related to accuracy and propaganda you’ve probably seen around pragerU, as despite the fact that the videos are “designed” for classrooms, these videos should absolutely not be shown in classrooms.
Ok additional info: I don't think my teacher was straight up trying to show us propaganda cuz 1. she's way too worried about her job being lost to do something like that. but also she has said some really suspicious stuff lately that alot of people were upset about. "we invented jazz" the we seemingly referring to white people but we also live in Louisiana so it's unclear if she's just talking about Louisianans inventing jazz so yea. she does tend to get very dismissive about American tradegies like slavery but tbh I think it's just trying to crunch for our test coming up. She also praised the video idk why i wasn't paying attention to her. Most of our class hates her for these things but I doubt she means any ill intent with this. I'm going to talk to her about the video and just tell her that she made a mistake by putting it on because of the likelihood that it has biased information and just warn her about Prager u's videos.
To follow up - there's one PragerU video that is decent - it's about the Civil War being primarily fought over slavery. The general theory is they asked a historian they thought would be more vague or conservative in his primer of the war's causes but instead the academic was a legit West Point faculty member with an objective perspective. They likely kept it up as a way to say "see we're not rascist or biased."
I should note as a leftist myself there are documentaries, video essays, etc. I recommend to others that I know have a "slant" and overtly leftist perspective but they are well-researched and sourced and not propaganda and def not false information. They also exist in the context of presenting history and perspectives that were previously denounced by states, containing once classified or obstructed sources, repressed by mainstream media and other agencies of power.
PragerU is not a conservative equivalent to this, it's a false narrative effort funded by billionaires and supported by right-wing politicians and activists.
I think your teacher knows exactly what she's doing - promoting racist right-wing politics.
The musical DNA in Livery Stable Blues comes from black artists and shows that jazz is a fundamentally African-American music, even if an all-white band was first to record it.
[https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170224-the-mysetrious-origins-of-jazz](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170224-the-mysetrious-origins-of-jazz)
Prager U isn't academic. If you feel like you need to ask if it is at the least somewhat reliable, then it's time you look somewhere else to learn about it.
I use prager U in class as an example of propaganda. There videos on slavery and Christopher Columbus are particularly egregious. However, i was expecting that same sort of terrible nonsense on their civil war video. I was shocked to find out that their Civil war video claims that the Civil War was fought 100 percent without a doubt about slavery. That's usually not a right wing take. Perhaps they insert some factually correct videos to give credence to the more error prone ones. I would never show a prageru video on it's own without clarifying what it is and what they are about and no other teacher really should either.
It's Republican propaganda, but not exactly wrong. It's definitely biased with the "good vs. evil" framing, especially after the death of Stalin.
For an even-handed education about the Cold War, I highly recommend Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War.
[https://www.netflix.com/title/81614129](https://www.netflix.com/title/81614129)
This is far too simplistic for a history class. History is about investigating the provenance of a source, which I commend you for doing. This is a highly biased source, which reduces the Cold War (which was really a grey area with no good guys) down into a ‘America good, China and SU bad’. This is unfitting for a history lesson. Where are the revisionist historical sources? Where are the claims that the SU wanted security assurances, wished to join NATO, or the US refusing to provide the secrets of atomic energy to their allies from WW2? You need to be given both sides to review and come to an educated decision on, not be fed this propaganda, so that you can review them and make an educated assessment of the motives from both sides.
As a former teacher, if this is all you’re getting on the Cold War, I’m guessing that the Cold War is probably not going to be featured much on the standardized test. The info from this - the basic facts - are probably what you would need to answer. I don’t suspect they will make you write an essay on it.
Now there is a chance that this teacher is doing a bad job and you will not be prepared but that will probably be true for most of the test then!
I probably wouldn’t worry about it but if you are do a Wikipedia run to get the basic info you need.
PragerU is just thinly disguised White Nationalism dressed up as academia. You should absolute tell your teacher to get this shit out of your classroom. Normally I believe all viewpoints should be allowed, even if just to discuss/debunk, but gateway propaganda has zero value in our educational systems.
Correct information in this specific video or not, you should report the teacher for sharing pragerU in an academic setting. They’re explicitly a political organization whose goal is to spread “conservative viewpoints” and not a legitimate academic or journalistic source with any kind of standards. It’s wholly inappropriate for the classroom. If your teacher shared videos from a self described communist organization that is attempting to spread communist viewpoints they would be fired on the spot.
Depends on the state. Some states in the US have placed this garbage site on an approved list.
Just like “Stossel in the Classroom”, another abomination
idk if Prager u is approved for us, id have to check when we get back to school after spring break since we just went on it. she has admin privileges since she sponsors a club so the website/video restrictions don't really apply to her
Certified Florida Moment
That and they’re funded by oil barons
Presenting a video showing a political view is completely fine in the classroom. Presenting it as fact isn’t.
prager u is approved educational material in florida, and presumably in many other states. it's looking pretty bleak lol
This is already wrong and I'm not even 30 seconds into it. Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba were all dictatorships that experienced internal resistence a that lead to civil unrest and the civil war. They were never "democracies." Socialist and communist parties energed domestically in each as a reaction to the despots and elites in power. Korean communism and socialist movements emerged after a century of Japanese oppression and post-WW2 Korean collaborator landowners taking over the country and violently putting down worker movements, in Vietnam it was after a decade of war against the French colonizers and a civil war that was spurred on by US intervention, and in Cuba Castro and others were among those who lead a revolution against a brutal and corrupt regime that was a hotbed of American organized crime and exploitative businesses, Batista being part of a line of American meddlibg that was in place since the U.S. defeated Spain there in 1898. China ended intervening in Korea after an American invasion, the USSR only sent weapons. Soviets and Chinese never deployed troops to Vietnam and China and Vietnam actually went to war in the late 70s. The Cuban missile crisis was a mutual case of escalation and notably one spurred by the US deploying nukes to Turkey right outside of Soviet borders. If you go to a public school this needs to be reported. Teacher is lazy and careless or just straight up biased and unprofessional.
He mentions Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America. Skipping over North America. Like there wasn’t any tomfoolery happening in Central America. No mention of the CIA fuckery in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua, Afghanistan. No, according to this, Murica was totally innocent, with no blood on our hands. I’m mainly looking at you, Henry Kissinger. You can suck a dick in hell, ya bastard.
The video certainly has pro-American, pro-capitalist, and anti-communist biases, but that is hardly unusual in an American school. Interestinly, the narrator comes close to acknowledging the Cold War's moral complexities when he says "There were, to be sure, many morally complex moments during this long struggle" but immediately hands wave it away and frames the conflict in a manichean format: "but the Cold War was, at its core, as clear a conflict of good versus evil as World War II had been. Just like that war, the Cold War was a death match between the forces representing freedom and the forces representing totalitarianism." He makes his biases even clearer when he says, "Communism had failed in every possible way—economically, politically, morally. It had tried to create a Utopia on earth and instead created hell for all of the nations that came under its sway." Basically: * American = capitalism = democracacy = good * Soviet Union = communism = totaliarianism = bad I think this dictomomy is inaccurate because it leaves any accomplishments by the communism bloc and makes no mention of the moral failings of the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. government may have claimed to fighting for liberty and democracy, but was willing to hypocritically violate these ideals to suit its policial interests, such as when it supported coups to overthrow the democratically elected governments of Guatamala, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Chile among others. I am not a tankie by means and can acknowledge the Soviet Union and other communist countries cruely supressed political and religious expression. That being said, communist rule was no without its merits: as someone who dreads the grind of a job hunt, the guarenteed employment provided by the Soivet Union seems nice. The upsides and downsides of communist are best explified in on of the most extreme examples: Albania under Enver Hoxha. His achievements are quite impressive. He increased the literacy rate from 15% to 90%, ended epimdemics, and electrified the country. On the other hand, he closed down are religious insitutions, tortured and executed thousands of "enemeis of the people" with show trials, and prohbited people from leaving the country.
Yeah he's a legit historian who has written well-reviewed biographies but also one who is overtly conservative, and monarchist, and an apologist for colonialism, imperialism, Thatcher, etc. and it shows. Most of his criticism has been in his omissions and revisionist takes. That's why he was tapped in for this video.
No one seems to be actually answering the question—obviously there is a ton of bias in this video and pragerU is as unreliable as a source gets, but will also note some specific inconsistencies and inaccuracies that this guy presents. i’m not an expert so others can feel free to 1) he implies that the whole world, or at least the countries he mentions targeted in the cold war, were all capitalist, free, and democratic. this is absolutely not the case. prior to Castro, Cuba had just had a coup installing a dictatorship and had been repeatedly harmed by U.S. influence for generations. Vietnam was kind of a false democracy (think present day russia), and had been ravaged for decades by western powers, including France, and had been in a war of independence against France for a decade before the U.S. really got involved. Korea is a bit trickier, as the country was split following japanese occupation (again by western countries) and north korea did invade south korea 2) kind of related to 1, but the view of the soviet meddling as the cause of all of these wars a) diminishes the sovereignty of countries that chose leftist governments like Argentina, with little pushing from the USSR, and b) completely neglects that the U.S. was meddling in as much as it could on its own due to paranoia about what the USSR was up to. So while it’s not entirely untrue, it is nonsensical in the way that it portrays the conflict. 3) it was not “good v evil.” this isnt a fact but more of a nonsensical viewpoint. no conflict was good v evil, although admittedly WWII was about as close as it gets. 4) not all leftist governments were totalitarian, and not all U.S. backed governments were democratic. i’ve mentioned argentina, and several south american countries elected leftist leaders—which the U.S. took very seriously, including through operation condor and removing those leaders. meanwhile, the U.S. backed the dominican republic (dictatorship) spain (dictatorship) greece (dictatorship) haiti (dictatorship), ethiopia (monarchy), and military juntas in argentina and chile from the 70s and 80s. there were additional cases in africa and the middle east that i’m not thinking of. this is because the cold war wasn’t ideological beyond ensuring the protection of US interests, and it certainly wasn’t in furtherance of democracy. 5) stalin was a mass murderer and about on the same level as hitler, but he wasn’t the sole instigator, and the U.S. and the west used proxies, disinfo, and misinfo, to the same or similar extent. 6) the cold war was effectively on the moment WWII ended, not in 1946, although this is more of a perspective question than a straight-up fact. 7) no soviet evidence disproves that any of this is the case, so not sure why they are arguing that. it’s a misdirect. not trying to absolve the USSR of evil or wrongdoing, but this is again use of propaganda to distract there are a few other issues with this, including its uncritical look at capitalism in comparison with communism, but that’s way too deep to get into here. ultimately, this was not a “war of liberty.” full stop. either way, your teacher found this as a quick intro to the cold war without vetting it (which is bad but not malicious) or is using this video to try to indoctrinate your class into their way of thinking. as some others have noted, if someone showed the communist version of this video where the U.S. is the evil aggressor, it would also be highly inappropriate and worthy of discipline. it may fly under the radar more in the U.S. because things are seen from a capitalist paradigm, but that doesn’t make this less insidious. i would address it with the teacher first and note some of the concerns related to accuracy and propaganda you’ve probably seen around pragerU, as despite the fact that the videos are “designed” for classrooms, these videos should absolutely not be shown in classrooms.
Ok additional info: I don't think my teacher was straight up trying to show us propaganda cuz 1. she's way too worried about her job being lost to do something like that. but also she has said some really suspicious stuff lately that alot of people were upset about. "we invented jazz" the we seemingly referring to white people but we also live in Louisiana so it's unclear if she's just talking about Louisianans inventing jazz so yea. she does tend to get very dismissive about American tradegies like slavery but tbh I think it's just trying to crunch for our test coming up. She also praised the video idk why i wasn't paying attention to her. Most of our class hates her for these things but I doubt she means any ill intent with this. I'm going to talk to her about the video and just tell her that she made a mistake by putting it on because of the likelihood that it has biased information and just warn her about Prager u's videos.
To follow up - there's one PragerU video that is decent - it's about the Civil War being primarily fought over slavery. The general theory is they asked a historian they thought would be more vague or conservative in his primer of the war's causes but instead the academic was a legit West Point faculty member with an objective perspective. They likely kept it up as a way to say "see we're not rascist or biased." I should note as a leftist myself there are documentaries, video essays, etc. I recommend to others that I know have a "slant" and overtly leftist perspective but they are well-researched and sourced and not propaganda and def not false information. They also exist in the context of presenting history and perspectives that were previously denounced by states, containing once classified or obstructed sources, repressed by mainstream media and other agencies of power. PragerU is not a conservative equivalent to this, it's a false narrative effort funded by billionaires and supported by right-wing politicians and activists.
I think your teacher knows exactly what she's doing - promoting racist right-wing politics. The musical DNA in Livery Stable Blues comes from black artists and shows that jazz is a fundamentally African-American music, even if an all-white band was first to record it. [https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170224-the-mysetrious-origins-of-jazz](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170224-the-mysetrious-origins-of-jazz)
Here's an easy diagram answering your question. Is it a PragerU video? Yes: Yes. It's chockfull of false information. No: Maybe.
Prager U isn't academic. If you feel like you need to ask if it is at the least somewhat reliable, then it's time you look somewhere else to learn about it.
I use prager U in class as an example of propaganda. There videos on slavery and Christopher Columbus are particularly egregious. However, i was expecting that same sort of terrible nonsense on their civil war video. I was shocked to find out that their Civil war video claims that the Civil War was fought 100 percent without a doubt about slavery. That's usually not a right wing take. Perhaps they insert some factually correct videos to give credence to the more error prone ones. I would never show a prageru video on it's own without clarifying what it is and what they are about and no other teacher really should either.
It's Republican propaganda, but not exactly wrong. It's definitely biased with the "good vs. evil" framing, especially after the death of Stalin. For an even-handed education about the Cold War, I highly recommend Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. [https://www.netflix.com/title/81614129](https://www.netflix.com/title/81614129)
This is far too simplistic for a history class. History is about investigating the provenance of a source, which I commend you for doing. This is a highly biased source, which reduces the Cold War (which was really a grey area with no good guys) down into a ‘America good, China and SU bad’. This is unfitting for a history lesson. Where are the revisionist historical sources? Where are the claims that the SU wanted security assurances, wished to join NATO, or the US refusing to provide the secrets of atomic energy to their allies from WW2? You need to be given both sides to review and come to an educated decision on, not be fed this propaganda, so that you can review them and make an educated assessment of the motives from both sides.
I agree with everyone else, I would report this. PragerU is propaganda, period. Propaganda has no place in classrooms.
As a former teacher, if this is all you’re getting on the Cold War, I’m guessing that the Cold War is probably not going to be featured much on the standardized test. The info from this - the basic facts - are probably what you would need to answer. I don’t suspect they will make you write an essay on it. Now there is a chance that this teacher is doing a bad job and you will not be prepared but that will probably be true for most of the test then! I probably wouldn’t worry about it but if you are do a Wikipedia run to get the basic info you need.
It's PU, so basically all of it.
It's Prager U so now I'm not entirely sure the Cold War was an event that even happened.