Fan Death: It's hard to unlearn comfortable lies
"Fan death is a widely held belief in Korean culture, where it is thought that running an electric fan in a closed room with unopened or no windows will prove fatal. Despite no concrete evidence to support the concept, belief in fan death persists to this day in Korea." -Wikipedia
If something is clearly a lie, why does the belief persist? Because it's hard to unlearn comfortable lies.
If you grew up in the United States, you know that Christopher Columbus discovered America and proved the Earth was round, right?
But Columbus didn't discover America, in fact, he never set foot on the North American continent. And it was already common knowledge in the 1400s that the Earth was round, no thanks to Columbus.
After September 11, 2001, when New York's Twin Towers fell after being struck by passenger airplanes, President George Bush said his administration had documents from a secret source, showing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (which was not where the September 11th hijackers were from) and U.S. troops invaded Iraq to safeguard American lives.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded that the source of these documents was not credible, and the documents showing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were an obvious fake. Iraq did not have these weapons, and had nothing to do with the September 11 attack.
And of course, we all know Hitler invented white supremacy as we know it today.
Only he didn't, Americans did. In his autobiography, Adolf Hilter praises America for excluding certain races from being able to become citizens. From the founding of the United States, presidents, army generals, and citizens, including Thomas Jefferson, have called for the "extermination" of Native Americans. America has a long history of eugenics (choosing who can procreate or live, based on physical characteristics that are deemed more or less desirable to a group), from California's forced sterilization that inspired Nazi laws, to gas chamber executions in Nevada in 1924 - before this ever happened under Hitler. Hitler's Nazi white supremacy was modeled after America's eugenics, executions, slavery, and forced sterilizations.
Did you already know about these common lies? Do you have a hard time believing some of this? If so, did you follow the linked sources? If not... why?
You may think "why does it matter, it's all in the past?"
We learn from history. We learn how to be better, how to avoid the same mistakes, how to build on what we have, and how to be more empathetic and thoughtful about our actions (well, hopefully). If our history is a lie, it's useless. Why even have history if it's just a fairytale? We can't grow or build on a lie. If we don't learn from our mistakes, we are more likely to make them again, and hurt more people.
When Columbus landed in the Caribbean islands, he was brutal. He kidnapped and enslaved the native inhabitants, sold 9-year-old girls into sexual slavery, and led 50,000 native people to comit suicide rather than suffer under his rule and Christian persecution. The descendants of people who suffered under Columbus deserve better than this murdering slave master being celebrated as a hero. And this true story is an opportunity for everyone to recognize the dangers of believing that God gives anyone the authority to control other people.
Bush held firm to his lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, despite the overwhelming consensus among intelligence communities that the source of this information was discredited, and the documents faked. Because Bush was unwilling to admit he was wrong or lying, hundreds of thousands of people died in an armed conflict that cost $2.4 trillion, and was fought for nothing. Instead of protecting American lives, thousands of Americans were killed in the conflict, and entire communities were decimated in Iraq and beyond. All justified by a lie (and oil, but that's another story), Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.
Nazis weren't the only ones putting people in concentration camps during World War 2. The United States forced thousands of Japanese Americans into concentration camps because a racist idea that all people of Japanese descent, even American citizens, could be spies working for Japan, against the United States. If you don't think this was racist, or related to white supremacy, consider that Germany and Italy were also enemies of the U.S. in WWII, but there was no round-up of German Americans or Italian Americans. The difference was race.
This may seem like something relegated to the past, but this same sort of racial skepticism (read "racism") (based on skin color and culture) can be seen today in the United States - it's not hard to find. Whether it's Latinx Americans (American citizens) being arrested by ICE and held without regard for their rights, black Americans being subject to institutionalized racism, or the President and his supporters calling for all Muslims to be banned from entering the United States, white nationalism is not dead. No matter how badly most of us want to put racism and white supremacy behind us, we have a long way to go, and we are not safe from slipping backwards.
It's hard to unlearn comfortable lies, but we need to - for ourselves, and for our future.