History shows us that societies that fail to honestly confront (and teach their children about) their darkest chapters are, more often than not, doomed to repeat them. Germany’s unflinching confrontation with its Nazi past—through education, memorials, and legal accountability—stands in stark contrast to Japan’s reluctance to fully acknowledge its wartime atrocities, or to America’s halting efforts to address our legacy of slavery (and the ongoing “Lost Cause” Confederate mythos) as well as the (ongoing) genocide against this continent’s Indigenous peoples.
The consequences of this collective amnesia are all around us, from the Confederate flags on January 6th to the new efforts to strip science and history from our schools. When we fail to teach children about the horrors of the Holocaust, for example, anti-Semitism resurges. When we allow Confederate monuments to stand unchallenged, white nationalism finds fertile ground. When we call January 6th “legitimate political discourse” (as multiple Republican elected officials have done) rather than the attempted coup that it was, we prepare the soil for the next, potentially successful insurrection.
