My class was required to read Maus and here’s the one thing about history that I have learned by reading it. Through all our wars and all our social progress and all the movements and the protests and the struggles, we haven’t learned a thing. There’s a common phrase thrown around that says, those who cannot learn history are doomed to repeat it. And I believe this to be true. But it does not mean the exact same thing will happen in the exact same way. It means by allowing ourselves to forget our history, we will let the same kind of people set the same wheels in motion that have consistently led to war, death, and tragedy. We like to think that for every major tragedy or disaster we experience as a species, that we’ve moved past the collective mindset that allowed it to happen. That we’ve evolved past the point where such an awful event can happen again. History is done. It’s behind us. Let’s move on. We do this because the very idea that such a thing could happen again is too awful to contemplate. But the sad fact is, we are not beyond our history. We’re not even close, and it is foolish to think otherwise.
Why do I know that? Because it’s still happening. Because the hate-led people that never moved on from the ideals of Hitler or the KKK or any other hate group just got quieter and more clever and waited until the rest of us believed ourselves above all that so they could bring it back in force. We are not above Nazis, because they still throw rallies in the streets. We are not above racism because there are attacks against minorities all over the country every day that we don’t talk about. We’re not above the hateful propaganda, as various racist, bigoted, even Nazi propaganda is so easy to end up on YouTube alone. We’re not even above camps, as we separate immigrant children from their parents to throw them in cages like the animals some people are actually referring to them as, engaging in horrible act after horrible act with no repercussions. We have learned nothing from history, and thus history is repeating itself all over again.And you might be thinking right now “we don’t treat people like the Nazis did to the Jewish people. We haven’t had a Holocaust in America and there’s no way it can happen.” And you’d be partially right. We haven’t had a Holocaust in America, but we are not above the steps it took to get there. because you know what’s another part of our history I never learned from a textbook growing up? The Japanese internment camps, in which 110 to 120,000 Japanese Americans, 62% of which were U.S. citizens, were taken by force and placed into concentration camps shortly after the attack of Pearl Harbor, although they were called, “military areas at the time.” The excuse was for national security, but even our own government later concluded in 1980 that it was a blatant act of racism. It is foolish to believe that we are above such things because we’ve done it before. And because we haven’t learned anything from it, it can happen again. It is happening again. History keeps repeating itself round and round. But it doesn’t have to. If not for this generation, then maybe for the next one.
History is important and it needs to be taught, but it needs to be taught right. Unaltered, uncensored, matter of fact. No over-dramatizations, just a telling of exactly what happened and how it was allowed to happen from as many perspectives as one can gather. History can’t be simplified and it shouldn’t be simplified because it’s very rarely simple. And ignorance on the facts should no longer be accepted or tolerated. Now granted, some of these topics have such deep complexities that historians can spend their entire lives studying and trying to understand it. However, while it may be impossible to give the entire context for a historical event in the space allowed in a history book, the deliberate omissions or simplifications of fact to suit a political bias or to t a good versus evil narrative needs to end. And we’re increasingly running out of excuses as to why that continues to be the case. We live in a world where so much information is accessible at the click of a button. The phrase history belongs to the victors is becoming increasingly irrelevant because the facts behind historical events are becoming harder and harder to hide now that finding information and fact checking are becoming streamlined. And that’s a good thing.Unfortunately, that also means that a lot of hateful misinformation, propaganda, and straight-up lies are also readily available and often sought out by those seeking to confirm existing biases or for those looking to be either fearful or hateful of their ethnically different neighbor. What we do need to do now, though, is focus on how we can promote better education to places where a widespread poverty is present of what history was actually like.
Our primary goal when raising the next generation of adults is to teach them to be better than the ones in place, because they need to be. The next generation has to be the ones to live with our greatest mistakes. And if we want them to be better, then we need to explain to them exactly what we did wrong. Now, I don’t expect young children to be able to comprehend the horrors of what happened throughout history. But it’s also wrong to try to hide the details of why it all happened from them too. There is a natural inclination to protect children from the bad things in the world. But if we want them to make a better one, then they need to be exposed to it. They need to see it. They need to feel free to ask difficult questions about it. And we need to be able to answer them. And while they may not understand it at the time or respect it or even be remotely engaged by it, it needs to be shared to them all the same to prepare them for when they get older and they start exploring the world for themselves. And when they do that on some subconscious level, they need to be able to comprehend why these things happened so they can do something to prevent it from happening again. Only then can we break this cycle. Only then can history really move forward instead of in circles. And if we’re lucky, if we do our jobs, sometime in the future, no parent will ever have to tell their child how they survived an atrocity. And no child will ever have to live with that legacy of pain.
*Some sections of this opinion piece have been edited for the purpose of clarity.
