Alan Zendell, December 7, 2023

Shortly after nine-eleven, a Seattle Times columnist of Japanese descent sardonically thanked ISIS for committing an act so heinous, it would eventually make Americans forget the attack on Pearl Harbor. It seems he was correct. Today, on December 7th, the eighty-third anniversary of the attack, I searched the CNN website for “Pearl Harbor.” I got “No Results Found.”

Are you surprised? While many people hold grudges and remember personal grievances for decades, as a society, we have a tendency to erase bad memories. I guess I’ve forgiven Japan – I’ve driven nothing but Toyotas since 2006, but forgiving is not the same as forgetting. Millions of people around the world deny that the Nazi holocaust ever happened, which is why the motto of the Jewish survivors is “Never forget!”

Psychologists tell us humans naturally try to suppress their memories of traumatic events. It’s a defense mechanism vital for our mental health. But purging our day-to-day memories of painful events does not expunge them from history. We’re taught that if we ignore the lessons of history, the errors of the past will be repeated, but our teachers failed to mention that burgeoning new technologies make each repetition more deadly.

Today, I’m focused on four lessons we cannot afford to forget:
• Appeasing aggressors never works. It simply encourages them.
• Freedom and democracy are not free. They must be constantly worked at and defended, or they will disappear.
• The rules of war only apply when all sides abide by them. Corollary: in modern warfare, no one is a civilian.
• Racism and bigotry never die. They just retreat into the dark recesses of society and fester.

When America elected President Barrack Obama, many of us believed it was a sign that we had evolved past the legacy of slavery. We were shocked out of our naivete when Donald Trump proved that personal grievances, bigotry, and hate were not only still alive and well in America, but they existed in sufficient numbers to give him the presidency. We took our eyes off the ball, and we can’t even estimate what that will cost us as a nation.

Fascism nearly destroyed civilization in the twentieth century. Had the Axis Powers won – for example, had the Germans or Japanese developed the atom bomb before we did – the entire planet might today be dominated by competing autocracies. On one hand, we’d like to forget all that, yet our entertainment media are flooded with every conceivable kind of dystopian future. We suppress our fears and then live our nightmares in films, video games, and limitless exploitive media. That ought to tell us something.

Today, we see the results of our failure to heed the lessons of history in three critical arenas. Vladimir Putin showed us that paranoia, lust for power, and unbridled ambition will always fill every vacuum created by apathy and laziness. Russia’s war in Ukraine is this century’s Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. By not meeting force with force in 1939, Allied leaders allowed the war to grow until it consumed whole countries and resulted in more than 20 million military and 50 million civilian deaths. If we do not prevent Russia from destroying Ukraine, there is little doubt that NATO countries will become directly involved with an ever-increasing risk of nuclear war. Yet, extremist politicians who represent a minority of Americans are hamstringing our ability to defeat Putin. They’d rather fight over abortion, rig elections, and blame each other for bad immigration policies for which both sides are culpable.

It took eight decades to forget the lessons of World War 2, but it only took two months for the world to forget the atrocities Hamas committed on October 7th. Less than nine weeks ago, the world understood that Hamas, a terrorist organization whose principal purpose is the destruction of Israel, hides among its own civilians using them as human shields. Hamas knew its murderous attacks on innocent Israeli civilians would leave Israel no choice but to destroy the infrastructure they had built in Gaza. No one denied Israel’s right to defend itself and to destroy the entity that had sworn to exterminate Jews in the Middle East, knowing full well that Hamas had set its own population up as sacrificial lambs. Yet, the same extremist politicians who would abandon Ukraine are now willing to abandon our only reliable ally in the Region.

Now, the same small minority of right-wing extremists in our Congress seem unanimously committed to putting Donald Trump back in the White House. They understand and applaud Trump’s promises to abandon the protections of our Constitution and remain in power indefinitely. There are no longer any mysteries surrounding Donald Trump. His base is solidly behind him. If the rest of us either forget the lessons of history or simply decide that protecting our democracy is too much trouble, we will create our own dystopian future.