Those Who Forget the Past…

by The Evil Overlady

This post is from a Facebook post I made earlier today. I thought to share it here, as I feel strongly about it.

We cannot allow ourselves to just wave the past away and pretend it never happened. That is not and will never be acceptable. We have to own what we have done and promise ourselves and the rest of the world that we will never, ever do such horrific things every again.

And this time, we have to mean it.

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In another discussion on someone else’s Wall, someone brought up the idea that we shouldn’t be teaching about things like what happened during WWII and what lead to the horrors that occurred in and around Germany at that time.

They said that it was only being done to “punish” Germans for what their predecessors had done. As you may well imagine, I disagreed. This was my reply:

“We MUST continue to teach our children what has gone before so we can do our best to avoid doing it again. So yes, that means teaching about those icky, unpleasant, monstrous, horrible things that have been done in the name of so-called Manifest Destiny, civilizing the savages, Lebensraum, and whatnot. Just because it may have happened a very long time ago, it doesn’t mean it’s not still as important to know about.

By not wanting to teach about them, some people are trying to pretend it never fucking happened. And that’s a crime in itself.”