That is, East Coast Guru, in addition to Der Fuhrer, of course.

Jeff Legan & East Coast Guru,
One that incontrovertibly hits the proverbial nail right on the head.

Those are all very cogent, pertinent and useful points, Jeff Legan. I sometimes find it all too easy to forget that not everyone – in fact, perhaps hardly anyone – has any interest in or facility for absorbing and grasping knowledge regarding history beyond at most dates and places. The who and why, after all, demands a lot more from the student of history (or of anything else for that matter) than merely the where and when. To be fair though considering the rather dismal record of humanity’s behavior to humanity over time, it would appear that the avoidance of essential historical knowledge is pretty much a global rather than merely an American phenomenon.

You’re welcome, East Coast Guru. As for the Nazi’s theistic leanings, for all we know they may have worshipped Odin.

Good one. A version of it I had never heard before.

If they read about them, they will have a sense of what it was like to experience them. We forget because mostly we purposely do not pay attention to the past. (How often have you heard someone say “forget about that, it is in the past”?) We do not have the sense of what it is like because we do not care to. First hand accounts really bring past events to life. Read enough about other lives and viewpoints and you start to feel empathy for others. That has nothing to do with learning to avoid mistakes of the past though. That is just a side effect of being exposed to enough different views over time. I would say I was born with a love of learning, but I had to learn empathy.
Any media will work, it does not have to be reading. Learning is learning, whatever the method. For me, learning is a pleasure. For most people around me, learning anything other than gossip appears to be considered work and something to be avoided. It would be all right if it was only the average citizen who ignored the past, but it seems a growing number of our politicians have no understanding of government and no care for history either. I am starting to wish there was some kind of basic how-does-our-government-work test every candidate had to pass before they could actually run for office. I can think of no other job where you are not required to know anything, or start learning anything, about the job you are applying for (ok, except for that “offspring of the boss” position). I suspect you can now leave office as ignorant as you went in, your very own team of lobbyists will advise you every step of the way, no thinking necessary. Congress does not even bother reading the Bills anymore (the same ones they do not actually write anymore), and stopped hiding that fact some years ago already. I would venture to say that any politician that has a general love of history would make less policy mistakes than one who dismisses history. I have seen some that professed a love of a specific event in history, even writing a book about it. I do not feel that gives the big picture view I am talking about but is better than nothing. I have no idea if there are any history lovers in office currently. I am not even talking an “American history” lover, I am talking more like “World history” or “Human history”.

Or this corollary.

I always thought Nazi’s were atheists but apparently not. Thanks for sharing the belt buckle photo.

Jeff Legan,
The real problem, I believe, is not that we as a society forget what happened earlier but rather that those of us who didn’t live through these events have no sense of what it felt like to actually experience them. It’s one thing to know that we have gone through many wars in our history, but it’s another to be fully aware of what it feels like to be caught up in the midst of them.

Good Sir Rich,
Most unfortunately, according to the evidence and from all appearances, even those who do remember the past are nevertheless all too often hell bent on going for a rerun blithely comforted by the delusional certainty of being able to emerge with a completely different outcome.