Opinions

The best way to avoid a dire future? Remember the past.

There was disturbing news last week, released on Holocaust Remembrance Day. A survey of Americans, commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Memorial Claims Against Germany, found that the memory of the systematic murder of six million Jews during World War II in Europe is dimming. Many adults, and particularly millennials (18 to 34 years), are fuzzy on the facts.

It's not a matter of denial: Almost all the respondents to the survey understood that the Holocaust happened (Holocaust denial is rare in the U.S.), and agreed that students should be taught about it in school. But conference members expressed dismay that so many people don't know the details, especially young people. Many believe wrongly that only two million Jews were killed, can't explain what happened at Auschwitz, and don't understand that Hitler became German chancellor through normal enough parliamentary procedures: He was appointed.

The consequences of dimmed history can be great. In promoting her new book last week, "Fascism: A Warning," former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright cautioned that what we don't know can definitely hurt us. The rise of fascist-like governments in Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines, Poland and Venezuela represents, she said, a significant assault on democratic values. She addressed
the ways in which President Donald Trump and those around him seem often not to understand those values, or to be exceedingly careless about them. But Trump was not Albright's principal concern.

Rather, she worried more about ignorance of the past creating an opening for beliefs and behaviors that eventually will strip people of their rights, their freedom and their dignity. Others have written recently about this same erosion of democracy.

Similar warnings were issued in the United States almost a century ago when fascism was more clearly on the rise than it is now. In his 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," Sinclair Lewis imagined a politician who promised central economic and social reforms on behalf of common people, but when elected, established an authoritarian plutocracy that benefited only those who
championed his government and methods. The message was that it certainly can happen here.

There were a host of fascist sympathizers in the U.S. and in Europe then. Today, director Joe Wright's Oscar-winning film "Darkest Hour," starring Gary Oldman, reminds that Winston Churchill was nearly alone at a critical time in understanding the profound threat to democracy posed by the rise of authoritarian governments on the continent in countries with liberal traditions.

Such films may be a way to alert young people to what can be lost. But the greater burden falls on the schools, and the teaching of history. Many people can quote George Santayana on the consequences of not knowing history ("those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it"); but how many fully grasp how fragile a people-centered democracy really is?

Liberal democracy as we know it began with John Locke's articulation of natural rights to life, liberty and estate, inherent in all humans. A good way to teach, and to remember, that philosophic fundamental is to revisit the Declaration of Independence. That founding document is more about the kind of government the Americans intended to establish than about why the colonists were determined to separate from England. It was to form a government that derived its just powers only from the consent of the governed, based on a firm commitment to the rule of law.

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It's no wonder that many young people tune out when the subject is American political history, for the link between their actions and what government and the governed do is not very direct. What's most important to teach is that the Constitution provides a government by representation, and that getting one's rights represented takes patience, attention, work and compromise. It may have been Thomas Jefferson who said the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips for certain.

The youth movement that has arisen in the aftermath of the Parkland shootings is a ray of hope, not because there may come effective legislation to regulate access to weapons intended for war, but because more young people will learn how democracy works, and will become engaged. As they do, they'll likely become less fuzzy about the history of their rights and those of others.

Steve Haycox

Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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