The Lessons of History

I get it. Our society has a short memory. The older people who lived through things are becoming fewer and fewer. Maybe they didn't pass down their wisdom, or maybe the younger generations were too busy with all the amazing new technology to listen.

People have forgotten what it was like before vaccines. They don't remember and were never told how almost everyone knew a family who had lost a child to now-preventable diseases like smallpox, polio, whooping cough, measles, diptheria, influenza... 

Scarlet fever, tuberculosis, chicken pox... Whole families were decimated sometimes. And when vaccines became available, mothers lined their children up to wait for hours to be vaccinated, because they didn't want them to die. 

But people have forgotten. And now we have widespread anti-vaxxers. And now we have children dying of those same old horrors, even though they don't need to because we can protect them... 
cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-g…

And people have forgotten about the Nazis. They have forgotten the scourge that was fascism. Some even deny the Holocaust happened. There are so few alive now who were there and saw it with their own eyes... 

People have forgotten, to the extent that now neo-nazi white supremacists are called "very fine people" by the American president. And the American public did not rise up and drag him from the White House. 

Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: 'Some Very Fine People on Both Sides'The president backtracked from his remarks on Charlottesville just a day earlier.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-on-both-sides/537012/

And now... now we have the US president and conservative leaders around the world declaring "antifa" (literally anti-fascists) a terrorist organization. 
washingtonpost.com/national-secur…

Fascists. That's Nazis. You do know that, right? And antifa, or antifascists, are opposed to Nazis/fascists. What does it tell you when political parties try to declare what isn't even a real organisation a "terrorist organisation"? 

When a political party tells you that anti-fascists are the enemy... It is a clear sign that they are pro-fascist. See how that works? It's not vague or ambiguous. But people have short memories. Society has a short memory. 

There were people in the UK, Canada, the US, and in Europe in the 1930s who thought fascism was a good idea. It was all about nationalism and jobs, after all. Until it wasn't. Until it became all about death and oppression and persecution and war. 

But, our society seems to have forgotten that. Our journalists cheerily talk about "antifa" the way they would talk about the IRA or ISIS. Except, it's different. Anti-fascists are regular people, those who have not forgotten. And they are reacting to an existential threat. 

Anti-fascists are not looking to take over anything. They want to prevent a take-over. There is a big difference. The reason this gets any traction at all is there are an awful lot of honest-to-goodness fascists out there in high political positions. 

Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban... The list goes on. And don't forget right wing political parties not in power. 

But our society has forgotten. We have not learned the lessons of history. I fervently hope we will all come to our senses and not be forced to repeat them.