Are we at risk of losing the lessons of the 20th century？
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Summary
On the anniversary of two major 20th century events, D-Day and Tiananmen Square, we need to ask, are we at risk of losing the lessons of the 20th Century? Are we forgetting them? Every new generation needs to be told these stories and needs to learn these lessons. But to what degree are we slipping behind?
Transcript
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We've got the anniversary of two major 20th century events coming up, D-Day and Tiananmen
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Square, and I think we need to ask, are we at risk of losing the lessons of the 20th
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century? Are we forgetting them? Every new generation, so the saying goes, needs to be
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told these stories and needs to be learned these lessons. But to what degree are we slipping
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behind? In the past year or so, there's been a number of media reports and stories and
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conversations about statistics on Holocaust information, to what degree people are educated
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on the Holocaust, and reports that made their way all up to the New York Times found that
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Canadians, and particularly Canadian millennials, are quite ignorant about a whole lot of the
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Holocaust. And something like 75% of Canadians can't name a single concentration camp, even
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though Auschwitz is something that one would have thought was well known, that anybody could
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summon that phrase, many movies, many books, that it had been a wide part of popular culture.
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But I guess this day and age, with new young people coming into the fore, coming into adulthood,
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if they're not being learned it robustly in school, they're just not learning it at all.
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So we're looking at the 75th anniversary of D-Day this week, and the 30th anniversary of the
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massacre at Tiananmen Square. Two very similar but very different lessons, of course. The D-Day one
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about fighting the Nazis, about fighting that totalitarian regime, and why a lot of Canadians,
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a lot of our ancestors, put their lives on the line, many dying for our freedoms and our liberty.
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Something we forget, when we're so readily able to give up the fight this day and age, to say,
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ah, who cares? We don't have to worry about fighting for this freedom, or that freedom.
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And fewer and fewer Canadians remain who fought in World War II. I mean, anyone who's been going to
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Remembrance Day for many years, you still respect it, you still honor it, but you kind of get used to it.
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But perhaps what you don't realize is that there are fewer people who are physically present
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at those services who were back there back in the day. And as their numbers recede,
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does our memory of it recede? Did the number of people who appreciate the importance of the event,
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does that diminish? Now, Tiananmen Square is much closer to us, of course, than World War II was just
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in 1989. But there's already a lot of fascinating stuff to read out there right now about how the
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communists in Beijing, not just censoring conversation about Tiananmen Square back then when it happened,
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but censoring it now. One popular musician, a pop rock star in China, who isn't really all that
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political, had a couple songs come out that alluded to Tiananmen Square. His tours have now been
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cancelled, his social media has gone dead, and he has vanished. They are disappearing people for fear
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that they are going to talk about Tiananmen Square. So this all shows us it's an urgent matter,
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it's a pressing matter, and it's a very real matter. Because if we let these stories slip away from our
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fingers, if we let these stories just disappear, if we let China clamp down on the fact that Tiananmen
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Square massacre was a real thing, it happened, and there was a time when people in China were putting
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their lives on the line for democracy and freedom, well, if we let that happen, then we have failed to
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learn the lessons. The lessons that people decades ago died for.