“Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.”

In our lifetime, we are sure to see the death of the last of so many survivors: those of the Holocaust, those of the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those of the internment camps in America. This is inevitable. However, we will never see the death of Neo Nazism, fascism, dictatorships, and modern warfare. Just as victims’ stories and legacies are passed from generation to generation, so is hatred, imperialism, and technologies that will harm our human race. World War II was not a mistake we can learn from, but a breeding ground for evil and hysteria. The after effects are so substantial, that we are still too closely connected with it to understand its true implications.

This connectivity is still so evident today. A woman in San Francisco was deported this week because it was revealed that she was a concentration camp guard. She is 83. Do we, a country that tortures its prisoners, spies on our citizens, and are fully aware of organizations such as the KKK formulating, have the right to ostracize this woman? It is a rhetorical question of biblical proportions. We looked the other way as we imprisoned our own citizens because of where they came from on so many occasions just in the past century, that it is hardly our place to cast the first stone. We justify our actions as the prevention of future atrocities in other nations but we rarely step in to the rivers filled with blood, the modern genocides happening today. We have equated imperialism with freedom fighting, while in reality we are actually just colonizing. We are repeating the mistakes of our British fathers, and soon, just like them, we will suffer the same fate: our empire will crumble.

It’s not a matter of doom saying, it’s a matter of cycles. The sooner we are aware that we are not invincible, the sooner we can accept that history isn’t just something we learn about, it is something we can learn from. Germany wanted to create a superior race. We want to create a superior force. When the last bullet is fired and the last body is counted, in the end, there’s not much difference.