The apathy of youth today

I got a friend hooked on the TGA series and he in turn have started his 2 teenaged children on watching episodes with him.

One thing that has quickly become apparent to him is his children know next to nothing about WW1 OR 2 and until they started watching the WAH series with Spartacus they had never heard of the holocaust or the death camps and what they knew about WW2 was mostly about the Americans and how they saved the world bull crap.

My friends daughter found out after her curiosity was tweaked about an elderly couple that had died in the neighbourhood a couple of years ago and she was shocked to learn both of them were survivors of the death camps from family members of the elderly couple. She had seen the numbers tattooed on their forearms but never gave it a second thought but since watching the WAH series it has affected her deeply and now is starting to understand why we should never forget. Unfortunately most of her friends and school mates don’t care and don’t see how what happened 90 years ago will affect them in todays world.

It is a sad but real truth about todays youth that WW2 to them is just a footnote in history and that their knowledge of it is limited to basic learning in school and American war movies. Many of todays youth do not know the contributions that not only Canada made but Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other countries made to the war effort.

We should never forget lessons of the past

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Good points.

It is sad on so many levels. Mostly because those kids will tomorrow be making judgements of other kids who’s lives are still very much affected by those wars. For most, it is clear that WWII is only extension of WWI. And WWII effectively never ended - Germany is technically, still under occupation, UN Charter still refers to allies and enemies of that war, and many are normalizing nazism again.

Are we bound to repeat history since large portions of us have forgotten it?

I am glad that the The Great War series and WW 2 serias are making sure these essential parts of history are not forgotten. Have a bit of a worry, that its is still mostly ideologically leaning towards western views, measures and judgements.