In 1963 we were less than

[Hekate]

9. My mother was determined to never forget. Because of her I knew about the internment of ...

... Japanese-Americans and that it was a shameful injustice; that in her Colorado high school she knew a refugee Jewish boy who had witnessed piles of books burned in the streets of Germany; that our neighbor across the street fled Austria ahead of the Anschluss with her family; that six-million Jews and God knows how many others were systematically slaughtered by Hitler; that the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese army was a real event, likewise the Bataan Death March. She told me about a woman visiting another neighbor who had survived imprisonment by the Japanese in the Philippines, and who kept a diary of sorts on whatever tiny scraps of paper she could find and conceal.

This was never, ever about hatred or carrying forward the fights of the past -- it was about knowing, and it was about Santayana's dictum that those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.

I ended up majoring in history in college -- WW I was far away, as you say, but WW II was all too real.

During the Bush Junior regime I was active against his wars of choice, and met several very elderly Europeans who were getting unpleasant flashbacks to their youth in Europe and the run-up to Hitler's war.

Interesting thing about WW I -- PBS did a series on it a some years ago, and the finale just blew me away: the conclusion of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles set the stage for every subsequent war of the 20th Century. If I'd known that I would have paid a lot more attention to that part of history myself.