Perspective: The historical oblivion of the TikTok generation
What’s viral these days on TikTok, you ask? Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter to Americans explaining why al Qaeda killed nearly 3000 Americans on 9/11. A young generation of Americans are reading this letter and some are agreeing with its justification for mass murder.
This is a logical extension, of course, of believing that Hamas was justified in perpetrating the horrors of 10/7 in Israel. We’ve seen plenty of that sentiment in the past month, spun as liberation from oppression. But the slogan “from the river to the sea” is not just about liberation: it justifies mass slaughter in the name of that cause.
This brain virus — of believing that moral righteousness or divine destiny demands the purposeful destruction of masses of innocent people — has long been a debilitating parasite on the human species. Nearly every religion and every civilization has had its share of those infected by it.
That the virus exists is not what is so worrisome; it’s clear we’ve always had it. That it exists widely throughout the post-World War II world where we supposedly looked clearly at the virus and repudiated it on an international scale through the United Nations and its treaties and international courts, is what shocks. That young people in America could look at what was done on 10/7 and say the victims deserved to be tortured and killed in their homes, is what shocks. That young people in America could nod their heads sagely in agreement with Osama bin Laden, who murdered thousands of their fellow citizens, is what shocks.
The moral compass of our younger generation appears completely shattered. We live once again in the pre-World War II days, the lessons of that war forgotten. “Never again!” now rings hollow, and in a haunting example, a Greek memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was defaced after — after — 10/7.
How could this have happened? I think there are many reasons, including the post-Christian, post-truth world the West has labored to create over the past half-century. Many books have already been written on that topic. But there is another partial cause we cannot overlook. Our children have forgotten, all because we failed to pass on what we remember. We blithely left the task to technology and social media, not understanding that neither wish our children well.
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I first noticed the gradual disappearance of the teaching of history when my oldest daughter was in high school. Of course, U.S. history and world history are still required for graduation, but what was taught was an egregiously superficial gloss with many omissions, half-truths and a complete lack of nuance. My daughter could tell me the life story of Harriet Tubman — which is awesome — but could not tell me anything about the Cold War. She was taught nothing whatsoever about the history of the Middle East in the modern day, even though her own country was embroiled in wars in that region at the time. It was left to her father and I to fill in the blanks. And advances in technology have made the situation far, far worse than it was when my daughter was in school.
Wesley Yang summed up the horrifying results in this fashion:
“When we made the succession from a text based culture to a streaming one, all prior knowledge instantly evanesced, reformatting all prior culture and leaving a blank slate. In the resulting brave new world children can know they are the opposite sex, mass murderers of civilians are heroes of resistance — and Osama Bin Laden is a profound and wrongly maligned truth teller. Anything can happen now.”
He’s right — anything can happen now, and you can rest assured “anything” includes the justification of mass murder by our sweet, oblivious, disconnected, terminally online children. Concomitantly, it also means that our sweet, oblivious, disconnected, terminally online children will be deeply surprised when they themselves die in one of these righteous campaigns, as were the young people at the rave in Israel on 10/7.
Goebbels was only partially correct. (And if you don’t know who Josef Goebbels is, you should. If you have to Google him, you’ve proved my point.) Goebbels was right in saying that if you repeat a big lie often enough, people will begin to believe it. But what he didn’t add was that this works best when people have no remembrance or understanding of the past — for then there are no lies and no truths at all.
We have failed our children, and all the world will pay the cost in blood and horror.
Valerie M. Hudson is a university distinguished professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and a Deseret News contributor. Her views are her own.
