History teaches us valuable lessons. But will we learn from them?

David Schmalz here. Writing this week’s cover story was the most unusual writing experience of my life, because by the time I sat down to write, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say.

I had originally set out to write about the history of Japanese on the Monterey Peninsula. But as I got further into it, the escalating fascism of the federal government began to color all my thoughts as masked, unmarked agents descended into communities, disappearing people off the streets and off to God knows where, all without due process.

So as I was reporting this story, everything kept bringing me back to the Japanese American internment camps during World War II. And it got me thinking: I had learned about Japanese internment at some point in my education, and in college, two of the classes that stuck with me most were the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and The Holocaust in Literature. And in my late 20s, I lived in Cambodia for three months while researching a writing project, immersing myself in the history of that country’s genocide and subsequent civil war in the 1970s and ’80s.

As I’ve been watching America’s descent into fascism over the past weeks and months, even years—and to be clear, I think the vast majority of Americans are not fascist—I started asking myself: I know all this stuff, and I know countless others do too, I’ve plumbed the darkest depths of humanity to better understand it, but to what end?

What’s the value of understanding history if it can’t prevent us, collectively, from making the same mistakes?

Trying to answer that question became the frame for my story, and as I continued writing, I didn’t know how it would end until I wrote the last sentence.

I hope you’ll give it a read if you haven’t already. We are living in historic times, and they require our attention.