Don't expect people to remember
Events always fade from history - yet it seems that people are always forgeting this. I'd previously written up Is the Holocaust fading from memory? to which the answer was of course yes, but probably less than a lot of other historical events. Been thinking of this again recently, prompted by this tweet:
this is always the context in which you have to take 'these Chinese kids have never heard of the Tiananmen square massacre' - like, the majority of people everywhere are unaware of major events that occurred before they were adults. https://t.co/Ikf3m1Wfs9
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) October 13, 2019
Here's another recent example from my twitter feed:
WTF from the classroom: today gave a lecture on the white supremacist systems of Jim Crow & Apartheid. Showed a docu which featured a young Nelson Mandela, I paused & asked if they knew him, no one did. I revealed he was Nelson Mandela & half the class hadn’t heard of him. Laawd!
— Blues and Abstract Truth (@barnor_hesse) October 24, 2019
(The original tweet here also isn't the only time that that tweet about people having forgotten Abu Ghraib got retweeted into my feed recently).