I went to school in Austria in the 1980s.
We learned about the Nazis. About the Second World War. About concentration camps, the Gestapo, propaganda, indoctrination and the machinery of a state that had turned human beings against one another.
We were taught all the ugly parts.
But there was another message underneath it all.
It was over.
That world was gone.
It had been defeated, and it was our responsibility to make sure it never returned.
For us, the terror was something inherited. We knew it through textbooks, through photographs and, more importantly, through people who had actually lived through it.
My grandparents.
My father.
They remembered a world that we knew only as history.
Freedom, therefore, seemed almost permanent.
We had defeated evil. The democratic order had prevailed. The lesson had been learned.
And then we had what felt like one long party.
A party that was supposed to last for the rest of our lives.
Perhaps that was the first mistake.
We became comfortable.
We had forgotten that freedom is not something that is conquered once and then permanently secured. It is not a historical achievement that can be placed in a museum and admired.
It requires maintenance.
And perhaps my generation was unusually fortunate because we lived through two fundamentally different worlds.
We were still children in a world without the internet.
Without mobile phones.
Without social media.
Without the glowing rectangle permanently illuminating our faces.
We played in the woods. We rode bicycles through the streets. We disappeared for hours and were expected to come home eventually, usually because our mothers had started shouting our names from the front door.
There was no algorithm deciding what we should see.
There was no permanent digital audience.
There was no infinite stream of outrage.
We were the last analogue generation.
Born analogue, but grown into the digital world.
That gave us a peculiar advantage.
We remember both.
The generations that followed us do not.
They grew up inside the digital world. Their understanding of reality was formed through networks, narratives, algorithms, social approval and permanent exposure to other people’s opinions.
And they inherited something else from us that may have been more dangerous than we realised.
They inherited freedom without inheriting the memory of its absence.
They learned that freedom existed.
They did not necessarily learn what it had cost.
They learned to demand rights.
They did not always learn the responsibilities that accompany them.
They learned that they could criticise institutions.
They did not always learn that institutions also have the right to criticise them.
They learned to speak.
They did not always learn that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from disagreement, consequences or uncomfortable answers.
And this is where history becomes dangerous.
Freedom is not immunity from criticism.
It is not a permanent entitlement to grievance.
It is not a licence to demand that everyone else accommodate your perception of the world.
And it certainly does not mean that anyone who disagrees with you has somehow become an enemy of freedom.
But those lessons are difficult to learn when you have never experienced the alternative.
Perhaps that is the fundamental problem.
The generation that remembers tyranny is disappearing.
The generation that inherits freedom without remembering its price increasingly assumes that freedom is simply the natural condition of the world.
It is not.
History does not repeat because human beings are incapable of learning.
It repeats because, eventually, the people who remember why the lesson mattered are gone.
And the people who replace them have to learn it again.