In a lot of ways I think Americans need to learn more history than just World War 2.

The current situation has many historical parallels that are more interesting than just Hitler Hitler Hitler.

I think there's a lot of things besides World War 2 that help us understand the current moment in time.

One example is about 80 years before the end of the Roman Republic. Tiberius Gracchus was a member of the Populares faction, populists in opposition to the aristocracy, the Optimates faction. Gracchus' populist reforms caused increasing tension in the senate. In 133 BCE, he was assassinated, and it would go down in history as one of the first assassinations in a practice that would become increasingly common in the republic. 84 years later Julius Caesar would cross the Rubicon River, a moment indicating the end of the Roman Republic. In this context, consider the venom with which the word "populist" is thrown around as a pejorative term, and the unprecedented actions taken against the candidate who is running for president under that banner presently.

Another example is the time right before the beginning of the French revolution. King Louis was printing money at a rapid rate, and it was creating a huge bubble for those within the fold of the government, but mass harm for those who were not. It was a time of extreme inequality, and many people were rushing into the capitol to try to get in on the gravy train causing overcrowding among the have-nots. Contrasts between the American revolution and the French revolution are quite important, given that the former led to a world superpower, and the latter led to an unstable nation that is today on I think it's fifth republic.

Yet another example is the Spanish empire during the exploitation of the new world. Spain treated South America like a true colonial holding -- unlike the United States where colonies became places people lived and built their lives, South America was a place primarily centered around exploitation of the local populations and natural resources. One result of this was a massive influx of silver to the Spanish government, which minted more coins and released them into circulation, causing high inflation because there was more money chasing the same amount of goods. Ultimately, this was one of the factors that brought one of the two most powerful empires on the planet into becoming a relative backwater.

Of course there's more things to learn from regions other than Europe. The Song dynasty in 9th century China and the Brahmins in India around the same time both had regimes that were more interested in writing poetry about how bad the invaders were or building more temples, respectively, leading to both countries losing considerable territory during this period.

Wang Mang in China around the 1st century became emperor through virtue signaling about Confucianism, and his incompetent rule based on an ideology that had massive holes led to tens of millions of deaths in a world that only had a couple hundred million humans.

In spite of the progressive paintjob on the modern bureaucracy, we have millennia of history from Imperial China about the risks of bureaucracy, including deep conservatism. The English reached china trying to trade clockwork that was centuries ahead of anything the Chinese had made, as well as guns and other technologies. They were turned back, a situation that ultimately led to the century of humiliation and the end of Imperial China.

The Islamic world has a few cautionary tales. The Islamic golden age saw the Muslim world as the center of the world in terms of much science and technology, as you can see from our use of algebra and the name of chemistry derived from alchemy, and our use of a numbering system out of the Islamic world. All of it came crashing down due to various factors leading to the Islamic world that once thought it would take over the world becoming a playground for other empires.

In the Mediterranean and the modern middle east, the bronze age collapse showed us most of the civilizations of the era being destroyed. Only a few civilizations remained, and some such as the Minoans were erased so thoroughly that we didn't even know they were real until shockingly recently in history when someone decided to look up the locations mentioned in Greek myth.

Around the same time period, the Harapan civilization, also called the Indus valley civilization in India tells us the entire self-contained story of a massive civilization that was born, rose, survived for ages, then declined and totally disappeared.

So to focus solely on one tiny piece of history is to really make a huge mistake. We have more than one case study, more than one lens to look at the world through, and not all of these lenses reveal the same story. Sometimes they reveal quite different stories.