If you wanted to erase the impact of a visceral recent historical memory, one of the best ways would be to render it absurd. You could, for example, bring it up over and over again, in increasingly ridiculous comparisons, until it became nothing but meaningless hysteria. Then, when you do something that genuinely compares to the horror of that memory, you can be sure that legitimate reminders of the historical lesson are tuned out as nothing but noise and posturing.

You can’t erase history, but you can certainly beat the relevance out of it.