'Oh gramps, for once, stop talking about the war'.
People really don't want to hear those stories because it makes them uncomfortable. I'm in an absolute minority in that I wanted to hear the stories even if they made me uncomfortable. But the vast majority of the people would love to get through life without learning history's lessons and as a result are much more likely to repeat them.
And from what I've seen, the rest of 'the west' has similarly sized undercurrents of similar sentiment.
Strangely, that 40% will be made up of, largely, people whose grandparents lived through WWII.