Yeah, but communication was so different at that time and the awareness of like, as stupid as it sounds, just the concept that racism is bad was so abysmal. Like, looking at the way people talked about race at the time it doesn’t seem like there was much awareness at all of how unreasonable and harmful racism is to society as a whole. Obviously we’ve still got a long way to go on that, and Trump’s election can be seen as an indicator that we’re not as far as some might have guessed (probably mostly white people), but people do seem to be at least more aware than they were. We also have the knowledge of that history of both the Japanese internment camps in the US and Germany’s concentration camps.

There definitely are substantial dehumanization efforts acting to counter this knowledge. But even there, you hear these stories of people being shocked that people they knew and cared about were among the people being deported during these crackdowns. They were sold on the idea of ‘bad people’ being deported, but the actuality is that it’s their neighbors who they actually like or even rely on who fall victim to these policies. A lot of people think of this stuff in terms of ‘exceptions’, where they might have a principle that they’re against undocumented immigration, but they don’t realize that the person at the counter of the local restaurant who they have a positive impression of is undocumented.

I see this myself every time I go to the grocery store. I can tell there are people who voted for Trump and are largely on board with the transphobic rhetoric in theory, but when they interact with me in the simplest of ways you can see this guilt in their face as they realize I’m actually just another human being and part of their community. They may not like the bogeyman of trans people, but when they meet an actual human being who’s kind to them? Even who just smiles at them and says hello? It conflicts with that propaganda that they’ve acted on in their politics and they literally do feel bad. Not all of them, to be sure, but some of them. That’s a good sign.

It means that there’s some capacity for learning. That we may be susceptible to propaganda and ignorance, but we’re also capable of learning from our mistakes. The question is how long it takes that capacity for learning to be triggered and override our capacity for ignorance, and how bad things get in the mean time.

Hopefully seeing those camps is one of the things that triggers that learning. That it rhymes enough with the history we’re aware of that people in the right positions start to realize how dangerously close we’re getting to something really bad before we actually get all the way there.