Probably bc if you claim 1 didn’t really happen, it makes it a lot easier to downplay all the steps that had to happen to reach 2. That way when somebody calls you out for starting down that same road again, you can claim they’re trying to make a big deal out of nothing. Once it’s just normal for one group to be treated as if they’re deserving of less than any other human, nothing is really a big deal.

It’s not like one day there was no genocide, everything was peachy, then suddenly 6 million people were gone. It was a long road that began with normalizing attitudes, then legalizing discrimination, and eventually stripping away an entire group’s perceived humanity along with their rights.

I know some people claim they believe empathy is a made up new age concept, but it’s actually a tool humans have relied on for millions of years, even before they had a name for it. It’s that part of you that says this feels wrong. That feeling should drive you to act, or at least say something because you can recognize how it would feel if it was happening to me instead of them.

It’s can be ignored, but it’s what’s supposed to keep this from happening over and over again, unless individuals within a broader dominant group are allowed to normalize the idea that we’re us and that other group is them, so just ignore that feeling. Eventually this normalizes the narrative they are a danger to us. Inevitably it becomes anyone who doesn’t see that we had no other choice but to do what we did, just doesn’t understand or is refusing to acknowledge what they are really like. They’re not like us. Except in all the ways that they are.