Five years ago, I published Open Minds (Mindjack #1):
“Back then, it was the first (mind)readers who were different and paid the price for it. Grandma O’Donnell’s stories about the camps where the government held her dad and the other early (mind)readers still gave me the creeps….Even if I never changed, at least I wasn’t destined for an internment camp simply for being a zero. The world had become more civilized since the experiments on those first (mind)reader kids.” – Kira in Open Minds
The word “camps” in the American mind elicits the horrors of the Holocaust, but the camps in my book were explicitly modeled after the Japanese Internment camps. When the books were translated to German, I had a fascinating discussion with my translator about the nuance of words and how “camps” meant “death” in German – we had to find a different word because the camps in my book were places that people died, but they weren’t designed for wholesale slaughter. Just horrific living conditions and the casual deaths that result from that.
My books have always been about tolerance and the innate human fear of The Other. Our world is more in need of tolerance and compassion than ever before. Just like Kira, I believed the world had become more civilized… and just like Kira, I was wrong. Civilization is a gossamer thing that must be protected, defended, fought for anew with every generation. We have to remember the past, not just so we don’t repeat it, but so we understand that the same fears, the same rationalizations, the same phobias that lead to those past horrors still live inside us. They’re part of the human condition. And if we want to keep our hold on a civil society, we have to fight that battle anew, every day.
Images of the Japanese Internment camps were censored for the duration of WWII: https://anchoreditions.com/…/dorothea-lange-censored…
Back then, the ACLU fought the internments in two Supreme Court cases. If you want to take action to keep anything like this happening again in the US, please consider donating.
(h/t to Ramez Naam for the link)