The Newfound Banality Of Atrocities

If Hitler were invading Poland in 2024, it would look like this.

Tucker Carlson would fly to Germany to marvel at the aroma of freshly-baked German bread before nodding along as the Führer blamed Poland for being “uncooperative.”

Goebbels would show up on talk shows to insist that “we don’t know how those Jews died” and claim that the casualty numbers coming out of the concentration camps were inflated (even though everybody who’s verified them, including his own government, believes they’re accurate). 

The UN General Assembly would pat itself on the back for passing toothless, non-binding resolutions aimed at stopping the invasion, all while the German ambassador ignored them and played with his phone.

And it would take five years, six million dead Jews, and irrefutable, triple-vaccinated evidence of the horrors that took place before anyone would admit what happened was wrong.

You’re not supposed to admit that you don’t care about the deaths of 30,000 people. But you don’t. You can’t. 30,000, or even 1,200, is too big a number for our Dunbar-limited brains to connect to.

So you rely on stories. 

You think about Shani Nicole Louk. Or, at least, I do. The image of her twisted body being spat on by jubilant Palestinians, was one of the first, and still the most emblematic image I saw of the horror of that day. 

You think about 10-year-old Daria Karp, who spent three hours surrounded by dead bodies when Hamas attacked her home. They murdered her father in front of her. 

You think about Osher Vaknin and Oriya Ricardo and Rotem Neumann, young, harmless partygoers, all of whom were gunned down by terrorists at the Supernova Festival. 

But if you’ve been paying attention, you also think about eleven-year-old Dunya Abu Mehsen, who lost both parents, two siblings, and her right leg, in an airstrike that hit southern Gaza in November before losing her life courtesy of an Israeli tank shell in December.

You think about Ibrahim Dahouk, begging to be allowed to leave Gaza and receive treatment on what remains of his arm. One of hundreds of thousands of injured Gazans struggling to survive without medicine or proper care. 

You think about six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was found dead after fire from Israeli tanks trapped her in a car with the bodies of five of her relatives.

None of these stories are meant to counteract the others. They don’t refute or diminish them. They help us to consider the human beings behind the death tolls. 

They encourage those calling for an immediate ceasefire to think about the people who will be left vulnerable to further attacks. They encourage those who say Israel has no choice except its current course, to acknowledge the vast distance between doing nothing and slaughtering 30,000 innocent people.

And they remind us that when sociopaths like Rep. Ogles say of the civilians in Gaza that “we should kill them all,” or when teens on TikTok say they want to see a repeat of the October 7th attacks “again, and again and again,” they're talking about human beings, not numbers or political symbols. 

There’s a notion that the atrocities of the past were so awful that we couldn’t possibly repeat them. That the people who committed them were somehow different from us in character and morals and humanity and we can take our rightness and their wrongness for granted.

But none of this is true. 

As James Baldwin put it, we haven't been ennobled by oppression or technological progress. We haven't figured out how to care as much as we should.

In fact, the speed and scale with which social media exposes us to suffering only increase the danger that we become numb. 

In the lightly edited words of John Philpot Curran, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

But it’s easy to be vigilant of our enemies. The hard part is refusing to look the other way when the stories no longer flatter our friends. 

Because nobody who sees Israeli journalists and politicians claiming that ~570,000 Palestinians on the brink of famine is not a humanitarian crisis, or saying that “[nobody] in greater Israeli should have mercy on these Gazans. Not on the elderly, not on the young, and not on the children,” could believe Israel's claim that this war is being waged against Hamas and not the Palestinian people.

Nobody watching a choir of Israeli children singing about “eliminating” everyone in Gaza, or who knows about the children carrying out random acts of violence on innocent Palestinians, can believe that it’s only the Palestinians who teach their children to hate.

Nobody who saw the IDF shoot three unarmed, shirtless, white-flag-waving, Hebrew-speaking, ISRAELI HOSTAGES, could believe that they’re doing everything they can to “safeguard the innocent civilians” in Gaza (although, for what it’s worth, several Israeli politicians and Mossad officials and IDF soldiers have made it clear they don’t believe there are innocent civilians in Gaza). 

Anybody who can hate Hamas and their atrocities, anyone who cares when children suffer, anyone who possesses the moral machinery to understand why killing innocent people is evil and unjustifiable, can understand that the same is true here. 

They can see, as several IDF soldiers and holocaust survivors see, that it’s not just why you’re fighting that matters but how you fight.

The question is, how long will it be before more people admit what’s happening is wrong?

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