Illusion and lies are the origin of our apathy toward genocide

This article is not exactly hopeful, if read in haste. It tends to make more sense when, through difficult conversation, we gain some freedom to think and act about wars without the interference of armies. After all, there is nothing that those who promote war can do for peace.

I remember my first classes on the Second World War. Well, how could I forget them. At the time, I found it not at all appealing to know in what years it had begun and ended. I believe the dates made little sense to me because of my inexperience in relating events. Besides, my young age did not distinguish what fits into one, ten or a hundred years.

In general terms, and for exam purposes, the Second had come after the First. And it was called a world war because those who called it that considered that the whole world boiled down to them. Elementary-school knowledge that holds true today.

Open parenthesis. Anyone who lived through the 1990s knows that, in terms of morgues, run-over people, stabbed people, putrefying corpses, television supplied us abundantly with violent images. In the city where I grew up, a woman drowned her two children in a well and then threw herself in too. On the lunchtime show, I watched the little bodies floating. Another case was the daughter who, with her girlfriend’s help, killed her mother and her grandmother. Not to mention the rape, murder and robbery carried out against an elderly woman who lived alone on Rua XV.

In the end, those who died and those who killed were related to someone close. They were, in any case, degenerates; they did not exactly count as people. Not to mention the national cases: the Candelária massacre, Daniella Perez, Índio Galdino. Close parenthesis. This is my argument: it is hard to impress a Brazilian child.

Those ordinary murderers, although extremely dangerous, had committed their crimes furtively. They were discovered and then televised, jailed, lynched or killed by police. But what we were told about the extermination camps was totally different, and often more frightening. There was something wrong with multitudes murdered in broad daylight.

How it turned out

What we know about the genocide of Jews is marked in black and white in our memories, both by the photos and by the brilliant film Schindler’s List (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg. Thanks to new technologies, part of those memories can touch us even more deeply. Using a combination of digital resources, I myself colorized a photo of child survivors of Auschwitz taken by Alexander Vorontsov.

It is hard to look at them and say: “we despised your families to the utmost, we chose who would be enslaved and who would be killed and incinerated in our four gas chambers with crematoria.” Because that is exactly what we did, in the role of humans. Taking responsibility for that disgrace is a pain for a lifetime, and I do not think there is any way to deal with it other than carrying it, with shame and remorse, until the last day.

Facing inhumanity is not, however, the same as stagnating in lament. It is exactly the opposite. And, to walk the minimum necessary, we must rid ourselves of two convenient illusions. The first is that all responsibility can be attributed to the Führer. Let us be consistent, even though it bothers us at nearly unbearable levels. No man would have been able to undertake the Third Reich without help. In 1935, the Nazi Party enacted the racial discrimination laws, and Mr. Mustache was not alone — as the official footage proves.

The other classic illusion is that the “world” of the Second World War did not prevent the genocide simply because it knew nothing. Come now. On second thought, I no longer even think it is an illusion — since not every illusion is necessarily a mistake —, but a barefaced lie. With the illusion, we gain a certain psychic relief, which often turns into proud pleasure: “I would never have done something like that.” With the lie, we kept the idea that we have a power that, in truth, we do not have.

Lie

Since the Gulf War, one more absurdity of the 1990s, international military conflicts also became television programs. This is not a figure of speech. Literally, wars are simultaneously television programs. It takes little intelligence — sometimes I do not even reach that — to understand that the images we consume are the work of a person. Someone holds the camera, chooses when to press REC, when to stop, from what position what they see will be seen, what enters or does not enter the frame. In the case of artificial intelligence generation, someone will have to write the prompt.

In this way, the media product of war is part of war’s general arsenal. Whoever has more or fewer resources to create and spread stories has, consequently, more or less military power. It is fair to ask what the destructive range of a weapon of this kind is. Since the spontaneous constitution of a public sphere, and its progressive and irreversible decline, public opinion has been used to legitimize or not the actions of the state. If I convince Brazil that I am “good” and that the other is “evil,” then Brazilians tend to pressure their rulers in a specific direction, whose product ranges from support on digital social networks to proposals at the United Nations Security Council.

Telling the best story, however, has nothing to do with telling the most accurate history. That quality criterion is restricted to citizens who are not easily moved by the appeals of the masses — people who, in each social circle, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

On the way to the endgame. So, if the world had known of the annihilation of humans in the Second World War, it would have acted to protect the Jews. I guarantee that, with a clear mind and three or four videos of the apocalypse in Palestine, one can say with one hundred percent accuracy that this is a lie.

Weakness

Not even the appropriate terms for dealing with war crimes in Palestine have been used properly in different parliaments around the world. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote that “the closer you look, the more Netanyahu looks like Trump,” in the worst sense. The article states that “about eighty percent of Israelis blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government for the catastrophe of Hamas, according to a poll by the Hebrew newspaper Maariv.”

In Brazil, the congresswoman who was born to be a she-donkey and will never rise to mare, Carla Zambelli, posted an image of an American and Israeli eagle over a Palestinian rat. I am persuaded by myself not to expect this project of a person to be able to grasp the size of her own bestiality.

Faced with name lists of thousands of civilians killed by Israel, the response of the “world” is so weak, languid, limp. Perhaps this is the moment for this awareness: we are incapable of preventing violence by the mere knowledge that violence exists. I am warning you now: in the next few hours, Palestinian children will be brutally murdered or maimed, and those who survive will have seen their families and friends explode. Knowing this changes absolutely nothing.

A few hours ago, a Palestinian boy went to fetch a ball when a bombing took place right behind him. His nephew’s back was wounded. But the nephew is better off than Saleh al Qaraan, whose head was blown apart in the explosion.

Used to finding posts with animals on Instagram every day, I saw a tabby kitten jump into the lap of a Palestinian man on which rested the pale body of a dead child. The kitten curled up and closed its eyes. Not to mention the mother who, with her dead baby wrapped in white cloth, refused to stop kissing him. Or the countless videos of children in panic attacks inside hospitals.

On the individual level, my work or yours against war and nothing seem about equal. We cannot count on it, at least not now, that the prudence of the wise will find a slot on the world leaders’ agendas. But whether or not we defend Palestinian civilians, now, at every single opportunity, says something about what we have learned about our own wickedness.