No, they didn’t. And when you tell yourself that, you make yourself a sucker.
Because when we tell ourselves that people who do terrible things cannot be human, we forget the logical implications of that; that only the inhuman are capable of doing terrible things.
And we’re human. We know this for sure. So therefore whatever we do, cannot be terrible. Because we’d know if we crossed that line, right? Our friends, our family, our coworkers… None of these people are inhuman. We know them, we talk to them, we care about them. So, logically, they could never be capable of anything truly monstrous. Because only monsters can be monstrous.
The Nazis were human. That’s the worst, and by far the most important lesson of the Holocaust. That humans did those things. That every single person you know is, under the right circumstances, capable of the most monstrous acts imaginable.
That’s why so many people cannot bring themselves to believe that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide; because they believe that only inhuman monsters can commit genocide, and they cannot call every person in Isreal an inhuman monster, can they?
It’s not our humanity that keeps us good. Goodness is not inherent, or God given, or born into us. It’s a choice we have to make, every single moment of every single day.
Every time you tell yourself that the worst people in the world aren’t really people, you make it just a little bit easier to cross those lines. To do something truly monstrous. Because the one thing you know for sure is that you are not a monster.
They dehumanized themselves. Nothing wrong with recognizing that.
No, they didn’t. And when you tell yourself that, you make yourself a sucker.
Because when we tell ourselves that people who do terrible things cannot be human, we forget the logical implications of that; that only the inhuman are capable of doing terrible things.
And we’re human. We know this for sure. So therefore whatever we do, cannot be terrible. Because we’d know if we crossed that line, right? Our friends, our family, our coworkers… None of these people are inhuman. We know them, we talk to them, we care about them. So, logically, they could never be capable of anything truly monstrous. Because only monsters can be monstrous.
The Nazis were human. That’s the worst, and by far the most important lesson of the Holocaust. That humans did those things. That every single person you know is, under the right circumstances, capable of the most monstrous acts imaginable.
That’s why so many people cannot bring themselves to believe that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide; because they believe that only inhuman monsters can commit genocide, and they cannot call every person in Isreal an inhuman monster, can they?
It’s not our humanity that keeps us good. Goodness is not inherent, or God given, or born into us. It’s a choice we have to make, every single moment of every single day.
Every time you tell yourself that the worst people in the world aren’t really people, you make it just a little bit easier to cross those lines. To do something truly monstrous. Because the one thing you know for sure is that you are not a monster.