Why We Look Away from Genocide
and What It Costs Us
By Geoffrey Clow | A Twinkling of the Soul Article
I start with the questions no one wants to ask out loud:
Why do humans do this? Is this who we really are? The truth is uncomfortable. We’re capable of extraordinary cruelty and extraordinary kindness.
But the cruelty requires systems, infrastructure, propaganda, permission. Kindness is older. It’s what surfaces when systems fail, when we bypass them entirely, when we act from the part of us wired for connection.
Our original human wiring, the 290,000 years before hierarchy, says cooperation, shared survival, collective protection.
The last 10,000 years of manufactured scarcity say domination, obedience, dehumanisation, kill or be killed.
Both are real.
But only one is ancient.
Only one is what our bodies still know.
And that’s what this article sits with: the fracture between who we became and who we once were. The sick feeling in your stomach watching livestreamed horror while the world keeps turning. The part of you that still breaks open. The part that wonders if that breaking matters.
This piece isn’t about politics.
Or terminology.
It’s about what happens to us, in our bodies, in our wiring, when we witness atrocity and are told to stay functional.
It’s about what’s left of our humanity. And what it costs us every time we look away.
Here's what you'll find in this article
The Fracture
Your coffee’s gone cold.
You don’t remember making it. Don’t remember those first three sips. But there it sits, half-drunk, scum forming on the surface while you stare at your phone like it might explain something if you just keep scrolling.
The screen glows. Always glowing.
A child’s shoe in rubble. Just one shoe. Pink. Small enough to fit in your palm. You wonder about the other shoe. You wonder about the foot that was in it. Then you realise you’re wondering about a dead child’s shoe and something inside you cracks a little more.
Refresh.
Another hospital bombed. Third one this week? Fourth? You’ve lost count. Doctors operating by candlelight. A man carrying what’s left of his daughter in a blanket that used to be white. Someone’s grandmother, face grey with dust, eyes empty, sitting in what used to be her kitchen.
You close the tab.
You open it again.
You close it.
Your jaw hurts. You’ve been clenching it so hard your teeth ache. Your shoulders are up around your ears. You’re barely breathing. When did you stop breathing?
How?
Not a rhetorical question. A real one. The kind that sits in your chest at 3am like a stone. The kind that wakes you up in the night with your hands in fists and your heart racing for reasons you can’t quite name until you remember: Oh. Right. Genocide. Still happening.
How are humans doing this to other humans?
How does a whole group of people get marked for extinguishment while the world watches on phones and laptops and argues about terminology?
How do the bombs keep falling, you can count them, you can watch the footage, you can see the craters where homes used to be, and nothing stops?
Someone’s making the bombs. Someone’s loading them onto planes. Someone’s flying those planes. Someone’s dropping them. Someone’s filming it. Someone’s defending it on television. Someone’s paying for it with your taxes. Someone’s voting for the politicians who approve it. Someone’s scrolling past it to see what their friends had for lunch.
And you’re sitting here in your kitchen with cold coffee and a sick feeling in your stomach wondering:
How many times can we watch the same crime and still call it a tragedy instead of a pattern?
You look at your own hands.
Same species. Same DNA. Same capacity for this.
That’s the part that breaks you. Not that it’s happening. That we’re capable of it. That the distance between you and the person who bombs hospitals might just be circumstance. Different trauma. Different propaganda. Different permission structures.
The same hands that can hold a child can also build the bomb that kills one.
And most days, most of us, we just choose not to think about that too hard.
You close the tab again.
But Gaza is still burning whether you’re watching or not.
What We're Actually Doing
Let’s not use soft language here.
This is how genocide works: it needs planners, apologists, technicians, and spectators who choose not to see.
Men in suits signing contracts for munitions. Pilots checking their instruments before takeoff. Lawyers drafting position papers. Journalists writing headlines that turn “we bombed a refugee camp” into “tensions escalate.” You, reading this on a device manufactured by people paid pennies, powered by electricity generated from stolen resources, while children die in real time on the other tab you have open.
The paperwork is cleaner now. The slogans sharper. The PR more disciplined. But the architecture is familiar. A target population. A story that they are less than us. A machine that can erase them faster than we can say the words “rule of law.”
We know exactly what we’re looking at.
We’re livestreaming genocide. Bookmarking it. Sharing it with trigger warnings. Debating it over coffee. Watching doctors pull children from rubble in 4K resolution while we argue about whether it technically meets the legal definition yet.
The absurdity would be funny if it wasn’t so obscene.
Genocide doesn’t start with bodies in mass graves. It starts with language that strips people of their status as people, until their suffering registers as noise, not harm.
“Vermin.” “Terrorists.” “Illegals.” “Savages.” “Animals.” “Human shields.”
Once a group is named as a threat, a disease, a problem to be solved, everything becomes permissible. Bombing their homes becomes “neutralising targets.” Starving their children becomes “strategic pressure.” Erasing their history becomes “security measures.”
Your stomach turns reading this. Or it should. If it doesn’t, that’s part of the problem.
And we call it stability.
The language of “security,” “self-defence,” “collateral damage”, this is how modern states sanitise what older empires did with open slaughter. Same mechanism. Better marketing.
Genocide doesn’t need monsters. Bureaucrats will do.
Palestine: The Pattern in Real Time
Add Palestine to that list.
Not as a future case study. Not as a hypothetical for law journals. As a live broadcast with comment sections and like buttons and people arguing about it while their dinner gets cold.
A people forced into fragments of their own land, starved, bombed, displaced, and then told that even the word for what is happening to them is unacceptable.
We have the footage. All of it. Phones capture everything now. The bombs falling. The buildings collapsing. The father screaming his daughter’s name into rubble. The doctor holding a dead infant, still in scrubs, face blank with exhaustion and horror. The child with no legs asking when they can go home.
And we watch it. We save it. We share it. We debate whether it’s real or staged or taken out of context.
Then we close the app and make lunch.
The stages are textbook:
Decades of dispossession. Ghettos renamed “security zones.” Walls and checkpoints cutting life into pieces. A trapped population described as “human animals” so their deaths register as security achievements, not crimes.
Two million people locked in an open-air prison. Half of them children. No way in. No way out. Then the bombs start falling and we’re told they brought it on themselves. That they’re being used as human shields. That the hospitals are legitimate targets. That the refugee camps are military installations. That the children dying are tragic but unavoidable.
The siege. The cutting of water and power. The bombing of homes, hospitals, schools, refugee camps. Each step explained away as self-defence, as if you can defend yourself by erasing the people you occupy.
Doctors amputating limbs without anaesthesia because Israel bombed the medical supplies. Children drinking from puddles because Israel destroyed the water treatment plants. Families crushed in the buildings Israel said were safe to shelter in.
This is happening now. While you read this. While I write it.
Palestine is the test we are failing in real time.
Governments arming and funding the assault. Media outlets laundering the language, “Israel’s war on Hamas” as if you can fight an idea by bombing everyone who lives near it. Ordinary people scrolling past mass graves and starving children because saying “genocide” out loud might be inconvenient at work, at the dinner table, online.
We built Holocaust museums. We teach children about Rwanda and Cambodia. We pledged “never again” over the bones in killing fields and mass graves.
And then we watch Gaza burn, in HD, in real time, with verified footage and witness testimony and doctors livestreaming from operating rooms, and argue over whether the word “genocide” is too strong.
We didn’t forget history. We ignored it.
The Pattern We Keep Repeating
This isn’t the first time. It won’t be the last.
But let’s back up. Before the 20th century gave us the word “genocide,” we had five centuries of practice.
Colonisation. The original template for systematic extermination.
The Americas, from 1492 onward. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 50 and 100 million indigenous people dead within a century of European contact. Disease, yes, but disease weaponised through displacement, enslavement, deliberate contamination. Population reductions of 90% or more. Nine out of every ten people. Gone.
A Taíno woman watching Spanish soldiers burn her village. An Aztec child dying of smallpox in a city the conquistadors had never visited yet. A Cherokee grandmother walking the Trail of Tears in winter, watching her grandchildren freeze.
These aren’t abstractions. These were Tuesday afternoons for someone. Ordinary days that ended with your world burning, your children dead, your whole civilisation erased. And the people doing it? They called it spreading civilisation. Bringing enlightenment. Saving souls.
United States. The Trail of Tears, 1830s, 5,000 Cherokee dead during forced removal. Sand Creek, 1864, U.S. cavalry massacred 163 Cheyenne, mostly women and children, while they slept under a white flag. California Gold Rush, 1849-1870, population dropped from 300,000 to 35,000. Direct murders. Bounties on scalps. Extermination as state policy.
State policy. Not rogue soldiers. Not isolated incidents. Policy. Written down. Budgeted. Implemented. With paperwork and procurement and payment structures. We made genocide a line item in the budget.
Australia, 1788 onward. British colonisation reduced Aboriginal population from 750,000 to 93,000 by 1901. Massacres. Forced child removals, the Stolen Generations. “Smoothing the pillow of a dying race,” they called it. Polite language for extermination.
“Smoothing the pillow.” That’s what they said. Like they were helping. Like it was mercy. Like the people they were killing were already dying anyway so why not speed it along? We’ve always been very good at making murder sound like kindness.
Canada. Residential schools, 1880s to 1990s. Read that again. 1990s. Last one closed in 1996. Thousands of children dead from abuse, disease, malnutrition. “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Over 500 unmarked graves identified at 53 schools so far. They’re still finding the bodies.
A Cree mother having her six-year-old ripped from her arms by priests and police. That child’s hair cut. Language beaten out of them. Buried in an unmarked grave when pneumonia or abuse or despair finally killed them. That happened to thousands of families. Some of those mothers are still alive.
Still alive. Think about that. This isn’t ancient history. There are grandmothers alive right now who had their children stolen. Who never saw them again. Who spent decades not knowing if they were alive or dead or what happened to them. And we call it the past tense like it’s over.
Argentina. Conquest of the Desert, 1878-1885. 14,000+ indigenous people killed. The Selk’nam nearly extinct, hunted for sport, bounties paid per person killed. Photos exist of the hunting parties. Men posing with their kills like it was a weekend outing.
Photos. They took photos. Stood there smiling next to the bodies like they’d bagged a deer. Sent them as postcards. Hung them on walls. Because they didn’t see people. They saw pests. Problems. Obstacles to progress. And we bought the postcards.
Brazil. Portuguese expansion into the Amazon. 90% population decline post-contact. Enslavement. Mass killings. Ongoing. Still happening. Right now, ranchers and miners still burning indigenous people out of their lands while politicians look the other way.
Still happening. Present tense. Not history. Now. While you read this. While I write it. Same pattern. Same justifications. Same murders. Just with better PR and lawyers who know how to make it sound legal.
New Zealand. The New Zealand Wars, 1845-1872. Māori went from 40-70% of the population to minority status. Land confiscations backed by military force. Homes burned. Crops destroyed. Sovereignty erased.
Sovereignty erased. That’s the goal, isn’t it? Not just to kill people but to erase the fact that they ever had the right to say no. To rewrite history so it looks like the land was always ours, the resources were always ours, the power was always ours. Make it look inevitable. Natural. Just the way things are.
And Namibia again, because Germany practised on the Herero and Nama before the Holocaust. 1904-1908. 80% of Herero dead. 50% of Nama. Concentration camps. Scorched earth. The test run.
A Herero woman driven into the desert with her children. No water. No food. German troops shooting anyone who tried to return. She knew what was happening. They all did. They just couldn’t stop it.
The test run. That’s what Namibia was. The place where Germany worked out the logistics of industrial extermination. And then they went home and did it again, more efficiently, with better record-keeping, to different people. Because once you figure out how to do it, you just, do it again. Different continent. Different victims. Same mechanism.
This is the pattern that taught the world how genocide works. How to justify it: civilisation versus savagery. How to organise it: military campaigns and legal frameworks. How to maintain it: reserves, camps, schools designed to erase culture. How to deny it: they were dying anyway, we were helping them, it was inevitable, it was progress.
And how to memorialise it: with nothing. Or worse, with statues of the killers. With place names honouring the generals. With national holidays celebrating the conquest.
History doesn’t repeat. It just sends polite reminders.
Now let’s count the 20th century, when we finally named what we’d been doing all along.
Armenia, 1915. Ottoman forces drove 1.5 million Armenians into the desert on death marches. Systematically. Methodically. Families separated. Women raped in front of their husbands. Children dying of thirst while soldiers watched and laughed. Teachers and priests killed first, always kill the ones who can document it, who can organise resistance, who can tell the story later.
That last part matters. We always kill the storytellers first. Because if there’s no one left to remember, did it really happen?
Ukraine, 1932. Stalin manufactured a famine. Grain seized at gunpoint while people starved in the streets. 3 to 5 million Ukrainians dead. Holodomor. “Death by hunger.” A Ukrainian farmer watching his children’s bellies swell from starvation, their hair falling out, their skin turning grey, while armed guards stood between him and his own harvest. Parents eating leather. Eating grass. Eating their own children’s bodies after they died because the alternative was watching the living ones die too.
You want to look away from that. So did everyone in 1932. That’s how it works. The horror gets so big you can’t hold it, so you don’t. You go to work. You feed your own kids. You tell yourself it’s not your problem.
Germany, 1933-1945. We know this one. Six million Jews. Roma. Disabled people. Queers. Slavs. The mechanised efficiency of it. The trains running on time. The record-keeping. The bureaucracy of murder. A Polish grandmother separated from her grandchildren on a railway platform, she went left, they went right, and that was it. The last time. No goodbye. Just a guard’s casual gesture and then ash.
We made movies about it. Built museums. Made it required curriculum. Said never again with our whole chests. Then we did it again. And again. And again. Because “never again” apparently meant “never again to THOSE people in THAT way” not “never again will we let humans exterminate other humans.”
Cambodia, 1975. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killed between 1.4 and 3 million people in four years. Intellectuals, city dwellers, anyone wearing glasses because glasses meant you could read and reading meant you could think. The killing fields, mass graves still being found. Skulls stacked in memorials. A teacher buried alive for the crime of being literate. A doctor beaten to death with a hoe for the crime of knowing how to heal.
We kill the ones who can think. Always. Because thinking leads to questioning and questioning leads to resistance and resistance threatens the people in power. So we eliminate the problem at its source. We call it revolution. We call it purification. We call it necessary.
Rwanda, 1994. 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus murdered in 100 days. That’s 8,000 people per day. 333 people per hour. Five people every minute for three months straight. Neighbours killing neighbours with machetes. Radio announcers directing the slaughter like traffic reports, “there’s a cockroach family hiding at 34 Rue de la Paix.” A mother hiding her children in a ceiling while the man who used to sell them bread hunted them with a machete. Her hand over her baby’s mouth to keep them quiet. The baby suffocating. Dying silently so the others could live. That’s the choice she had to make.
The UN had troops there. They pulled out. Watched it happen. Did nothing. Bill Clinton later called it his greatest regret. Easy to regret from a distance. Harder to act when it’s happening. We’re good at regret. We’re very good at memorials and apologies and moments of silence. We’re just not very good at stopping it while people are still alive to be saved.
Bosnia, 1995. Srebrenica. 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys executed in a “safe area” while UN peacekeepers watched. Dutch soldiers standing by while buses full of men were driven to execution sites. A fifteen-year-old boy separated from his mother, marched into the woods at gunpoint, shot, dumped in a mass grave with his neighbours and his teachers and his friends.
The peacekeepers went home. The executioners got trials. Some of them. Eventually. Years later. The boy stayed in the ground. That’s the pattern, isn’t it? The dead stay dead. The killers go home. The systems that made it possible keep running. And we call it justice because we held a trial.
Darfur, 2003. Janjaweed militias killed 500,000 non-Arab civilians. “Arab land” they called it afterward. The villages burned. The wells poisoned. A Fur woman raped in front of her family, then watching them murdered.
We were supposed to have learned by now. We had the word “genocide.” We had the international laws. We had the tribunals and the treaties and the promised interventions. And still, people burned villages and poisoned wells and raped women in front of their families. Because laws only work if someone enforces them. And enforcement requires caring. And caring requires seeing people as people.
Iraq, 1988. Saddam Hussein gassed 182,000 Iraqi Kurds. Halabja alone, 5,000 people dead in a single day. Chemical weapons deployed against civilians. A father finding his children dead in the street, their skin blistered, lungs burned.
Chemical weapons. On civilians. And the world? Barely blinked. Because Saddam was useful at the time. Because geopolitics mattered more than Kurdish lives. Because we’ve always been very good at deciding which deaths count and which ones don’t.
Congo, 1996. 233,000 Hutu refugees massacred by Rwandan-backed forces. The aftermath of one genocide creating another. A woman who survived one massacre only to die in the next.
That’s what we don’t talk about enough. How genocide breeds genocide. How trauma creates trauma. How the people who survive one atrocity sometimes become the perpetrators of the next. The cycle doesn’t break. It just shifts location.
East Timor, 1975-1999. Indonesian occupation killed up to 44% of the population. Nearly half. A grandmother who lived through Portuguese colonisation, Japanese occupation, and Indonesian invasion, all three trying to exterminate her people.
Forty-four percent. Think about that. Nearly half the population. Gone. And most people couldn’t find East Timor on a map. Couldn’t name a single Timorese person. Couldn’t tell you one detail about what happened there. Because some genocides get museums and curricula and some just get buried in the margins of history books under “regional conflicts.”
Somalia, 1987. Government forces destroyed Hargeisa and Burao, killing 200,000 Isaaq clan members. “We have left them only the sea,” a military commander said. He meant it as a threat. The bodies washed up for weeks.
He said it. Out loud. “We have left them only the sea.” And he wasn’t ashamed. Wasn’t trying to hide it. That’s what happens when dehumanisation is complete. You can say the quiet part out loud because you genuinely don’t see them as people anymore. You see them as a problem you solved.
Nigeria, 1967. The Biafran blockade. Over a million Igbo deaths from starvation and violence. Images of starving children that shocked the world, and then we moved on. A mother watching her child’s belly swell from kwashiorkor, ribs showing, too weak to cry.
“Shocked the world.” We say that a lot. Images that shocked us. Events that horrified us. And then what? We moved on. Because shock fades. Horror gets boring. The next news cycle starts and yesterday’s dying children become yesterday’s news. That’s how we survive this. Not by caring less, but by caring briefly. Intensely. Then moving on.
Dominican Republic, 1937. Trujillo ordered the killing of Haitians living near the border. “Show me your parsley,” soldiers said, knowing Haitian Creole speakers would struggle with the Spanish ‘r’. 40,000 people murdered over a pronunciation test. A farmer killed because his tongue couldn’t quite curl around a word.
A pronunciation test. That’s all it took. Your tongue shaped by your language, shaped by your mother’s voice, shaped by the place you’re from, and that shape gets you killed. Because we’ll use anything. Language. Religion. Skin colour. The shape of your nose. The texture of your hair. We’ll find a difference and make it matter and use it to justify murder.
Soviet deportations. Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Kazakhs, Poles. Entire populations loaded onto trains and dumped in Siberia. Hundreds of thousands dead from exposure and starvation. A Chechen family loaded into a cattle car in February, half of them dead before they reached the Kazakh steppe.
Entire populations. Just, moved. Like furniture. Like inconvenient objects taking up space where the state wanted something else. Load them on trains. Drop them somewhere that’ll kill most of them. Problem solved. And we did this while other countries were signing human rights declarations and building the United Nations and promising a better world.
Each one came with warnings. Recognisable stages.
Hate speech. Segregation. Stripping rights. Organised violence. Mass killing.
Each one produced the same after-the-fact rituals.
Memorials. Museums. “Never again.” Candles lit. Names recited. Speeches given. Students taking field trips to remember the dead.
We built museums for “never again.” Turns out we just meant “never again until the next time.”
And people are still being exterminated. Right now. While you read this.
We turned atrocity into a curriculum. A hashtag. A tragic backdrop to the same old politics.
And Here's What Breaks You
Not the people dropping the bombs. You expect that. There are always people willing to kill. It’s everyone else.
Your neighbour who brings you soup when you’re sick. Your coworker who cried at the end of Toy Story 3. The woman at the coffee shop who remembers your order. The guy at the gym who always holds the door. People who are kind. Decent. Good.
Who watch children being pulled from rubble and then go make lunch.
A friend texted me yesterday. Three words: “I can’t watch.”
I knew what she meant. We’ve stopped saying Palestine out loud. Saying it makes it real in a way that watching somehow doesn’t. Like if we don’t name it, if we just witness it silently, scroll past it carefully, we’re not really participating. We’re just, aware. Informed. Concerned.
But here’s what actually happens:
You’re on your phone. You see the image. A child’s face, grey with dust, eyes wide. Or maybe just a body, small, covered with a sheet that used to be white. Your chest tightens. Your throat constricts. Something in you starts to break open.
And then your thumb moves.
Not a decision, exactly. Just a reflex. A tiny motion. Scroll.
Past the dead child. Past the destroyed hospital. Past the father screaming. Past the doctor with no anaesthesia. Past the mass grave. Past the starving baby.
To a recipe. A meme. Your friend’s new puppy. A video of someone dancing. An ad for shoes.
And that thing in your chest that was starting to break? You seal it back up. Not consciously. Just, you choose not to feel it right now. You have work in an hour. You have bills to pay. You have your own problems. You can’t carry Gaza and Ukraine and Congo and Sudan and Yemen in your body all day every day and still function.
So you don’t.
You scroll past. You make coffee. You answer emails. You go to the meeting. You pick up groceries. You pay your taxes that buy the bombs. You vote for the politicians who fund it. You stay quiet when someone at work says something vile because saying something might make it awkward and you need this job.
You do all of this while knowing, somewhere in the back of your mind where you don’t look too closely, that people are dying right now. That children are being crushed in buildings right now. That doctors are amputating limbs without anaesthesia right now.
Right now. While you’re reading this. While I’m writing it.
And that knowledge sits in your body like a stone. That tightness in your chest that never quite goes away. The heaviness in your gut. The way your shoulders stay up by your ears even when you try to relax them. The way you wake up at 3am sometimes with your hands in fists and your jaw clenched and a feeling you can’t quite name until you remember: Oh. Right. The world is on fire and I’m just, eating breakfast.
That tightness. That’s complicity learning to live in your body.
And here’s the thing nobody wants to say: we’re not monsters for this. We’re just human. Our nervous systems aren’t designed to hold the weight of industrial-scale suffering. Our brains aren’t wired to care about thousands of people dying hundreds of miles away with the same intensity we care about our own child’s fever.
So we protect ourselves. We numb. We scroll. We look away.
And the systems know this. They count on it. They count on you being too tired, too overwhelmed, too convinced of your own powerlessness to do anything but witness and move on.
Silence is always someone’s strategy.
Some nights I stare at the ceiling and think maybe the world really is this cruel.
Maybe giving up on humanity is just being realistic. Maybe the people who’ve stopped caring aren’t weak, maybe they’re just honest about what we are. Maybe breaking open every time you see a dead child is naive. Unsustainable. A luxury you can’t afford if you want to keep functioning.
Then the thought scares me. Not because I might be wrong. Because I might be right. Because that door, the one where you stop breaking open, where you stop feeling it, where you just accept that this is how things are, is so easy to walk through. And I don’t know if you can walk back.
We’ve become very good at witnessing.
We’re just not very good at the part that comes after witnessing.
Who We're Becoming
If this is what we tolerate, this is who we are.
We watch genocide livestreamed in 4K while our coffee gets cold. We see children crushed in rubble, doctors operating by phone light, families starving, and we just, keep scrolling. Keep working. Keep arguing about whether it meets the technical legal definition of genocide yet, like the fucking paperwork matters more than the bodies.
We’ve become people who can watch a whole population being erased and then make dinner plans.
The dehumanisation isn’t just happening to them. It’s happening to us. Every time we scroll past a dead child to see what our friends had for lunch. Every time we say “it’s complicated” instead of “it’s wrong.” Every time we choose not knowing over knowing, comfort over truth, our morning routine over someone else’s extermination.
We’re being reshaped. Bent. Numbed. Taught that this is just how things are.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If you shrink all of humanity down to one person, you don’t get a wise elder or a misunderstood genius. You get someone you’d cross the street to avoid. Someone with the charm of a cult leader and the moral compass of a landmine.
A person who can watch their neighbour starve while arguing about dinner plans. Someone who destroys whole families then insists they’re the victim. Someone who can flatten a city before lunch and sleep fine that night.
Clinically? You’d call it malignant narcissism with a heavy side of antisocial pathology.
Spiritually? We’ve become the guy who burns down the village and then complains about the smoke.
And the worst part is, it’s not a metaphor. It’s us.
Look at what we do. We have the footage. We have the testimony. We have doctors livestreaming amputations without anaesthesia. We have verified death counts. We have children on camera asking why no one is helping them.
And we watch it. Save it. Share it with content warnings. Debate it. Analyse it. Cite international law. Write think pieces. Hold panels. Give speeches.
And the bombs keep falling.
The species that invented compassion and genocide in the same breath. The species that built hospitals and then bombed them. That created international law and then ignored it. That said “never again” and meant “never again until it’s convenient.”
We keep proving, over and over, that the line between human and monster is paper-thin. And most days? Most days we don’t even bother staying on the right side of it.
If Society Walked Into a Clinician's Office Today
If society were a single patient sitting across from you, you wouldn’t need long to see the pattern.
And you’d want to refer them out. Fast. To that colleague you’ve never quite trusted but who takes the cases you can’t handle. The ones that make you lie awake at night wondering if you’re making it worse just by witnessing.
The presentation is unmistakable: a species deep in collective dissociation, addicted to violence, numbed by its own pain, and terrified of its own reflection.
You’d diagnose a civilisation with chronic moral injury. Severe empathy erosion. A dangerous split between what it knows and what it chooses to do.
You’d see trauma responses everywhere. Hypervigilance. Paranoia. Compulsive hoarding of resources. The desperate need to dominate so no one can dominate you. Underneath that, a festering attachment disorder on a global scale. The kind that forms when caregivers fail, communities collapse, and everyone learns the same lesson: trust gets you hurt.
And then there’s the rot we don’t want to name.
Not a single personality disorder, but a collective pathology. A civilisation that normalises cruelty. Rewards exploitation. Suppresses empathy until it functions more like a traumatised perpetrator than a healthy adult.
If this were one person, you’d say their nervous system is fried. Their moral centre is offline. Their coping strategies are killing everyone around them.
You’d tell them they’re dangerous.
Not because they enjoy violence. That would almost be easier. At least then you’d know what you’re dealing with.
No. They’re dangerous because they’ve stopped feeling the weight of it.
Because they can watch children die and then make lunch. Can know about mass graves and still complain about traffic. Can livestream extermination and debate whether it meets the legal definition while the bodies pile up.
And you’d tell them the truth no one wants to hear:
This isn’t who they had to become.
It’s just who they became when power replaced connection. When trauma became inheritance. When fear became easier than empathy. When looking away became survival and survival became complicity and complicity became just, normal.
But here’s the thing that keeps you up at night about this patient:
You can see the wiring underneath. The 290,000 years of it. The capacity for extraordinary kindness. The way they still break open sometimes, still reach toward each other in disasters, still know in their bones that we’re meant to survive together.
It’s not gone. It’s just buried. Under 10,000 years of systems designed to make them cruel.
And you don’t know, you really don’t know, if that wiring can come back online before the coping strategies kill everything.
You don’t know if a species can witness this much suffering, participate in this much extermination, and still find their way back to the part of them that knows how to care.
You don’t know if we’ll ever help each other again.
Or if this is just who we are now. A civilisation burning through everything, including ourselves, insisting we had no choice while our hands are still on the match.
What Your Body Still Knows
But here’s what your nervous system is doing right now, even as your brain tries to make sense of genocide:
You’re sitting there watching horror and your body is reacting.
Gut clenched. Shoulders up. Breathing shallow. That specific nausea that comes from witnessing suffering you can’t stop.
That response, that breaking open, is also human nature.
Your body doesn’t shrug at genocide. It protests. Something in you knows this is wrong, not because someone taught you to think that way, but because you carry 300,000 years of wiring that says: We survive together. We protect the vulnerable. We share.
For most of human existence, like, the vast majority of it, we lived in small bands. Twenty to maybe 150 people. Hunter-gatherers. No agriculture, no property, no kings or cops or borders.
And in those conditions, for hundreds of thousands of years, cruelty didn’t scale.
You couldn’t systematically exterminate your neighbours because you needed them. Their knowledge of where water was. Their skill tracking game. Their hands when your kid was being born. Their stories around the fire when the nights were long and dark and scary.
An elder teaching a child which plants heal. A hunter sharing meat with the family whose hunt failed. A mother nursing another woman’s baby because that woman died in childbirth.
These weren’t acts of charity. They were survival.
Selfishness got you exiled. Hoarding got you ostracised. Violence within the group meant you were out. The evolutionary advantage went to people who could cooperate. Share. Read each other. Build trust. Care for the ones who couldn’t care for themselves.
Babies who bonded survived. Adults who shared thrived. Groups that helped each other outlasted the ones that didn’t.
This is what the archaeological record shows. This is what our bodies still carry, in our DNA, in our nervous systems, in the way we still instinctively reach toward each other when things fall apart.
We’re wired for connection. For mutual aid. For empathy.
So what the hell happened?
The 10,000 Year Wound
About 10,000 years ago, give or take, we started farming.
Sounds boring. Stay with me.
Because this is where the crack in humanity begins.
When we started farming, we stopped moving. Started accumulating surplus. Storing grain. Building permanent structures. And for the first time in 300,000 years, some people could own more than others.
Property was born.
A farmer closing his fist around grain. A guard tightening his hand on a spear. Someone saying “mine” and meaning it to exclude rather than share.
And with property came hierarchy. Someone had to guard the surplus. Someone had to decide who got access. Someone had to enforce the rules about who owned what.
Kings. Priests. Warriors. Bosses. The people with power and the people without it.
Your survival wasn’t about cooperation anymore. It was about obedience. Staying in your place. Not questioning the people who controlled the resources you needed to live.
Manufactured scarcity became the control mechanism.
There’s enough land, you just can’t use it. There’s enough food, you just haven’t earned it. There’s enough shelter, you just don’t have the right papers, the right skin colour, the right religion, the right last name.
And if you’re going to hoard resources while others starve, you need a story. A reason why you deserve abundance and they deserve nothing. You need them to be less than. Inferior. Dangerous. Unworthy.
Dehumanisation became necessary for the system to work.
And it’s been working for 10,000 years.
Slavery required Africans to be property, not people. Colonisation required Indigenous peoples to be savages, not sovereign nations. The Holocaust required Jews to be vermin, not neighbours. Apartheid required Black South Africans to be threats, not citizens.
And now genocide requires Palestinians to be terrorists, not teachers and bakers and kids with favourite songs and grandmothers with recipes they’ll never get to pass down.
The pattern is always the same:
Create an enemy. Dehumanise them. Make their elimination seem reasonable. Necessary. Even moral.
We’re very good at this by now. We’ve had 10,000 years of practice.
The Mechanism Broken Down
Here’s how it works in three steps:
Dehumanisation:
People turned into vermin, terrorists, illegals, animals. So killing them feels like pest control, not murder.
You see it happen in real time now. Watch the language shift. Palestinians go from “people” to “militants” to “human shields” to “animals” in the span of a press conference. Refugees become “illegals” become “invaders” become “infestations.”
Once the language changes, the killing becomes housekeeping.
Moral justification:
Every atrocity sold as prevention, preemption, defence, order, civilisation. They had to die so we could be safe.
The bombs fall on hospitals and we’re told they were storing weapons. On schools and we’re told they were command centres. On refugee camps and we’re told they were military installations. On children and we’re told they were tragic but unavoidable.
A spokesperson in a suit, clean and pressed, explains why a six-year-old bleeding out in rubble is regrettable but necessary. Then they take questions. Then they go home to their own children.
The press nods. Takes notes. Asks about the next topic.
Desensitisation:
Images of shattered bodies become background noise between ads and talking-head debates. We scroll past children in rubble the way we scroll past weather reports.
You see a dead child on your phone. You feel something. A flutter in your chest. Your throat tightens.
Then an ad for sneakers. Then a video of a cat. Then a political argument. Then another dead child. Then a recipe. Then a meme. Then another dead child.
Your chest doesn’t tighten anymore. Or it does, but quieter. Easier to ignore.
That’s the mechanism working.
Language does the heavy lifting.
Once you can say “human shields” instead of “we bombed a family,” once you can say “military-age males” instead of “teenage boys,” once you can say “collateral damage” instead of “we killed children”, you’ve already won.
The killing becomes technical. Strategic. Regrettable but necessary.
And people who might have revolted at “we’re exterminating a population” will nod along to “we’re ensuring security in the region.”
Same thing. Different words.
This is how ordinary people participate in genocide without seeing themselves as killers.
They just repeat the language. Share the talking points. Vote for the politicians who make it possible. Pay the taxes that buy the bombs. Go to work. Come home. Watch TV. Sleep fine.
They don’t pull triggers. They just make it easier for someone else to.
Who Breaks, Who Participates, Who Looks Away
Why some people can participate in genocide while others break watching it:
Trauma. Generations of it.
If you’re raised in systems that teach you some people are worth more than others, if you’re traumatised into believing scarcity is real and you have to fight for survival, if you’re conditioned to defer to authority and fear outsiders, cruelty becomes thinkable.
A German soldier in 1941, son of a father who fought in the first war, grandson of a man who fought the Franco-Prussian war, great-grandson of men who fought Napoleon. Four generations taught that following orders is virtue, that strength is everything, that losing is death. That soldier, standing at a mass grave, rifle in hand, didn’t get there by being evil. He got there by doing what his whole lineage taught him: obey, survive, dominate before you’re dominated.
Add propaganda. Add fear. Add permission from leaders you trust. Add language that turns victims into targets.
And suddenly ordinary people become capable of extraordinary harm.
Not because they’re monsters. Because the system prepared them for this. Because their trauma made them vulnerable. Because their grandparents were traumatised too and passed down fear dressed up as wisdom.
Why others can’t look away:
Different trauma. Different nervous system. Different luck.
Maybe someone in your lineage modelled compassion under pressure. Maybe you’ve been on the receiving end of dehumanisation. Maybe you got lucky, the right book at the right time, one teacher who taught you to question authority, a brain that didn’t get traumatised into compliance the same way.
A woman whose grandmother survived a pogrom and taught her: never be the one who looks away. A man whose uncle was “disappeared” by the regime and so he knows what silence costs. Someone whose wiring just won’t let them scroll past a child in rubble without their chest cracking open.
It’s not moral superiority. It’s circumstance and wiring and choice, all tangled up.
Why most people just look away:
Because trauma teaches us to shut down. To numb. To conserve energy for immediate threats.
When the world is overwhelming, when systems are too big to fight, when you feel powerless, dissociation becomes survival.
Your body knows you can’t save them. Your nervous system knows you can barely save yourself. So it does what it’s designed to do: it protects you from the weight of witnessing by turning down the dial on feeling.
That tightness in your chest gets quieter. The nausea gets manageable. The images become just images. Sad, yes. Tragic, yes. But you have rent to pay and kids to feed and your own problems and you can’t carry the weight of Gaza and Ukraine and Congo and Sudan and Yemen and and and,
Systems know this. They count on it.
They count on you being too tired to stay outraged. Too busy to organise. Too scared to speak up. Too convinced of your own powerlessness to believe your voice matters.
They flood you with information until you can’t process it. They present atrocity as complexity. They make you doubt your own eyes, your own gut, your own clear sense that what you’re witnessing is wrong.
Until one day you wake up and realise you’ve been watching people be exterminated and you barely flinched.
Some nights I stare at the ceiling and think maybe the world really is this cruel. Maybe giving up on humanity is just being realistic. Maybe the people who’ve stopped caring aren’t weak, maybe they’re just honest about what we are.
Then the thought scares me because it feels too easy. Like permission to stop trying. Like a door I could walk through and never come back from.
And I don’t know which is worse: that I might be wrong, or that I might be right.
But Here's What Breaks the Pattern
Even now. Even in the midst of this. Even with all the propaganda and systems and historical precedent for looking away,
People keep reaching toward each other.
The doctors who stay in bombed hospitals because their patients can’t leave. Performing surgery by candlelight after Israel bombed the power plant. Amputating limbs without anaesthesia because the medical supplies were in the pharmacy that got hit yesterday. A nurse in scrubs covered in dust and blood, hands shaking from exhaustion, still working. Still helping. Still human.
The absurdity of it: we have the technology to livestream their work, to watch them save lives in real time, and we also have the technology to manufacture and deliver the bombs that create the patients they’re treating. Same species. Same moment in history.
The journalists who keep reporting even when it costs them everything. Over 100 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza so far. Targeted. Their families targeted. Their homes destroyed. And still they report. Still they document. Still they bear witness because if no one records it, it didn’t happen. And if it didn’t happen, it’ll happen again.
The ordinary people filling the streets demanding ceasefire. Hundreds of thousands in London, Paris, New York, Melbourne. Blocking traffic. Shutting down train stations. Getting arrested. Losing jobs. Being called terrorist sympathisers for the radical position that maybe we shouldn’t be murdering children.
The aid workers who refuse to stop. Driving into war zones. Distributing food and water and medical supplies knowing full well they might not make it out. Some of them don’t. We know their names. We put them on lists. We call them heroes. Then we keep funding the bombs that kill them.
The families sharing their last food with neighbours. The strangers sending money, signing petitions, calling representatives, refusing to be complicit. The teachers explaining to students why this matters. The artists making work that forces you to see. The grandmothers who lived through other genocides saying “not again, not ever again” and meaning it this time.
A Palestinian doctor performing surgery by candlelight. A Jewish grandmother getting arrested at a protest because her parents taught her what “never again” actually means. A college kid who can’t afford rent but sends twenty dollars anyway. An old man who survived Cambodia teaching his grandchildren to recognise the pattern.
Mutual aid doesn’t make the news like bombs do.
But it’s there. It’s always there.
Humans helping humans, even when, especially when, the systems tell them not to.
This is also human nature.
It emerges not in spite of our evolutionary wiring, but because of it. Because cooperation is still in our bones. Because empathy is still our default setting, underneath all the trauma and conditioning and fear.
You see it every time disaster hits. Hurricane. Earthquake. Flood. The systems fail and people don’t wait for permission. They help. They share. They organise. They become the mutual aid their ancestors would recognise instantly.
After Katrina, it wasn’t FEMA that saved people. It was neighbours with boats. After the earthquake in Turkey, it was civilians digging through rubble with their bare hands. After every disaster, the same pattern: governments fail, people step in.
That wiring is still there.
Buried under 10,000 years of hierarchy, yes. Traumatised into dormancy, yes. Taught to fear each other, yes.
But not erased.
Never fully erased.
The Questions
So here we are.
Is this who we really are?
Both. We’re capable of extraordinary cruelty and extraordinary kindness. But the cruelty requires systems. Infrastructure. Permission structures. Propaganda.
The kindness emerges when systems fail. When we bypass them entirely.
Our original wiring, 290,000 years of it, says cooperation. Says we survive together.
The last 10,000 years of hierarchy says domination. Says scarcity. Says kill or be killed.
Both are real. But one is older. One is what our bodies still know.
Is this who we have become?
If this is what we tolerate, then yes.
We’ve been traumatised into numbness. Conditioned into compliance. Taught that this, all this cruelty and hierarchy and manufactured scarcity, is just how things are.
We’ve become people who can know the stages of genocide by heart and still watch them play out in real time without intervening.
But trauma isn’t identity. Conditioning isn’t destiny.
Will this change?
I don’t know. You don’t know. No one does.
Systems built on domination and manufactured scarcity always collapse eventually. They have to. They’re not sustainable. They’re not aligned with how humans actually thrive.
The question is whether they collapse before they destroy everything. Whether we choose something different before it’s too late.
That’s not a question anyone can answer alone.
Will we return to helping each other?
Some of us never stopped.
Look for them. They’re everywhere. Doctors and teachers and organisers and ordinary people who just show up. Who refuse to look away. Who insist on connection even when systems demand separation.
They’re not special. They’re just humans doing what humans do when we remember what we actually are.
The return isn’t coming from somewhere else. It’s not a rescue or a revolution or a single transformative moment.
It’s happening in every small act of defiance against dehumanisation. Every time someone chooses connection over compliance. Every time we help each other without asking permission.
It’s happening every time you refuse to look away. Every time your body breaks open at the suffering of strangers and you let that breaking matter.
Because that’s your 290,000 years of wiring telling you the truth:
We’re not meant to be separate. We’re not meant to hoard while others starve. We’re not meant to watch each other die.
We’re meant to help.
And maybe, maybe, if enough of us remember that, we can build something that looks less like the last 10,000 years and more like the 290,000 before.
Not perfect. Not utopia.
But human. Actually human.
In all the ways we were before we forgot.
Your coffee’s cold. The scum on the surface has thickened. Your shoulders are still up by your ears. Your jaw still hurts.
The screen is still glowing.
Gaza is still burning. Ukraine is still bleeding. Congo is still being torn apart. Sudan. Yemen. Rohingya. Uyghurs. The list doesn’t stop. It never stops.
You could close this tab. You probably will. You have to, you can’t function like this, chest cracked open, grief pouring in, your whole body screaming that something is wrong while the rest of the world keeps turning.
That’s not weakness. That’s how they designed it.
But here’s the thing your body knows that the systems don’t want you to remember:
The question isn’t whether you’re capable of looking away, you already know you are. We all are. That’s not what makes you human or not human.
The question is whether you’re willing to let that be the only answer. Whether the part of you that still breaks at the sight of children under rubble gets to matter more than your fear of what mattering might cost. Whether your 290,000 years of wiring gets to speak louder than 10,000 years of systems designed to make you complicit.
You can feel it in your body right now. That fracture. That crack. That place where the horror gets in and you can’t seal it back up no matter how hard you try.
That’s not the sickness.
That’s the cure trying to work.
The only question that matters now is whether you let it.
