Evil arises out of complacency

 I was going to post this on Facebook and still might, but I think my blog a more apposite home.

 
Evil arises out of complacency, which is why it oftentimes only becomes obvious in hindsight, especially by those who were involved. Also, anyone can commit evil, given the circumstances, despite what we tell ourselves. When it becomes a social norm, it’s the person who resists who becomes the exception. And that’s the key to it all – it becomes normalised and we rationalise it because the subject obviously deserves it, and the perpetrator is on the side of Right (with a capital R).
 
We are witnessing its emergence in various parts of the world right now: specifically, Ukraine, Gaza and America. In the case of Ukraine, the perpetrator is Russia, who is not on ‘our side’, so it’s easy to call out. But in the case of Gaza and America, the perpetrators are traditionally our allies, so there is a tendency to turn a blind eye, and certainly not to create waves. Israel has weaponised famine in a most iniquitous fashion, because they control the aid, and even the aid is used as a weapon and a coverup for genocide and ethnic cleansing, as called out by Francesca Albanese (United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories).
 
In America, people are being ‘disappeared’ off the street, which is so unbelievable that the Administration has got away with it (this obviously doesn’t happen in the epitomised free world; you must have imagined it). In both of these cases, the actions have become normalised to the point that any negative response is but a murmur. You might ask: are these acts evil? Well, genocide is usually considered a war crime, but apparently not when Israel is the aggressor. Israel knows how to leverage the West’s collective guilty conscience for the pogroms of the 20th Century. And disappearing someone might not be considered evil until it happens to a family member – that may change your perspective.
 
At the very least, Netanyahu and Trump both have cruel streaks in their psyche (as does Putin, obviously), and both of them exploit the hate felt and expressed towards outsiders and both have normalised activities that not so long ago would have been morally unacceptable. History may judge things differently.