Peter Malkin, an Israeli intelligence officer in the Mossad, played a pivotal role in capturing Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal. Eichmann had been living under the alias Ricardo Klement in Argentina, a country known as a refuge for Nazi sympathisers and notorious fugitives such as Josef Mengele and Erich Priebke. In 1960, following a daring operation, Mossad captured Eichmann from the suburbs of Buenos Aires and brought him to Israel to face justice.
During Eichmann’s interrogation, he spoke about his family and expressed deep affection for his sons. However, when Malkin confronted him by mentioning his blue-eyed nephew, along with the millions of Jewish children who were herded into gas chambers and denied the dignity of remembrance, Eichmann responded with chilling indifference. With an impassioned look, he asked, “But he was Jewish, wasn’t he?” It exemplified the callous disregard for Jewish lives, treating them as “Untermensch” (subhumans).
Ironically, Israel invokes the horrors of the Holocaust to sanitise the ongoing dehumanisation of Palestinians in Gaza. With more than 75,000 reported dead, including 20,000 children, vast swaths of the territory lie in ruins. Hospitals and universities have been pulverised, water and electricity systems cut off, and humanitarian aid repeatedly delayed or obstructed. As access narrows, hunger and disease deepen among a trapped civilian population.
What we are witnessing in Gaza is no longer a military campaign; it is a humanitarian crisis that raises urgent questions about proportionality and civilian protection; a test to international law and the world’s conscience. Western democracies— particularly the United States, the United Kingdom, and several countries in the European Union—have continued military and diplomatic support for Israel while urging restraint; a dual posture that exposes the hypocrisy of their professed commitment to human rights.
Human history is a kaleidoscope of civilizational drama—wars, victories, defeats—but beneath the headlines lies our collective past, marked by the moral choices societies have made—and, often, by their profound moral failures. The twentieth century, in particular, is marked by staggering human suffering: from Hitler’s death camps to Rwanda’s machete-scarred fields, from mass graves in Srebrenica and Darfur to the plight of the Rohingya Muslims and the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Yemen. Across these tragedies, a troubling pattern emerges: selective moral outrage. Democracies that proclaim universal values have repeatedly subordinated humanitarian imperatives to strategic self-interest, responding inconsistently to injustice abroad—and increasingly, within their own borders.
The Holocaust offers a sobering illustration of moral indifference. In 1942, as millions of Jews were being exterminated, Allied governments and Western journalists received detailed reports of the atrocities. Yet responses—particularly from the U.S. and Canada—were subordinated to political expediency and strategic concerns. Restrictive immigration quotas and limited refugee policies exacerbated the humanitarian disaster. One of the most poignant examples of this failure is the fate of the MS St. Louis. Carrying more than 900 Jewish families fleeing persecution after Kristallnacht, the ship was denied entry to Cuba, the United States, and Canada. Its infamous “voyage of the damned” continues to serve as a haunting reminder of the world’s refusal to provide sanctuary to those in dire need, symbolising the tragic consequences of “moral disengagement,” a term coined by the Canadian-American social psychologist Albert Bandura.
The cold reception the MS St. Louis received was not an isolated incident. It reflected broader, hostile immigration policies. The actions of Frederick Blair, a senior Canadian immigration official and an outspoken opponent of Jewish immigration, epitomised this attitude with his contemptuous declaration: “None is too many.” These policies, and the attitudes that underpinned them, echo through time, as contemporary immigration stances in the United States and Europe sometimes reflect similar patterns of exclusion and disregard for those fleeing persecution.
The horrors of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka didn’t address the moral disengagement of global communities in the midst of human suffering, even after the establishment of the United Nations aimed at promoting global peace. A counterargument notes that the U.S. relaxed immigration policies in 1944, allowing tens of thousands of Jews to enter, but it was too late to undo entrenched antisemitism. A stitch in time could have saved nine.
The phenomenon of selective outrage and moral distancing was glaringly manifest half a century later in Rwanda, when 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were brutally slaughtered in a span of 100 days. Nevertheless, the response from Western democracies was alarmingly muted. The United States, under President Bill Clinton, along with other Western powers, minimised the gravity of the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe and delayed categorising it as genocide.
Despite credible reports of mass killings, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) was intentionally downsized, rather than reinforced. The reluctance to label the crisis as genocide stemmed from concerns that such recognition would trigger legal obligations for intervention under the Genocide Convention. This hesitancy reflected broader geopolitical calculations, as the conflict between two ethnic groups in an impoverished African nation did not represent the same geostrategic leverage or economic interests as crises in countries with abundant natural resources, especially “black gold,” such as Iraq, Venezuela, or Libya.
Hannah Arendt, one of the influential political philosophers of the twentieth century, coined the phrase “banality of evil” for the thoughtlessness that precedes inhuman actions. She witnessed the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem and expected a cold and unsympathetic monster in the dock, but was startled to see an ordinary man, “terrifyingly normal,” bureaucratic and career-driven, who was simply following orders. Though later research proved that Eichmann was indeed fanatically antisemitic, Hannah’s phrase has become a byword for ordinary people who participate in oppressive systems, devoid of forethought and remorse.
While Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” captured the terrifying normality with which ordinary functionaries enabled extraordinary crimes, a different phenomenon confronts the world today: the banality of indifference. It is less about thoughtlessness than calculation—a deliberate restraint shaped by alliances, arms contracts and strategic convenience. Nowhere is this clearer than in Yemen and Sudan, where years of civil war have displaced millions and pushed entire populations toward famine.
Despite the scale of these humanitarian crises, international attention on these nations is dismal, and the media visibility gap is stark. Western democratic nations, mindful of their broader alliances and unwilling to jeopardise relationships in the Gulf, maintain a cautious distance. ‘Geopolitical complexity’ is cited as context, but it often doubles as cover. Governments that pontificate about universal rights tend to find their urgency only when their own security, trade routes, or strategic interests are on the line.
Many Western countries profit from arms deals with warring parties, and this financial entanglement makes it politically and economically risky for these governments to criticise these wars strongly. Conflicts in Yemen and Sudan receive little global attention compared to high-profile crises in Ukraine and Gaza. The plight of victims in Yemen and Sudan is marginalised, viewed as peripheral to prevailing international narratives. Western democracies focus mainly on securing Red Sea shipping lanes and managing regional instability rather than humanitarian needs or justice. This selective approach highlights an institutional realism that values strategic interests over moral responsibility.
When the global population is repeatedly exposed to such glaring hypocrisies and expanding human suffering, a sense of apathy inevitably takes hold. American psychologist Paul Slovic describes this phenomenon as “psychic numbing,” wherein the emotional impact of tragedy diminishes as the scale of victimisation increases. If one victim moves humanity, one million becomes abstract and detached.
The recent carnage in Gaza offers an agonising testimony of this numbing effect. Humanity was initially shaken by the brutality inflicted upon innocent civilians during the Israeli offensive. However, as the violence spiralled, the tragedy gradually faded into mere statistics, with casualties reduced to numbers rather than individual lives. The Israeli administration’s relentless actions against civilians appear increasingly arbitrary, contributing to a troubling normalisation of death and devastation.
This normalisation is hauntingly reminiscent of the “balcony scene” in Steven Spielberg’s classic film Schindler’s List. In that chilling moment, Amon Göth stands on his balcony—calm, bored and detached—and casually shoots Jewish prisoners at random in the Plaszów concentration camp. The horror lies not just in the dispassionate violence itself, but in its ordinariness. Such institutional horror is often rationalised through the deceptive use of “Hasbara,” a form of narrative diplomacy that seeks to clarify and explain away horrendous acts.
The growing moral disengagement and emotional detachment from human suffering finds resonance in British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of “Liquid Modernity.” He argues that the stable institutions, durable identities, and long-term commitments of “solid” modernity have dissolved into flux, flexible identities, weakened collectivism, crank materialism, and short-term moral obligations.
Morally, this produces shifting codes, privatised responsibility, and fleeting obligation. Suffering becomes spectacle—compressed onto television screens and social media feeds, competing with entertainment, advertising, and distraction. Outrage is reduced to likes, hashtags, and perhaps a token donation before fading into obscurity. Social media deepens the malaise, breeding hostility, insulating users within echo chambers and filter bubbles, and accelerating the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.
Democratic governments frequently avoid policy initiatives that might jeopardise or alienate their voter base. A notable example is President Donald Trump’s decision to impose deep funding cuts to USAID. Operating under the banner of “America First,” Trump issued an executive order that cut funding for 90 per cent of development aid programs. The humanitarian consequences of this move are far-reaching, disproportionately impacting regions already facing deprivation and existential crisis.
Across Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Afghanistan, and Sub-Saharan Africa, millions relied on USAID for food, vaccines, and basic healthcare. With a single stroke of the pen, longstanding citadels of altruistic care were dismantled, deepening vulnerability and suffering. Cloaked in populist resolve, the US administration is unleashing senseless cruelty.
More dangerous still is the tribal morality that condones reprehensible acts when they align with ideological loyalties. In India, violence against minorities—from cow lynchings, Romeo squads, forced displacement to social exclusion—is often carried out by Hindutva extremists with tacit political indulgence. When such abuses rarely dominate headlines or prime-time debates, the dehumanisation of entire communities quietly becomes normalised.
Similar patterns can be observed in other countries. For example, the aggressive enforcement carried out by ICE agents in the United States, often disregarding humanitarian concerns, highlights this troubling trend. One notable incident involved a 56-year-old US citizen, dressed only in shorts and a blanket, who was forcibly removed from his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, during freezing temperatures in handcuffs. Although the event prompted condemnation, responses from the MAGA movement were conspicuously subdued. This reflects a broader issue: democratic backsliding and the erosion of human rights are not a priority for the white nativist MAGA community, whose vision is rooted in the resurgence of white supremacy.
This mirrors the ethnonationalist fervour of Hindu majoritarian fundamentalists, who aspire to revive the perceived glory of Hinduism. The widely celebrated narrative of a “glorious Hindu past” is also afflicted with selective amnesia—the fact that this era was marked by the systematic marginalisation and ostracisation of a significant portion of the population for over two millennia in the name of mythical caste hierarchies.
History will be remembered not by welfare policies and legislative milestones but by who was dragged, detained, displaced, and who looked away. The most dangerous moment for any democracy is not when cruelty is declared, but when it is proceduralized; not when injustice is celebrated, but when it is rationalised. The banality of indifference is the quiet surrender of moral imagination. Elie Wiesel, the holocaust survivor and champion of human rights, encapsulates it in his immortal words:
The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
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