anberra
As someone born after World War II who grew up in India, I have always wondered how it was possible for a highly civilized society like Germany to have been complicit through silence in the horror of the Holocaust. It simply wasn't possible for people not to have known what was being done to the Jews on an industrial scale, and that too in their name.
For the first time, as an Australian, I begin to get glimmers of understanding. The Australian government has subjected people fleeing persecution to acts of torture and unspeakable depravity, all in the name of protecting us from invading hordes of illegal immigrants, and we avert our eyes from the accumulating mass of incontrovertible evidence and pretend all is well. Obviously, there is no moral equivalence between the industrial-scale systematic slaughter of several million Jews and the few hundred asylum seekers incarcerated, however brutally, on a neighboring island. Rather, my point is to emphasize how ordinary decent people can allow inhumanity to be inflicted by refusing to see what is before their eyes.