When we watch archival footage of the Holocaust, it is easy to claim we would have stood on the right side of history. We shake our heads, repeat “never again,” and assure ourselves that we would have spoken out if we were in Germany. Even if dangerous, even if the sentiment unpopular, even if it cost us our jobs or our lives, we surely would never have looked the other way on atrocities of genocide.

Yet right now, history is actively repeating itself while millions of people choose to look the other way. We scroll past mass execution footage to look at vacation photos and change the subject at dinner tables to avoid being “political”. We hide behind the excuse of feeling “overwhelmed” while human beings are being slaughtered and tortured.

We talk a lot about “never again,” but bystander apathy is happening in real time. It’s easy to look at the sheer scale of the destruction and feel completely helpless, assuming someone higher up (a government, an institution, a world leader, a famous musician) will step in and fix it. But when millions of people make that same assumption, inaction becomes the default.

Instead, we sit in our comfortable privilege (because let’s be very for real, unless you are reading this newsletter from the rubble of a warzone, you are extremely privileged in this topic) and treat mass human extermination like background noise, waiting for someone else to step in so we don’t have to break our own comfort.

This isn’t just passive news watching; it is an active, cowardly indifference, and it makes every single person who looks away complicit in the violence. Because the danger isn’t just silence; it’s the moment we let our outrage turn into habituation, and start scrolling past human suffering like it’s an unwanted recipe video.

In Gaza, over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, with thousands more buried beneath millions of tons of rubble. Entire generational bloodlines have been wiped off the civil registry in a matter of months. Neighborhoods, hospitals, universities, and refugee camps have been reduced to ash.

Survivors are subjected to engineered starvation, forced displacement into designated “safe zones” that are subsequently bombed, and the collapse of basic medical care, where amputations on children are performed without anesthesia.

​

In the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, decades of resource extraction fueling our global technology supply chains have left millions dead and displaced over 7 million people.

Militias and armed forces systematically use gang rape and extreme physical mutilation as cheap, effective weapons of war to clear land and subjugate entire populations. Women and young girls are subjected to unspeakable horrors, tortured, and murdered, while infants and unborn children are brutally executed in front of their families.

Today, I read a report of militia pulling the unborn baby out of a Congolese woman’s body and raping the bleeding wound while murdering the infant in front of her and cheering.

These are not abstract geopolitical conflicts or distant headlines. They are deliberate, horrific acts of violence happening to real people right now; these are human beings, no different than you, being mutilated and destroyed for profit.

Ignoring these atrocities because they are uncomfortable to think about, or to see, is a privilege that the victims do not have. Softening the truth into sanitized terminology only shields us from our own moral complicity. Denying genocide so we don’t have to critically think about our leaders, or our faith, or our privilege is a sin worse than murder.

If “never again” only applies after the mass graves are filled, it means nothing. We cannot turn away, we cannot scroll past, and we must demand an immediate end to the destruction of human life. We must demand accountability for those who use their platforms, celebrity, and position of power to deny truth.