WHEN PEOPLE LOOK AWAY

 

If the leaders of a country paid their own military to rape and torture innocent civilians to death, what would we normally do when we caught them? Caught them alive? The answer is straightforward enough. They would face a war crimes tribunal. At the very least.

Picture the orders themselves. Hire your forces to rape men and women, film the act, then skin the victims alive while they scream for mercy. Film the beheadings too. Not of soldiers their own age, but of women, babies and other non-combatants. The videos exist. Many people have been fortunate enough never to see them. That is a genuine luxury. Yet they are real, they keep being produced, and the people who make them regard ordinary Western viewers as ideal material for the next one.

At this point a certain mental switch often clicks into place. The viewer tells himself “this isn’t real” and looks away. Fair enough. There is little point continuing if that is the chosen response.

For those who refuse that comfort, the next question is harder. What do we normally do with the people who issue such orders? We put them on trial. Conviction usually follows, and they are removed from society for the remainder of their lives. One might reasonably suppose the matter is then settled. After all, we possess the machinery. The United Nations, the Hague and various other bodies exist precisely for this purpose.

The difficulty arises when those same bodies fall within the reach of the perpetrators. How does one deal with evil that has already begun to capture, pollute and pervert the very instruments designed to restrain it? What happens when the infection reaches the ruling levels of organisations such as the UN itself? What happens when the high officials of that body formally assign seats on human rights committees to the very people who ordered the crimes described above?

Where does that leave us as a civilisation? Are we still secure when the institutions meant to protect the innocent are openly compromised in this way? And what of the individual reader? Has any of this touched you? Compare the worldview you hold today with the one you held ten years ago. Has it shifted? Have you found yourself, even once, lending support in argument to the justifications advanced by those who defend such wickedness? Have you caught yourself inventing excuses for the crimes when the evidence was placed before you? What would your earlier self have said upon hearing anyone defend these things a decade ago? What exactly has changed?

Ask the question once more. Have you been altered, even slightly, by this quiet infestation of our common life? Have internet fashions and the pressure of the crowd been allowed to reshape what you once knew to be true?