We’ve spent over six decades trying to convince ourselves that the rise of the Third Reich and the resulting WWII was a perfect storm due to unique conditions that could only happen once. That the next time, we’d know better and Nazis and fascists would never be allowed to rise to power again. Well guess what? Perfect storms do happen more than once.
Ordinary, banal evil flared to the most profound evil humans are capable of back in the 1930s, and ordinary, banal evil people are perfectly comfortable going back there right now. Why should we be surprised that they will recoil at no evil actions? They didn’t then, they don’t now. What should surprise us is that the rest of us–the people who don’t plan on any cruelties and don’t deny the full humanity of refugees, or trans persons, or immigrants, or people of colour, or women–tolerate the banal evil and normalise it and allow it to be part of the common discourse.
The Reef 