Editor's Notes: Never Underestimate the Human Capacity for Earnest Cruelty

Over the weekend we republished a section of the popular 19th-century abolitionist book American Slavery As It Is, by Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké. In that section, they respond to a criticism of depictions of slavery that was common at the time: that what was depicted was so awful, so inhumane, that they could not possibly be true.

This is echoed in the reactions to Nicholas Kristof's report on the abuses faced by Palestinians in Israeli detention. David Frum provides an instructive example, referring to it as "blood libel" and treating many of the claims as unique. For example, the claim that a dog was used to rape one prisoner is characterized as another case of characterizing "Jews as simultaneously uniquely cunning and uniquely disgusting."

Of course, as Nathan Goldwag points out, there's nothing at all unique about any of the accusations. Under Pinochet in Chile, for example, there was a "relatively-well documented use of dogs to rape prisoners by at least one Chilean police major."

In general we suffer from both an unwillingness to believe the worst about what our own society and that of our allies are capable of, and a simple lack of perspective of just how deep the recesses of human cruelty are. Of the Holocaust, we say "never again," and yet it and equivalently as horrifying have happened again, and again, and again, in the four-fifths of a century that have elapsed since that infamous atrocity.

There are scores of atrocities most citizens of wealthy countries are not even aware of. Indeed most are hardly aware of just how bad the atrocities they are aware of could get. This leaves people unwilling to credit reports of just how bad things already are here in America, as we lurch towards the midpoint of the second Trump term.

This is an oversight we ought to correct.