ISIS has done the world one favor, and one favor only.

Favor, you say? Are you mad? What sort of favor could ISIS be doing anyone?

That favor is to make more people believe that evil exists.

One would think 9/11 would have done it. And for many it did. One would have thought the beheading of Daniel Pearl would have done it. And for many it did. But something about ISIS and its atrocities and the scope of its victims, combined with its bloodthirsty reveling in its own mayhem, has silenced (for the moment; I certainly don’t think it’s permanent) a great many of those inclined to make excuses or offer rational explanations. Nor is anyone but those on the fringes denying that this is happening; the videos ISIS has released have seen to that.

Not that this realization will necessarily lead to truly effective action on the part of the West. So far it hasn’t, although it did seem to help the Yazidis on the mountain. It’s hard to imagine that the West will find its spine again, and even if it does the problem is much, much bigger than ISIS and will require a more concerted, sustained, and widespread effort than any country or group of countries seems to have the stomach for.

But the first step is recognizing evil when you see it.

World War II was an interesting case. The Nazis and the Axis powers were seen as evil, and an enormous number of countries united to fight them in an all-out war of the sort that might be mentally/emotionally impossible today. But the details of the evil regarding the Holocaust were minimized and/or even denied until after the war, when the evidence became irrefutable.* Why?

The Nazis were very different from ISIS in that they did not brag about their atrocities. They were “civilized” enough to hide them and perpetrate deceptions around them. Some of the motivation for that was to fool people, including their victims, into cooperating. But some was to lull the world into inaction. The Nazis knew that people find the worst difficult to believe, and they were counting on that. In fact, they often taunted their concentration camp victims by saying that if any happened to survive, the world would not believe their tales.

That brings me to Jan Karski. Karski was a hero of the WWII years, a Polish officer whose life had many twistings and turnings and stupendous bravery, and included action as a major figure in the Resistance. It fell to Karski (who was Catholic, but had been brought up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Poland) to document the Holocaust and to personally inform the Brits and FDR and other influential Americans about it as early as 1943. To say that their reaction was disappointing is to understate the matter.

Scott Johnson recently published a post at Powerline about Karski and his heroism, featuring some of Karski’s interviews. Watching them, I was struck by Karski’s demeanor. He just may be one of the most intense and yet controlled people I’ve ever seen, without being bombastic or loud. Even though he is speaking many decades after the events, he remains outraged at the responses he got.

There are videos of him discussing Roosevelt, too, but this is the one in which he talks about the reaction of Felix Frankfurter to his tale:

Frankfurter’s reaction sounded simple: “I don’t believe you.” But it was anything but. As Karski goes on to explain, “Probably he wanted to show me, yes, that the world is unprepared. This is an unprecedented problem, this is a horrible problem.” In other words, Frankfurter felt both overwhelmed and impotent, and in simultaneous denial and awareness of the horror of it all.

Was the Holocaust actually “unprecedented”? In the modern world, it seems to have been. Not that there hadn’t been problems something like it (the Armenians and Turks, to take just one example). But bad as that was, the Holocaust differed in style and especially in scope. The destruction of the Armenians was localized, but this was European-wide, and it was perpetrated by one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced, European nation on earth, a country that was simultaneously trying to conquer the Western world.

I’m not excusing Frankfurter’s reaction. But I think light can be shed on it by the following passage written by Arthur Koestler, which I’ve discussed in a previous post. Koestler was one of the people with whom Karski met (in 1943), and he joined the cause of spreading the word. Koestler wrote this passage in 1944 as part of an essay entitled “On Disbelieving Atrocities” (it appeared in the Sunday NY Times Magazine) about how difficult it was to energize others to do something about the horrors. I think that here Koestler is describing some profound truths about human nature:

There is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark, and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past, laughing and chatting. I know that a great many people share, with individual variations, the same type of dream. I have quarrelled about it with analysts and I believe it to be an archtype in the Jungian sense: an expression of the individual’s ultimate loneliness when faced with death and cosmic violence; and his inability to communicate the unique horror of his experience. I further believe that it is the root of the ineffectiveness of our atrocity propaganda. For, after all, you are the crowd who walk past laughing on the road; and there are a few of us, escaped victims or eyewitnesses of the things which happen in the thicket and who, haunted by our memories, go on screaming on the wireless, yelling at you in newspapers and in public meetings, theatres and cinemas. Now and then we succeed in reaching your ear for a minute. I know it each time it happens by a certain dumb wonder on your faces, a faint glassy stare entering your eye, and I tell myself: now you have got them, now hold them, hold them, so that they will remain awake. But it only lasts a minute. You shake yourself like puppies who have got their fur wet; then the transparent screen descends again and you walk on, protected by the dream barrier which stifles all sound. We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic van der Lubbe set fire to the German Parliament; we said that if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial [Koestler seems to have been unaware of the gassing method that had come to be used most often by that time] of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. he told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it. As to this country [Koestler was referring to Britain, where he was living at the time and writing for the war effort], I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belsen; you can convince them for an hour, they they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas you others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would be alive.

In that earlier post, I wrote:

Why is it so difficult to hear the screaming? Much of it is self-protective: if we paid attention to all the pain and suffering in the world, we’d be paralyzed by empathy and unable to enjoy our own lives. What’s more, there’s often a sense of powerlessness to change things.

However, despite the denial, during World War II we were already dedicated to the all-out war against the Nazis. That was the excuse FDR and others gave: that the continuance of that fight was our most effective response. Now we are not willing to commit to that sort of huge effort, despite our lack of the ability to deny the evil that is happening before our eyes. We are not powerless, and we are not in denial, but we are unwilling to unleash the power we have. And it is understandable, as long as the horror continues to stay away from our shores. I don’t think it’s any accident that the US has experienced no widespread terrorist attack in the nature of 9/11 since that date. The giant isn’t sleeping, but it’s taking a light nap, and the terrorists want to keep it that way.

*[NOTE: Some, of course, continue to deny the Holocaust to this day. But for the most part they have a very different, and far more pernicious, agenda than those who ignored or denied it during the war itself.]