It’s also based on this false mythology that the US (and I’m sure other countries) have crafted around their involvement in World War 2. There’s this popular notion based on the idea where “if we simply knew what was going on we would have stepped in sooner, and all the atrocities that were occurring were simply too hidden from the public view for us to do anything about until it was too late!” And the logic that follows from that mythology is that if we want to stop atrocities like the Holocaust from happening again we have to take every accusation seriously, because brushing it off could risk another Holocaust happening under our noses without us knowing about it! And this allows atrocity propaganda to get away with providing shockingly little evidence to support its accusations, because not meeting an appropriate burden of proof can just be explained away by the “clandestine” nature of genocide. That it’s all happening behind closed doors, hidden away from the public. The proof of conspiracy is locked away in secret archives, but a collection of anecdotes is all you should need! If you don’t believe the first hand accounts we are publishing about our targets enemy states, then you’re going to allow another Holocaust to happen!

But this understanding of genocide is completely ahistorical. Genocide does not happen in quiet, behind closed doors. Most people are actually quite opposed to their neighbors being discriminated against and eventually either run out of their homes or murdered, and most attempts to do so at any kind of scale would be met with social backlash and resistance. To get a society to the point where even the early stages of genocide are possible, you need to whip up segments of the population into a bloodthirst fervor. You need to agitate in public with loud speakers and megaphones, rallying people against the “subhuman removed” who are weighing like a cancer on the moral and righteous citizenry who is beset by a plague of undesirables. You need to boldly proclaim what your agenda is, and whip up enough of a critical mass of supporters to your cause that protesting against it becomes dangerous and risky because violent fascists will meet you in the streets to oppose those protests. Only then is it even logistically feasible to carry out even the initial stages of a genocide, and the entire process up to that point was required to be incredibly public. And at every stage afterwards genocide leaves behind incredibly damning evidence that incredibly apparent even on a cursory investigation. Starting with the mass refuge crisis that inevitably occurs as people attempt to flee from a campaign of mass persecution, down to the massive logistical networks required to carry out a campaign of mass death in the final stages.

The Holocaust did not happen in secret, it was well understood what was going on even with the standards of reporting and intelligence gathering of the times. This idea that we simply didn’t know comes from a desire to whitewash how complicit our country was with the Nazi regime. There was no debate on if the Holocaust was happening, we had transcripts of Hitler’s speeches and translations of the things he published, we had reports on the nazi rallies and the speeches given there, we had boats filled with refugees begging for asylum that were turned away from our doorstep. The public debate at the time was not, “Well gosh, we would certainly intervene if we knew what was going on, but the evidence is just so wishy-washy and we don’t want to be rash and jump to conclusions.” Instead, the debate was around whether or not eugenics and ethnic cleansing was good, with a significant portion of the public whole-heartedly endorsing Hitler’s policies and actions. Especially in the Jim Crow south and in other places of the country where the eugenics movement had a strong foothold and significant political sway due in part to endowments from organizations like the Rockefeller foundation and the Carnegie Institute who promoted Eugenics and race science as legitimate fields of academic study which you could get a degree in from American Universities as part of their mission to fund education. In fact, Hitler cites the American Eugenics Movement directly in Mein Kampf, crediting it with giving him the the “scientific basis” for nazi race laws like the Nuremberg codes. And of course, American corporations gave tremendous economic support, and those corporations had major business and financial interests tied up with supporting the nazis.

America was not unaware, America was complicit. Many of the policies implemented by Hitler are things that the American Eugenics movement had been trying to either pass into law or expand into other parts of the country for years. Many of the race laws in Jim Crow states were even harsher than what could be found in the Nuremberg codes, and eugenicist policies of forced sterilization had even started becoming state law in places like California. This idea that we simply didn’t know better is a comforting thought that allows people to pretend their country was the good guys, and they would have stepped off the sidelines sooner had we simply known better. And now we must remain hypervigilant for the slightest hint of impropriety.

And propaganda about Soviet states and other socialist projects fits this worldview quite well. This style of propaganda is full of stories about doublethink and brainwashing the public so that they don’t question the party while a secret conspiracy goes on under their noses as people are disappeared in secret.

In reality what a real ongoing genocide looks like is what is happening on the southern US border. Sure, reporters are often denied access to the inside of the migrant detention facilities on the border and other internment style camps, so some specific details about the process are somewhat obscured from public view. But the actual facts of what is occurring on the border is not the subject of public debate. Everyone knows that migrants are being locked up, families are being separated, women are being forcibly sterilized in these facilities against their consent, migrants are being horribly mistreated to the point of torture, adequate nutrition and health care is often not available to the people being detained resulting in many deaths. The public debate around this issue is not centered around what is happening in these facilities, it’s centered around whether the people being locked up and horrifically mistreated deserve it. With one side of that debate enthusiastically endorsing that cruelty, whipped up into a vitriolic fervor fueled by a constant stream of hate media broadcast by Fox News and various other tv, radio, and internet based hate media outlets. One side of that debate is celebrating how the illegals who are a plight and a burden on the good, hard-working American patriots are getting what’s coming to them, and that it serves them right for trying to come here and drag down the country. One side is claiming that Mexico is sending over their rapists, their drug dealers, and their murders, that these people are subhuman criminal scum, and that anyone who opposes these detention facilities are enemies of Law and Order and are traitors to this country and are traitors to all the true patriots who defend our borders.

You don’t have to dig beneath the surface to uncover some secret hidden conspiracy. Genocide is very loud and very public because it needs to be. It needs the consent and support of at least some portion of the public to be carried out, it needs these policies to be contentious so that the public fights among itself and resistance is difficult to organize.

When these libs raise concerns about being a genocide denier/apologist it comes from this idea that genocide is this secretive act, and if we don’t take even the most flimsy accusations seriously we risk being complicit in another atrocity. That the consequences of not taking accusations of genocide seriously are just too horrific to think about, and anyone who doesn’t feel the same way must themselves be complicit. But what this train of thought misses is that the consequences for supporting unfounded accusations is equally disastrously, and to illustrate that point we have decades of brutally interventionist US foreign policy which has repeatedly fabricated atrocity propaganda to manufacture consent for the slaughter of millions at the hands of a globe spanning military empire, with even more deaths being caused by countries under US sanctions being starved of resources as an act of non-combatant warfare. A false positive is just as disastrous as a false negative. But when you actually study history and understand the reasonable burden of proof you would expect investigators and reporters to be able to meet, you can feel more comfortable raising the standards of evidence you’re willing to accept to substantiate accusations of atrocity instead of naively buying into every accusation that you’re presented with and find yourself unwittingly in support of horrific foreign policy and militarism again and again and again.