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Every atrocity begins long before the first act of violence. It begins in the mind - in the quiet, almost invisible shift that allows one group to see another as less than fully human. Once that shift takes hold, the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and the thinkable becomes routine.
Auschwitz is often treated as an aberration, a singular eruption of evil. But the truth is far more unsettling. Auschwitz was not a departure from human history; it was an expression of it. The camp’s gates, its barracks, its gas chambers, its meticulous record‑keeping — all of it was built on a foundation that had been laid over centuries: the systematic stripping of personhood.
The Nazis did not begin with murder. They began with language.
They called Jews untermenschen - subhumans. They described Roma as vermin, disabled people as burdens, gay people as degenerates, Slavs as inferior stock. These words were not mere insults. They were tools. They created distance. They made empathy feel misplaced. They made cruelty feel rational. They made violence feel like hygiene.
Once a population is framed as a problem, a threat, or a contaminant, the moral imagination collapses. The victims become abstractions. Their suffering becomes irrelevant. Their deaths become logistics.
This is the machinery of dehumanisation: a cultural, linguistic, and psychological process that prepares ordinary people to participate in extraordinary harm.
It is tempting to believe that the perpetrators of genocide are monsters - aberrant individuals with uniquely cruel dispositions. But history tells a different story. The architects of mass violence are rarely sadists. They are bureaucrats, soldiers, neighbours, teachers, parents. They are people who have absorbed a worldview in which the victims simply do not count.
The most chilling truth about Auschwitz is not that it happened, but that it was made possible by millions of small, ordinary acts of compliance. People who would never have considered themselves violent contributed to a system that industrialised death. They followed orders. They repeated slogans. They accepted propaganda. They looked away.
This is not a uniquely German phenomenon. It is a human one.
The same psychological mechanisms appear in every genocide, every system of slavery, every colonial conquest. Before the violence comes the story - the narrative that divides the world into “us” and “them,” into persons and non‑persons. Once that division is accepted, the rest follows with terrifying ease.
Dehumanisation is not a historical relic. It is a living process, woven into the fabric of our societies. It shapes the way we talk, the way we legislate, the way we justify harm. And it continues to operate today, often in ways so familiar that we barely notice them.
The purpose of this chapter is not to recount the horrors of the past for their own sake. It is to illuminate the pattern - the mechanism by which entire populations come to accept the unacceptable. Because until we understand how dehumanisation works, we cannot recognise when it is happening again.
And it is happening again.
Not in the same form, not with the same victims, but with the same logic. The same linguistic distancing. The same cultural blind spots. The same moral evasions.
The machinery of dehumanisation has not been dismantled. It has simply been redirected.
In the chapters that follow, we will trace this machinery across history, across cultures, and ultimately into the present - where its most pervasive and least acknowledged expression continues to shape the lives of billions of sentient beings.
This is where the story begins.
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