Tag: holocaust

Without Empathy, We Don’t See People as People

I’ve been recently reading the book James by Percival Everett. It’s about the slave Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s gotten me thinking about empathy and the lack of it in humans. Empathy is not just a virtue–it’s the lens through which we recognize the humanity in others. Without it, people become objects, obstacles, or threats. History is soaked in the blood of empathy’s absence and the most chilling atrocities share a common root: the failure to see others as truly human.

The transatlantic slave trade didn’t just rely on violence; it depended on a systemic denial of empathy. Enslaved Africans were stripped of names, families, and identities. In the book I’m reading, Jim is just trying to get back to his family, but he is bought and sold by others in the book. Africans were branded, auctioned, and bred like livestock. This wasn’t ignorance, it was deliberate dehumanization. By turning people into property, slaveholders absolved themselves of guilt. Empathy would have made the cruelty unbearable. So it was repressed, silenced, replaced with pseudoscience and theology that justified oppression.

In Nazi Germany, Jews, Roma, disabled people, and others were targeted in a genocide that industrialized death. What made the Holocaust possible wasn’t just hatred–it was the meticulous suppression of empathy. People were reduced to numbers. Their names erased, their histories burned, their deaths cataloged in ledgers. The architecture of the Holocaust depended on millions participating–guards, secretaries, engineers–many of whom lived normal lives, compartmentalizing their complicity. Empathy had no place in the Final Solution.

But empathy’s absence isn’t just a relic of history. Under Trump’s administration, immigrants and asylum seekers are routinely described as “animals” or “vermin” or “invaders.” Children are separated from their parents and kept in cages, detained by ICE without due process, sometimes without adequate hygiene or comfort. The policy wasn’t a mistake; it was a strategy of deterrence through cruelty. To justify it, the administration relied on rhetoric that erased the humanity of migrants, calling them criminals, rapists, and threats to American “purity.” Empathy was a political liability, and it was treated as such.

Empathy is not weakness. It is an act of defiance in a world that profits from division and fear. To feel for another–to recognize a stranger’s suffering as real–is to refuse the machinery of dehumanization. When we listen, when we care, when we act in solidarity, we’re not just being kind. We’re fighting back against every system that says some lives matter less.

We don’t need more tolerance. We need more imagination: the kind that lets us picture ourselves in someone else’s place. Without empathy, history repeats itself. With it, maybe we can write a better one.

Hitler, Guevara, and Lenin and the Line We Walk

There’s a reflex in our culture–especially online–to flatten political history into a moral binary. You’re either on the side of the good guys or the monsters. In this simplified universe, to admire Lenin or Che Guevara is to place yourself in the same camp as those who admire Hitler. That comparison isn’t just historically false, it’s intellectually lazy.

Let’s draw a clear line, shall we?

Admiring Lenin or Che is not the same as admiring Hitler. It’s important to understand why, especially if we want to engage in political conversations that go beyond slogans and settle into substance.

Their goals were fundamentally different.

Hitler’s ideology was rooted in racial supremacy, conquest, and genocide. His vision required extermination. It was designed around hate. There is no version of Hitler that isn’t a fascist or a mass murderer.

By contrast, Lenin and Guevara operated under a radically different vision, however flawed. They saw themselves as liberators, fighting systems of exploitation and imperialism. Lenin wanted to smash the czarist monarchy and capitalism to empower workers. Che fought for global revolution against colonialism and U.S. theory, about freedom, equality, and solidarity, not domination and extermination.

Does that mean they got everything right? Hell no. The crimes can’t be ignored though.

Lenin authorized the Red Terror and laid the groundwork for the state repression in the USSR. Che oversaw executions of political enemies in revolutionary Cuba. They believed violence was a necessary tool of revolution. That can’t be whitewashed or excused with historical whataboutism.

However, here’s where critical admiration comes in.

You can admire someone’s courage, clarity of purpose, or strategic brilliance without endorsing every action they took. You can appreciate Guevara’s fearless commitment to anti-imperialism and still mourn the people who died because of him. You can study Lenin’s revolutionary theory and still criticize how it was implemented.

There’s a difference between admiration and apology. Admiration is honest. It sees both the brilliance and the brutality. It doesn’t romanticize, but it also doesn’t erase the context or potential of revolutionary struggle.

Apology is denial. It minimizes or justifies atrocities, insisting the ends always justify the means. That’s where things get dangerous.

If your admiration turns into excuse-making–“they had to do it,” “it was for the greater good”–you’ve stopped thinking critically. You’re no longer admiring. You’re worshipping. And revolutionary icons don’t need worship, they need interrogation.

Bottom line is history is messy and so are its heroes. We don’t need to build saints out of revolutionaries, and we don’t need to pretend they’re all devils either. The left does itself no favors by refusing to wrestle with the full truth of its icons. And the right discredits itself by comparing every revolutionary to a fascist.

So yes, I admire Lenin and Guevara. I admire their courage, their clarity, their willingness to challenge empires and imagine a different world. But I don’t ignore their flaws. I don’t excuse their crimes. And I don’t pretend they didn’t make serious mistakes at the cost of real lives.

That’s not an apology.

That’s what it means to learn from history instead of being trapped by it.