Ignoring Evil

Awesome passage by Billmon:

As for morality . . . Well, if you can't see the evil in locking prisoners of war -- some of them held by mistake, others only foot soldiers in the Taliban's army -- in 100 plus degree rooms for 24 hours without food or water, until they shit or piss all over themselves -- then you're truly beyond redemption. Once you've reached that point, you can probably justify anything, up to and including murder.

Unfortunately, according to the polls, that category may include a sizable fraction of the American people. I've speculated on the reasons for this before, I won't rehash them here. Maybe it's just human nature to ignore evil when it takes place outside of immediate eye or ear shot. Solzhenitsyn also wroteabout this trait, and how the Cheka learned to use it to its advantage:

There's an advantage to night arrests in that neither the people in the
neighboring apartment houses nor those on the city streets can see how
many have been taken away. Arrests which frighten the closest neighbors are not an event at all to those farther away. It's as if they had not taken place. Along that same asphalt ribbon on which the Black Marias scurry at night, a tribe of youngsters strides by day with banners, flowers and gay, untroubled songs.

Easier still to look the other way when the arrests take place half a world away, the archipelago is entirely offshore and the prisoners aren't driven through the streets in trucks but whisked through the sky by the CIA's own private airline. Add in the facts that those arrested are foreign, non-Christian and non-white -- and that some of them almost certainly are guilty of terrorist atrocities -- and you have the perfect excuse for a nation of Sergeant Schultzes to stick to its "We know nothing" line.
And why not? If the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the smoke billowing from the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp up on the hill, why shouldn't we expect most Americans to ignore what's going on in Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib -- or any of the other islands in the archipelago?