How Come They Are Not Ashamed To Hate Publicly?

A man recently confronted another passenger on a cruise ship after noticing large swastika tattoos across the man’s chest. The Jewish passenger called security. Around them, people lifted their phones and began filming. Some laughed while recording the confrontation.

The moment revealed more than the presence of a man willing to display a Nazi symbol on his body. It revealed a crowd that no longer felt the weight of what that symbol represents.

The swastika once carried a meaning that required no explanation. It marked an ideology that turned modern society into a machinery of extermination. It represented the moral bankruptcy humanity reached when a government organized the systematic murder of Jews and many others across Europe. For decades after the Second World War, the symbol functioned as a warning that certain ideas had already led civilization to its darkest place.

That memory restrained people. Hatred existed, but most understood that publicly displaying that symbol would immediately place them outside the moral boundaries of society.

Those boundaries are weakening.

Today the swastika appears more frequently in public spaces. It shows up on protest signs, clothing, graffiti, and occasionally tattooed across someone’s body. The deeper issue is not only that individuals are willing to display it. The deeper issue is that many around them no longer react with the same instinctive rejection.

When a symbol stops feeling connected to the human suffering it once represented, something important has shifted in the culture.

The change is gradual and often subtle. It appears first as indifference. People see the symbol and treat it as background noise........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)