Gonna disagree with some of the crowd here and say I think those people typically aren’t bloodthirsty/supportive of war. They’ve never believed many examples of inhumanity have been direct consequences of democratic leadership, and some (I have the Gaza genocide in mind here) they’ve never believed existed at all. They’ll see an “expert” voice an opinion that they’re already inclined to believe at present. The “expert” authoritatively cites evidence that they’re not familiar with, so seems legit enough. They’re not going to trust you to have knowledge the “expert” doesn’t, but they’re not interested in holding the discussion with you because they don’t carry the mythical knowledge that would win them the argument. They concede the point ahead of time to avoid conceding after a debate that didn’t convince them. It’s not forgetting, it’s pretending that they agree with your assessment.

A huge factor is how detached we are from atrocities that don’t touch us. I really believe that if one of these people had a friend or family that were affected by this, they would think a lot more deeply on culpability. I lived in Dearborn during the last election and I didn’t get the sense that muslims there were more likely to abstain from voting (or vote third-party) than non-muslims. I know this is partially a function of who I was talking with (mostly academia), but I’m convinced that a big factor was that all of us knew someone in our personal lives that had been emotionally injured by losing family.

There’s a good argument that ignoring atrocities is a moral failure, but I think most of us can relate. There are so many evils in the world today that if I actually spent time to think on even a fraction of them I think I’d be in a mental institution. That recent exposé on the dogs that were trained to rape prisoners, I can acknowledge it’s almost certainly real and that saying otherwise would be an injustice to the victims, but in my heart I don’t actually believe it happened because I don’t feel capable of managing the emotions that would come with accepting it. If you’re already overwhelmed by other aspects of the hellscape you live in, at some point reacting to horrifying headlines by throwing up your hands and booting up a video game becomes a survival strategy.