Remembering the Holocaust is more than a historical duty. It is a contemporary exercise in moral consistency. The greatest tragedy of the 20th century was not an abrupt event, but the result of a long process, marked by the normalization of hatred, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the indifference of societies that chose to relativize evil while it was taking hold.
For decades, the idea prevailed that the world didn’t know what was happening. That there was a lack of information, images, and mechanisms for transparency. Today, this justification no longer holds. We live in an environment of continuous information, in which human rights violations, wars, and repressions are monitored in real time. Even so, the rise of extremism continues to be treated, often, as an acceptable political divergence, and not as an organized power project.
Part of this distortion stems from the inappropriate use of the concept of sovereignty. National sovereignty is discussed as if authoritarian regimes functioned according to the same decision-making logics as liberal democracies. As if elections held under censorship, repression, and the absence of civil liberties could express the genuine will of society. This relativism empties the very meaning of democracy and compromises the universal defense of human rights.
Contemporary extremism is not solely ideological. It is sustained by financial structures and transnational networks that connect authoritarianism, terrorism, illegal economies, and, in some cases, drug trafficking. It is less about values and more about power, control, and money. This mechanism operates pragmatically, using political discourse as a veneer for practices that erode the foundations of the democratic world.
The selective nature of international outrage is one of the most evident symptoms of this inconsistency. Humanitarian tragedies of great proportions – such as those that occurred in Syria or in various regions of Africa – do not mobilize attention proportional to the gravity of the events. At the same time, the almost exclusive focus on Israel, especially when the country reacts to terrorist attacks, reveals an uneven pattern of moral judgment.
It is impossible to discuss the conflict in the Middle East while ignoring the role of terrorist organizations, their financiers, and the deliberate exploitation of civilians. When this framework is omitted, the debate ceases to be humanitarian and begins to reproduce historical distortions. In this context, narratives resurface that, albeit under new language, echo an old obsession: the selective demonization of Jews.
Antisemitism rarely manifests itself abruptly. It is built gradually through the relativization of history, the inversion of values, and convenient silence in the face of hatred. In Brazil, this phenomenon cannot be ignored. The increase in antisemitic manifestations in public spaces and on social media has, at times, been fueled by discourses that stray from historical facts and approach ideologies that treat hatred as a political tool.
The memory of the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a symbolic ritual. It imposes a concrete responsibility: to reject moral relativism, to defend democracy consistently, and to refuse selectivity in the application of human rights. History demonstrates, unequivocally, that indifference in the face of extremism exacts a high price – and one always paid by societies that believe themselves immune to it.
This editorial was originally published in Portuguese in Poder 360.
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