The Romans offered ghoulish entertainment to the populace in gigantic amphitheatres – Colosseum alone (from 80 AD) held, on the average, 65,000 people. Yes, that was on average, I repeat, the number of those who went out of their way to see people and/or animals being torn to pieces. These were not mere “games” as we understand them; combatants did not get up and shake hands at the end of a fight.

Why such a morbid interest in violent deaths? I ask myself.

Later, and over the course of hundreds of years, we see the same fascination during the public hangings, burnings at the stake, decapitations and what-not that were conducted for the greater glory of God and/or his royal servants and later, during the French revolution, to liberate the populace from religious and royal oppression. Suffice it to read Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, to get an idea of how the thrilled populace rejoiced at every bloodied head that rolled to the ground.

Are we to understand, then, that humans are, when all is said and done, basically vicious; creatures who just barely conceal fangs under a veneer of “civilisation”? That was certainly not the view Dickens’s wished to impart. He took great pains to explain how the greater part of the population of Paris, indeed that of all of France, had been so mistreated and for so long that they essentially had lost their moral compass. Indeed, we know, too, that Roman slaves were mostly treated like insects. I guess that’s what is meant by the word “dehumanising”.

However, I doubt that slaves made up the majority of spectators at the gory events held all over the mighty empire to celebrate victories (or to gloss over defeats) in the spectacularly beautiful structures they themselves – the slaves – had built. (Slaves are believed to have made up no more than 25-40 % of the population of Rome.)

Could it be that treating people as insects is as dehumanising as being treated as an insect? After Spartakus’s revolt in 73 BC, 6000 slaves were reportedly crucified. Six thousand! One single crucifiction has been haunting us for over 2000 years. How many people must you crucify before your stomach stops churning? And what sort of creature are you then?

If you are a Roman official, say a quaestor, or a senator, you have people above you and below you, not to mention beside you and of course, there is always the top dog. People are being assassinated left, right and centre, by slaves, by wives and above all by competitors. Even the top dog gets assassinated from time to time, so your primary concern is not with morality.

To this day, structures built by Roman slaves are among the most beautiful of all structures built by humans in Europe. We have learnt, I am told by historians, a great deal from the Romans. Hence we have tended to adulate them, something I strongly regret because they celebrated, above all, conquest and expansion at all cost (including genocide). I put to you that what followed the Romans when their fundamentally unsound society imploded, was several hundred years of “dark ages”, not because Rome was gone, but because Rome had left a tabula rasa: Everything before them had been eradicated; culture, traditions, religions, languages… and peoples. (Historians will disagree with me. Let them! Look at the mess we’re in and tell me if learning from the Romans has benefited us in the long run.)

Like the Romans, the Nazis celebrated conquest and expansion at all cost. I am not the first person to ask: How much did most Germans know of what was being done to Jews and other non-Arians by their compatriots? I suspect that most people living in towns or cities will at least have heard rumours, many will have seen the sacking of shops, arrests, beatings and worse. But they will have refused to “know”. Intoxicated with patriotism and full of hope that their government would at last offer them better a better life, they will have wanted to believe that what they heard or saw were exceptions. (True, the propaganda apparatus was running at full throttle: Those wonderful new radios…)

But the perpetrators, the soldiers, SS people, etc: What were they made of? They left normal homes, beloved girlfriends, parents and younger siblings and set about burying people alive, setting fire to churches where whole villages had run for sanctuary. The viciousness of NAZI hatred of Slavs, Jews and others perceived to be of a “foreign race” was unfathomable. How was it possible?

I have no answer.

How is it still possible? IDF is following in the footsteps of the Nazis, even trying to outdo them. How much of the IDF atrocities is the Israeli public aware of? How much is the US public aware of? As for the rest of us: Are we doing anything – anything at all – to stop the US from supplying weapons to Israel. Are we boycotting the US? Are we even boycotting Israel? (True, the propaganda apparatus is once again running at full throttle, those wonderful social media…)

Are our countries in the West any better than Nazi Germany and Israel?