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Three-panel meme showing a man in military fatigues speaking in a forest setting. In the first panel, he says “The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it…” In the second panel, he continues “…and that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine.” In the third panel, he concludes “It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than it is behind a single incident.”
In the context of Andor (Star Wars series this scene is from), people stopped caring about what the Empire does because they made all of their atrocities commonplace. People grow apathetic because they just internalize it as a new normal and assume “If we couldn’t/didn’t do anything about it all those other times, why care now?”
It’s a bit like how I feel every day I come to Lemmy and see yet another news article about any 2d20 number of Palestinian civilians murdered by Israel. It’s just an everyday thing now. Hamas’s indiscriminate murder of Israeli civilians on Oct 7 was met with immediate retaliation and condemnation, but when Israel performs several Oct 7-scale massacres on a regular basis, no one bats an eye. There’s no arbitrary point where you can convince people “Enough is enough, now we have to do something,” because people couldn’t or didn’t do anything all the other times and they don’t see why this instance should be any different.