It’s Okay to Take a Break from Your “No Politics” Friends

Every authoritarian regime needs citizens to choose comfort over conscience.

8 min read

Just now

Content Warning: This essay includes graphic images from the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp (1945). It is disturbing. It should be. I include it not for shock value but because complacency depends on sanitized history. To understand what silence enables, we cannot look away from what silence created.

When American troops liberated the concentration camps in 1945, the smell hit them first. Liberators later recalled that they could smell the stench of death miles before reaching camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. It didn’t just sit in the air — it clung. It moved with you, as if it had fingers, dragging itself into your clothes, your hair, the back of your throat. As soldiers got closer to the camps, the odor was so overpowering that it made some of them physically sick.

Inside the gates, American soldiers found what the world would later see in photographs: piles of skeletal bodies stacked like ruined lumber. Limbs tangled in ways that made it hard to tell where one human began and another ended. Jars on shelves filled with organs — livers, hearts, lungs — each suspended in liquid, tagged and cataloged in the kind of neat handwriting you’d expect from a…