There’s a pattern that shows up in every conflict: things get bad enough, and people stop seeing individuals and start seeing groups. When that happens, the people actually responsible try to maintain their self-imposed innocence.
When you assign the actions of a government or militia to an entire ethnicity, you’ve handed every guilty person in that group a get-out-of-jail-free card. The criticism stops being about what they did and becomes about who you apparently hate. They’ll remind you of that every chance they get. That’s not a side effect — that’s what they are trying to do.
It works the same way in reverse. Collapsing a specific political ideology into an entire religion denies millions of people the right to disagree with a government without being accused of betraying their own identity. Both moves do the same thing: reduce a human being to a label, then hold them responsible for everything that label has ever done.
Responding to that with more collective hatred doesn’t weaken extremism. It confirms it. It tells people the propaganda was right all along — that the other side really does see them as a faceless enemy, that there’s no point trying to be seen as an individual.
You don’t break a cycle by accelerating it. And the people who started it are counting on you to try.
But the world sees the truth. The world hears the truth. And history knows and screams the truth at us. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase that.