Mass atrocity like Auschwitz exceeds comprehension despite full factual knowledge of it.

Evidence

Auschwitz is a failure of imagination. It always was, from the outset. It exceeds comprehension, as Agamben has put it, no matter how much we know about its details. That is the way of death, the more so with mass, violent death. How could it have happened, even as we know the facts of how it did? How was it allowed to emerge, to take place under our very noses? The paradoxes of racism, as Barnor Hesse has characterized it. Never again, and yet again and again, even now, never more so before our very eyes. Seeing but not; seeing but not believing; believing but believing it immediately not my problem, our problem; seeing and believing but frozen from action, too distracted or busy or unconcerned to do anything about it; acting but not in concert, not concertedly. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 829

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘seeing but not believing but frozen from action’ cascade captures the phenomenology of bystander denial more precisely than any single-sentence summary could; sits with the paradox that knowledge and comprehension diverge at the scale of mass death.
• XREF: Echoes the ‘Never Again, and yet again and again’ structure familiar from writing on genocide prevention and the bystander effect literature.