Survivor testimony fails to inspire outrage, leaving witnesses suspect

Evidence

There are numerous reports by survivors.126” The more authentic they are, the less they attempt to communicate things that evade human understanding and human experience—sufferings, that is, that transform men into “uncomplaining animals.” None of these reports inspires those passions of outrage and sympathy through which men have always been mobilized for justice. On the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 983

Categorization

• XREF: Doctors’ and historians’ trust in survivors’ testimony; resonates with moral-panic literature on how testimony is received.
• QUESTION: Arendt’s claim that survivor reports don’t mobilize outrage is dated given Holocaust testimony culture post-1961; worth interrogating.