Among the countless conflicts in human history, three remain the most extensively documented: World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. These were not natural disasters or plagues. They were triggered by men—by decisions, ideologies, and the machinery of power. The death tolls were outrageously high. Unspeakable war crimes were committed in broad daylight and behind closed doors. And yet, despite the mountains of evidence and testimony, the full weight of what happened still feels impossible to hold in your mind all at once.

I sometimes imagine being in those time periods—not as a spectator, but as a participant. Living inside the machinery. I wonder how I would act and feel. What would I have done if I were a Nazi soldier ordered to kill civilian prisoners? Would I have been genuinely brainwashed enough to justify my actions, or would my conscience have fought back? Do you even get to make that choice when the entire world around you insists there is no choice to make?

What would I do if I were stationed on the other side of the fenced walls surrounding a concentration camp—ordered to surveil Jewish prisoners and watch their lives disintegrate day by day? Could I look through that fence and remain the same person on the other side of my shift? If I were imprisoned inside that camp, how would I endure being stripped down, starved, and crammed into filthy quarters overrun with lice? Separated from my family, all of us treated like animals with no certainty of survival. Would I be strong enough mentally to hold on, or would I break down and lose the will to live?

These questions are terrifying even as thought experiments. Yet it is still compelling to watch movies and documentaries about atrocities because I have the luxury to place myself on the right side of history—unlike those who had to live through it. Ordinary men became executioners. Ordinary families were torn apart. The line between victim and perpetrator was not drawn by character alone—it was drawn by geography, timing, and the cruel randomness of birth.

This is what makes the modern era so incomprehensible to me. There is an overwhelming amount of documentation—the photographs, the testimonies, the preserved camps, the films—yet extreme right-wingers, nationalists, and neo-Nazis scream about white supremacy while waving huge swastika flags. Do they understand what the Holocaust was? Do they believe it happened at all? Or have they constructed an alternate history so convincing to themselves that the truth no longer matters? The swastika is not an abstract symbol. It is soaked in the blood of millions. To wear it proudly is not an act of rebellion—it is an admission of either willful ignorance or something far worse.

The wars ended, but the moral weight they left behind did not. It lives in the choices we make now—in what we tolerate, what we remember, and what we refuse to forget.