Oh, they were known, they were just able to be pushed out the mind until filmed, unredacted, and uncensored evidence started to be widely and publicly seen, after the fact. No one in the West sees Gazan children dying on their TV, they hear verbal descriptions (as they did from the very start of what became the Shoa) or they see a cut to black or a mosaic blur or a shot of aftermath rubble, maybe with a body covered by a sheet. Usually it’s just a number scrolling by on a chyron. One of the things the bastards of today learned is don’t make the mistake of the bastards of tomorrow and let your populace (or your enemy’s populace) see uncensored atrocities… anyone’s atrocities. Most Americans alive today have only seen the least horrible and most anodyne images from Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen or Sobibor (or My Lai, or Phnom Penh, or Baghdad, or on and on and on)… if they’d seen the bulldozers pushing naked children with holes through their skulls into pits they’d never have been able to vote for the bastard of today when he’s using the playbook(s) of the bastard(s) of yesteryear.

And yeah, we’re all complicit, especially in the other substantially equivalent, if not greater, atrocities happening with Western funding and Western weapons that we’ve been ignoring for equally long or longer. Yemen, Syria, Sudan, the DRC. The less the victims look like us, the easier it is for us to ignore… especially when our governments and our media do us the job we’ve asked them to do by not letting us see what’s really happening out there.

They’re going to do a much better job of getting us to be complicit in the future, given the confluence of AI, social media, and the progressively more authoritarian leaning of aging tech broionaires.