After making a gesture that many interpreted as a Nazi salute, Elon Musk rejected the idea that he himself was a Nazi, or that any invocation of the movement’s symbols could be harmful.
“What’s relevant about Nazis is like, are you invading Poland?” Musk told podcaster Joe Rogan. “What is actually bad about Nazis—it wasn’t their fashion or their mannerisms, it was the war and genocide.”
But what Musk failed to acknowledge was that genocide never arrives as a bolt from the blue. A gradual, grinding process of dehumanization prepares the way for it, ultimately presenting violence as the next logical step. One hallmark of this process’s early phases is the emergence of hate symbols that highlight the divide between self-anointed “superior” groups and those they deem less worthy.
As hate-curious societies proceed further into dehumanizing certain groups, they can transmute into ones that eradicate people, whether by erasing their identities or by ending their lives.
Yet as hatred escalates, ordinary people can intervene in meaningful ways to halt or reverse progressions toward genocide. To prepare for such intervention, it helps to understand what forces hold people back from speaking up when vulnerable groups are targeted—and how you can surmount these forces so that your actions reflect your highest values.
Early warning signs
In the midst of mass violence, witnesses are often gripped by disbelief that such a thing could happen. Whole societies, in fact, can be caught flat-footed in the face of genocide—in part because people miss the earliest warning signs. Human rights scholar Gregory Stanton, the founding president and chairman of Genocide Watch, described some of these warning signs when he distilled the progression toward genocide into a series of recognizable stages.
The first is classification, the emergence of an “us versus them” social dynamic that marks some groups out as different from others. In the U.S. and many other Western democracies, classification has been used for years to define immigrants and refugees as a group of people distinct from born citizens. These sorting mechanisms turn more corrosive when those in power use them to deny rights to certain groups, as when the Khmer Rouge abolished Cambodians’ political and civil rights before launching a genocide against them.
Another hallmark stage is symbolization, where distinct signs are deployed to identify members of a persecuted group or to cement a dominant group’s hateful identity. The straight-arm salute performed by Musk, alt-right politico Steve Bannon, and others is a striking example, as is the Pepe the Frog image Musk displayed on his social media profile—a known white nationalist symbol.
Then comes dehumanization, in which one group rejects the full humanity of members of another. The Khmer Rouge, who went on to murder millions of Cambodians, described their enemies as “worms” or “parasites” who “gnawed the bowels from within.”
More recently, Donald Trump has used dehumanizing tactics like calling political opponents “vermin,” as well as accusing Haitian immigrants of consuming their neighbors’ pets. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump falsely claimed during a debate. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Dehumanization is especially ominous because it lays clear groundwork for direct attacks on certain groups. If someone truly thinks that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country, they may come to believe it’s normal, even necessary, to eradicate or banish them.
Barriers to action
Despite ongoing attempts to normalize hateful measures, some onlookers start to feel distinctly uncomfortable when symbolization and dehumanization take hold. Some may count members of targeted groups as friends, while others are disgusted that anyone would attempt to scapegoat the vulnerable.
But as University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic points out, this discomfort often isn’t enough by itself to spur meaningful responses to hatred. In part, that’s because people don’t think they can intervene in ways that make a real difference.
This false belief, which Slovic calls “pseudoinefficacy,” gives rise to internal monologues that run something like this: They’re threatening people by the millions all over the country—what I can do locally won’t even make a dent. Studies find that this kind of reasoning has stultifying effects, sapping people’s motivation to take action.
As people grow more aware of rising levels of hatred, they also start to show signs of psychic numbing, becoming more indifferent to the suffering of people in trouble. In widely cited studies, Slovic has shown that when people hear about escalating numbers of starving children, they take less and less action to relieve the children’s plight.
Pseudoinefficacy and psychic numbing are linked. When we perceive the scale of a hate campaign as overwhelming, we grow more convinced that we can’t do anything to fight it—so to keep despair at bay, we may mentally distance ourselves from what’s happening. When people feel bombarded with one grim news report after another, says neuroscientist Gil Sharvit of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, “you can generate a complete withdrawal effect: ‘I don’t want to see any politics anymore. I cannot handle that.’”
Formulating a plan
Mass emotional shutdowns that stem from overwhelm hurt societies, leaving the most vulnerable at risk and enabling progressions toward atrocity. But from a biological standpoint, this shutdown response is understandable. Brain studies reveal that we’re only capable of paying attention to a small number of things at once.
That means effective campaigns against hate and discrimination need to take these cognitive limits into account. “Our attention is severely restricted. You can’t attend to everything in the world,” Slovic says. “So the question is, what grabs our attention?”
Slovic has found through years of research that the best way to draw people’s attention to injustice, and motivate them to act, is to communicate that injustice on a more human scale. For instance, after Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad turned against his own people, killing them by the hundreds of thousands, there was very little widespread outcry despite the mounting death numbers.
What finally awakened the world’s attention wasn’t another in a series of atrocity bulletins. It was a photo of a single Syrian child lying face-down on a Turkish beach, drowned while attempting to flee to Greece with his family.
The week after the photo was published, Slovic found, daily donations to a fund collecting money for Syrian refugees suddenly soared to 55 times the previous amount. “Statistics didn’t make any difference,” he says. “It was this one photograph that created an emotional, jarring response.”
To foster this kind of empathy and engagement, in yourself and in others, seek out stories of specific people who’ve suffered as a result of hateful attacks or discriminatory measures. These may be testimonies from people you know, or simply moving narratives you find online—like the story of a Haitian refugee in Ohio who’s stopped biking and going to the park to avoid harassment, or the story of a transgender teen beaten by classmates who were proud of their brutal attack. Next, share these stories with your friends and networks—whether in social media posts, emails, or one-on-one conversations.
Stories of people in dire straits affect us on a more visceral level than standard info bulletins, and, as a result, we become more motivated to help. Through personal storytelling, you can open up “a window of opportunity where people suddenly are no longer numb,” Slovic says. “They’re energized.”
Offer a concrete action step
Once you’ve opened this window of opportunity, engaging people’s empathy and concern, follow up by suggesting a specific way they can intervene. If you’ve shared the story of a Haitian refugee in self-imposed isolation, you can encourage readers to donate to a local nonprofit working to create an “enduring welcome” for U.S. newcomers. If you’ve told friends about a local teen who’s suffered a racist attack, urge them to ask their representatives to support stronger laws and policies to deter hate crimes.
The power of suggestions like these transcends their direct impact. While your primary goal might be to help those targeted, publicly taking the side of the oppressed also conveys to others that doing so is normal and even expected. Those who absorb this message may go on to mount their own defense of targeted people and groups.
Research confirms that standing up for what’s right can be a socially contagious act. In studies, when one person in a group calls attention to injustice or resists it, others are more likely to follow suit.
The same holds true in real life, according to one participant in a major peace-building forum. During Burundi’s 1993 civil war, they said, some areas of the country “resisted the violence and killings of people from different ethnic groups, because some important and respected personalities said ‘No.’”
Join forces with likeminded people
Courageous acts to defend the vulnerable can also build into full-fledged social movements, as when thousands of people in the U.S. and elsewhere condemned unlawful wartime atrocities against civilians in Gaza. In addition to supporting such movements, you can join national or global groups focused on preventing violence, such as Human Rights Watch, Alliance Against Genocide, and Advocates for Trans Equality.
In joining such groups or movements, you gain new power to rally others to a cause—but not necessarily in the ways you might expect. When a data privacy group contacted more than 5,000 people in a 2023 University of Copenhagen field experiment, the outreach wasn’t all that successful in changing people’s opinions.
However, the campaign did end up affecting people’s behavior: Later on, they reported being more cautious about buying products that collected their data. It may be easier, then, for concerned groups to elicit desired behaviors—like signing a petition or donating to an immigrant support fund—than to shift public attitudes.
Another advantage to joining a social movement or group is that you’ll have more resistance to the “pseudoinefficacy” that may have dogged you before, Slovic says. When you’re embedded in a supportive community, you no longer feel you’re as helpless to change things, since you see direct evidence that others around you are making a difference.
Working with leaders and decision-makers
It’s one thing to drum up grassroots energy against the hateful developments that precede genocide, from fascist symbolism to broad assaults on civil rights. But convincing those in power to take up the cause is trickier. Not only are leaders as prone to psychic numbing as anyone else, their capacity to care may be even further strained due to the sheer number of demands on their attention—and their own sense of the political risk involved in acting.
To surmount these attentional limits, it’s critical to take the long view. It’s unlikely that one call or note, even a heartfelt one, will convince a lawmaker to support an anti-discrimination bill or shield a refugee facing unjust deportation.
Over time, however, sustained pressure from constituents and organized groups can lead to progress that couldn’t have been achieved any other way, as when Asian-American communities facing harassment lobbied California leaders to pass stronger laws to stop hate crimes.
Collaborations like those, forged under pressure, help reverse progressions that can lead to atrocity, making “never again” an ongoing commitment rather than an abandoned ideal.
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