War Quote by John Pomfret

Pomfret’s line works because it refuses the cheap comfort of monsters. He reaches for a phrase - “being swept up” - that sounds almost meteorological, like violence is weather rolling in. That’s the point: he’s describing mass atrocity not as an outbreak of individual cruelty alone, but as a social condition that recruits ordinary people through momentum, fear, and the sudden redefinition of “normal.” The moral horror is sharpened by the banality of the mechanism.

The careful hedging (“I think,” “to a certain extent”) reads less like uncertainty than like a reporter’s reflex: an attempt to name something immense without turning it into a grand theory. Then he puts Bosnia alongside Rwanda, and Hutu violence alongside Tutsi revenge, resisting a tidy one-sided narrative. That symmetry is risky - it can blur differences in scale, planning, and power - but it also signals his underlying target: the idea that group identity naturally maps onto innocence or guilt. He’s pointing at how quickly victimhood can be weaponized, how trauma can become a mandate.

“Society... has gone mad” is the most revealing subtext. Madness here isn’t an alibi; it’s an indictment of the collective. Pomfret is gesturing toward the moment when institutions, media, neighbors, even language itself flip from restraining violence to organizing it. The intent is diagnostic: if genocide feels like a civic trance rather than a spree, the uncomfortable lesson is that the safeguard isn’t just better people, but sturdier norms, accountability, and structures that don’t let “swept up” become a permission slip.