Time & Perspective Quote by Jared Diamond

Diamond is doing something deliberately unfashionable: insisting that moral horror is also an object of analysis, not just condemnation. The line links “injustices of history” to genocide and then to the forensic scrutiny of “murderers and rapists,” an escalation meant to block an easy escape route. If you’re tempted to treat historical injustice as a vague, regrettable fog, he yanks it into the same category as the most unambiguous crimes we can name. The provocation isn’t gratuitous; it’s strategic. He’s arguing that disgust alone is politically useless if it leaves the machinery intact.

The subtext is a defense of explanation against the accusation of excuse-making. Diamond’s work often gets read through that tension: when you foreground systems (geography, ecology, institutions), critics worry you’re laundering agency and responsibility. Here, he’s preempting that critique by choosing examples no one would dare “contextualize away.” Psychologists don’t study predators to sympathize with them; they study them to identify patterns, risk factors, and points of intervention. Diamond wants history treated with the same unsentimental rigor.

Context matters: as a popularizer straddling academia and mass readership, he’s translating a research ethic into a public-facing moral argument. The intent is preventative, not merely interpretive. “How those evil things came about” is a warning that atrocities aren’t alien eruptions; they are built - by incentives, fear, bureaucracy, propaganda, and ordinary complicity. The sentence is a quiet rebuke to comforting myths: that we are too enlightened now, that “they” were uniquely barbaric, that naming evil is the same as stopping it.