As I begin to write about the worst Fascists (i.e., the Nazis), it occurs to me that humanity is altogether more wonderful and more terrible than we commonly imagine it, more angelic and more diabolical. The mundanity and the moral and intellectual mediocrity of most lives is not the native and inevitable condition of the average human soul, but rather an impasse between vast forces of good and evil and immense impulses towards life and towards death. From this conflict we seek refuge in numbing routine and stultifying dogma, content for the most part to experience the battle at a safe remove, transmuted into art. Our impulse towards life and effort, fierce as the Sun, is satiated, because we are thinking and acting; and our impulse towards rest and stillness, inexorable as outer space, is mollified because our thoughts and actions rotate, like the Earth itself, in the same circuit every day. We watch Lord of the Rings appreciatively but do not actually wish, with Bilbo, to set off for the Misty Mountains. We enjoy the conflict when it is safe, simplified, and externalized but find it easy enough to ignore for the most part the actual tugs on the soul towards the difficult efforts of discerning truth and improving the world and likewise to disregard the impulses towards murder and suicide. We coax ourselves out of bed with difficulty by wondering what new entertainment our i-phones have for us. And thus routine and distraction divide our souls between them, and we are more or less neutralized in the great conflict in which we nevertheless participate day by day.

There is of course a continuous give and take in every life—small victories and defeats as we smile or else frown at those passing our cubicles. But sometimes the impasse is broken spectacularly by a hero or a villain, and sometimes the history of an entire nation breaks from the normal grayness to dazzle us with vivid moral contrast. There are occasions of black and white, and surely the world has now, for the most part, correctly recognized the Holocaust as a thing of blackness against the background of which the nobility of the Jew-hiders and anti-Nazi preachers is gloriously offset.

It is tempting to allow the histories of such moments to slip into the same moral category as fantasy novels, where the evil is not only allowed to be cleanly divided from the good but may also be unadulterated, inhuman, and unexplained. The Nazis become like orcs, requiring neither our understanding nor our pity. We are free to rejoice in their on-screen slaughter. In such contexts, perhaps the main way in which the Nazis are not fully like orcs is that we do not feel a certain self-satisfaction, bordering on smugness, through our shared rejection and hatred of orcs.

If we are trying to pursue truth and goodness, as opposed to mere entertainment or rhetorical effect or political correctness, then this approach is wrong for at least three reasons. It is inaccurate; it is unfair; and it is uninstructive. While the Holocaust as a project is pitch black, the men who carried it out were not all maniacal sadists full of hate any more than are mafia hit men or the functionaries of corrupt political regimes. They were doing a wicked thing but they were not purely wicked. We misrepresent them when we pretend they were. And we avoid the lessons we might learn. It is not enough to say, “Oh, they were steeped in a racist, nationalistic ideology.” We must go further. We must try to discern the kernels of truth around which the great lies were constructed and the elements of good that enabled a great evil to pass as good in the eyes of many Germans for many years.

Consider the statement of F. Enzio Bushe, who was three years old when Hitler came to power:

From my vantage point today, I can see that the general population of the United States, and maybe even of Europe, has come to understand very little about the terrible time of Hitler’s Germany and the Second World War. . . . In the evenings, our family sat around listening to the radio and talking about what we heard. We listened to the talks of Hitler, Goebbels and others, all of whom were very convincing. They built their arguments in such a simple way that someone listening today might ask, “How could you have fallen for that?” . . . But Germans were not a politically savvy people. . . . Germany, as a united county, was not established until 1871. . . .

I am not saying that the system was good; what I want to carefully explain is that the system had expressed a moral goal that was very successfully protrayed to the population. Everything that happened, we were told, was in pursuit of achieving that moral goal. My father, together with most German people, believed in the basic premise of Hiter’s alternative to the chaos that had occurred in Germany’s past. . . . When the new system began, there was a growing hope and a vision of purpose. There was meaning and an understanding of the need for order and discipline. . . . We believed what we heard. The magic of the music and the uniforms, the philosophy and talks–all were very powerful and convincing. Perhaps the strongest proclamation of the party was that of the need for unity. . . .

My father told me often how terrible life had been after World War I. He told me how millions of people had been unemployed and hungry. He talked about the anarchistic terror organizations that threatened the core of society, my father included. I was told that the new regime brought law and order and the establishment of respect for the dignity of human life. . . .

The need for the individual to sacrifice self-comforts in behalf of others was emphasized. We were also specifically educated to honor the profession of the farmer and blue-collar worker, to respect their work and greet them with dignity, and to view farmland as sacred ground. . . . There was an additional effort to teach sensitivity to the needs of the poor, politeness, and honor to women and motherhood. . . . Selfishness and greed were considered the roots of all evil. . . The idea that no one should ever freeze or go hungry again was repeated over and over. Youth were invited to participate in collecting “fast offerings” on the first Sunday of each month. The entire population was supposed to fast and give the equivalent in money to the collecting youth. I still have a photograph showing me at the age of five with a “money drum” in my hand, serving the “cause” with a neighbor. . . .

I faintly remember one night when the Jewish synagogue in the city of Dortmund, ten miles from where we lived, was burned down. I heard my father say, the next morning, that it was a terrible act of barbarism done by the “furor of uncontrolled people.” I heard him express gratitude that the police had stopped the violence and that everything was under control now. I learned later the irony of this situation, that an organized group with the Nazi Party had initiated the barbarism the government was now claiming to have “under control.” . . .

In the beginning [of the war], the German people felt tragically misunderstood. . . . Only after the final collapse did the complete reality set in. In the ashes of our destroyed country came the awareness of the real tragedy: the awareness that Germany was the villain, the aggressor, the barbarian, the cruel slaughterer. With the defeat came the reports about the concentration camps. The horror stories of criminal acts done by our own people were first met with disbelief. Finally, a feeling of indescribable shame came as reports were openly documented over and over again. With it came the awareness of betrayal–that the best of our feelings and desires had been trampled on and misused. We had been had.

History is written by those who win the war. The truth is much more subtle, much more complicated, and generally unwanted. . . . What is called “Nazi” or “neo-Nazi” in Europe or America today is not even close to the real thing. When I see people who wear the swastika now with their cruel, brutal faces, I think they are imitating what they have seen in old war movies as the portrait of the Nazi system. No decent person anywhere could have sympathy for such people.

I believe it is a tragedy in the history of mankind that so many lack the desire to get to the roots of truth and to look at facts without an agenda. Many things that are politically correct may not have anything to do with truth. Hitler succeeded, in many dimensions, to tap into the dream of Zion that seems to be intrinsic to us human beings. He created a mock Zion with the look of righteousness but without its truth.

We have avoided all the deepest lessons the history of Nazism has to teach us until we appreciate that harrowing fact that, were we growing up in post-World War I Germany, without the benefit of hindsight, we almost certainly would have behaved just as they did, as suggested by the famous experiment known as The Third Wave.

We are in no danger of any serious resurgence of Nazi ideology. I’ve never met a neo-Nazi, but when they hold marches, there is sure to be a much larger counter-march. We might do better to ignore them, because Nazism cannot be taken seriously as a political force in the post-Holocaust world, and what little strength it has comes mainly from its defiantly countercultural posture. But we are in danger of succumbing to some of the same underlying faults—of misplaced loyalty to political parties, of willing blindness to the immorality or wrongness of a flattering leader, of inadequate efforts to discern half-truths from our preferred news source, of deciding to not even try to understand or sympathize with our political enemies, of buying into a skewed and tribalistic national historical narrative. We may be committing these errors in the opposite direction as the Nazis did, and if so, they will only lead to an opposite catastrophe.

Thus, ironically, it is only in defending the Nazis that they begin to defend us against our own analogous vulnerabilities. They can inoculate us against repeating history only if we see the history unskewed by a dogmatic hatred of Nazis–a history enacted by humans, not orcs, who started out no less rational and no less morally attuned than ourselves. We should not, of course, defend Nazism, to say nothing of the utterly indefensible systematic murder of the Jews. But we should say all that can be said in defense of the individuals implicated in the murders. Only then can their history teach us how to avoid situations where we might receive and follow orders to do terrible things, even if our “orders” come not from Hitler but from Hollywood or Harvard or even someone claiming to speak for Heaven.

It is a general rule of clear thinking (though not necessarily of good rhetoric) to always attack the strongest and most defensible version of any position. The only reason we would abandon this rule when we attack the Nazis is to persuade—ourselves or others—in the manner of propaganda, and thus be little better than them with respect to intellectual integrity. Similarly, every prosecutor is bound to disclose all exculpating evidence, and the only reason we would refuse to do so for the Nazis is because we prefer the fictional clarity of ideology to the messiness of reality, even when the ideology paints an unfortunate group as the “bad guys” with an inaccurate or exaggerated brush, which is what the Nazis did to the Jews. Thus, it is only in strict truthfulness, generosity, and sympathy towards our enemies that we rise above the Nazis, while the political pressure against speaking even a word in their defense is really rather Nazi-esque.

Particularly for groups whose virtues and vices are opposite from those of our own contemporary society, it is also of great pragmatic utility to stretch our sympathy and imagination to the utmost. I am thinking here not only of the Nazis but also, for example, of the Pilgrims, the Victorians, and the founding fathers who owned slaves. We are in no immediate danger of repeating their errors, but we are in great danger of missing their lessons–and whatever lessons, positive or negative, any group may have for us will be received effectively only to the extent we can truly put ourselves in their place, imaginatively inserting ourselves into a different worldview and historical context. If they were narrowminded–as the Nazis certainly were in many respects–then let us be so broadminded as to comprehend with a Christlike love and pity both the fascist and the communist, both the zealot and the atheist, both the dupe and the denier.

And of course, to bring this home, we should be broadminded enough as to comprehend both the Republican and the Democrat. For my urgency is not in behalf of the Nazis. The Nazis are merely the most extreme case and therefore of philosophical importance for this essay. But to leave the philosophical and turn to the practical, we should not necessarily rush to uncover all exculpating evidence for the Nazis. That may not be a good use of time. My point is that the rules of fair treatment apply even to them. They are the universally acknowledged “bad guys” with whom to be associated is to risk job loss and ostracization. My urgency is not for them but for the perceived contemporary bad guys. Because if what I have written is true of the the most extreme case–the Nazis–then it is certainly true of Republicans and Democrats, of Hamas and of Israeli generals, of militant secularists and extremist Muslims, and of every other subgroup of humanity that anyone may have cause to dislike or disapprove. If, again, we are seeking truth and goodness rather than entertainment or rhetorical points, then there are no exceptions to the rule of fair and accurate treatment, of intellectual and moral chivalry. As it says in A Man For All Seasons, even the Devil himself must have due process.

My urgency, in particular, is for all sides of the electoral contests that are now picking up steam. It is essential to the sustainability of our democracy over generations that we preserve the ability to appreciate what is true and good in both sides of the debates. We must not reduce candidates to Sauron or policies with which we disagree to Satanism. While I am, to say the least, unenthusiastic about either presumed presidential candidate, neither is as bad as Hitler, and we should each stretch our sympathies and imaginations until we can say with conviction why this is so–and why, therefore, it is not as utterly unreasonable as we may like to imagine that many of our neighbors will be voting for the candidate whom we might consider to be the worse option.

The notion that the Nazis were so bad as to be beyond the legitimate reach of human sympathy and without any right to defense counsel in the court of history is, I take it, a pernicious error–because if they can be demonized in this way, then so can every other perceived “bad guy.” And indeed, cancel culture and “middle finger politics” represents the cancerous growth of this impulse. The proper response is to root out demonization itself.

This is not to say that we may not draw distinctions between right and wrong, or that we must presume that such distinctions are never clear. I believe they can be very clear, though more often in the personal realm than the political. And I started this essay out by acknowledging that history occasionally presents us with clear, black and white moral contrast, including the Holocaust in contrast to the Jew-hiders and anti-Nazi preachers. But each free choice a person makes presumably appears justified to the person making it, and we should always strive to sympathetically comprehend what the subjective justification might be, even if, despite our best efforts, we fail to discover any justification that we consider reasonable. And while we may condemn the error, we should still love the errant. It may still be right to fight our enemies, even to the death (i.e., war). It may still be right to punish wrongs. But if we are to go to battle, physically, politically, or philosophically, then let us do it with a proper solemnity, looking our enemies in the eyes and seeing them as our wayward brothers.