Maybe He Was Just Misunderstood

In the heated quest to re-write history everywhere from our museums to our schools, at least we count on a few truths to hold. Like, for example, we can still all agree that Hitler was really bad, right? Wrong. Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler. “Why does a potent portion of the American right seek to rehabilitate Hitler? The Nazi apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one of society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story than that. Tucker Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens. The country learned hard lessons from the Nazi Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice. Today, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.”