I often wonder what people actually have understood other than "the Nazis were bad". It's not enough to not be a racist, and it's not enough to have excuses for

I often wonder what people actually have understood other than "the Nazis were bad". It's not enough to not be a racist, and it's not enough to have excuses for putting up with war and exploitation and double standards. We live in an age where narcissism and outer appearances are glorified more than ever, where showing off and fitting in are accepted and the only debate is on how to best do that, where the atrocities and all our complicity in them is a constant background hum, where tribalism and identity politics and other things are considered "natural", where people hide their own person behind pseudo-objectivity, surveillance is everywhere and eternal, robocops are around the corner, we engage in constant double think about "consumers" deserving the crap shoved onto them by corporations. It's all just human nature, it's "science" (with a deus ex machina always around the corner) -- I would say things like the above are the things which people like Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner or other people I would consider heavy weights on the subject pointed out as crucial, that is, when you asked them about the Nazis, they didn't talk about the content of their ideas so much as about their personalities, the personalities and excuses of their followers, obedience and a lack of connection with oneself and reality, and so on. In comparison to that stuff they all seemed to agree that the "content" of the Nazi ideology was just smoke and mirrors. Even their methods held more content than their content did, if you will. Sure, they needed enemies and a cult of their own supposed superiority, but any details beyond that were subject to change. Every time I learn about something like Abu Ghraib, I die a little inside. That is, I get diminished a little, and every following day I live on this planet without the perpetrators of those deeds being brought to justice I get diminished some more. That's bad enough, but the way most people don't even notice that is really scary. Please, don't take this as me snapping at you. I have no way of knowing how exactly you meant what you said, but I am reminded every single day of parallels to Nazi Germany that are perfectly accepted in polite society, so I had to rant a bit.