As someone who literally did a doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust, I’m... gonna take issue with this, sorry.

Deep dives into Nazi backgrounds are actually often very worthwhile. I read and referenced a number of them in my thesis.

The problem is one of approach. https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1347987194460262400

And degree, and opportunity cost, because when you choose to write about something you are by definition choosing to not write about something else.

So this has to be done with a lot of care.

Issues you have to consider:

- Are you primarily giving these people a platform? Talking about what they believe does not actually always equate to that.

- Are you presenting them as sympathetic *in a way that excuses what they believe and what they’ve done*?

- Where is your actual focus? Are you writing about them in a way that erases their victims? Are you writing about them in a way that minimizes the damage they’ve done?

- Are you writing about them in a way that minimizes the danger they pose?

*The damage they do is not fully intelligible unless one has some understanding of how they got to the point where that damage was being done*.

You can’t perform useful analysis of extremism unless you understand extremists.

I don’t like how we’ve gotten to a point where “understand” is being read by people as “excuse”. It’s unhealthy. It’s actually kind of dangerous.

I don’t like that we’ve gotten to a place where “humanize” means the same thing. It is also dangerous.

Because when we present these people as inhuman monsters separate from us, with no complex motivations, with no complicated thoughts, with no personal histories, totally unlike us, we make it harder to recognize the danger in our own midst.

These people aren’t monsters. They’re human beings.

This isn’t about “oh poor them” or being nice to them, it’s—as I said—about cold hard analysis. It’s about learning to recognize danger in order to minimize and prevent damage.

Literally studies of atrocity and extremism are not possible unless you have access to deep dives into who these people are.

Holocaust scholarship would not be fully possible without a rich sociological and psychological understanding of who the Nazis were.

One of the better books I’ve read on WWII and the Nazis is HITLER’S ARMY by Omer Bartov.

I fucking stan the hell out of Omer Bartov.

Among other things, HITLER’S ARMY skewers the historical argument that the Wehrmacht were just guys defending their homeland and weren’t actually ideological Nazis. Bartov says that’s letting them off the hook. A great many of them were in fact Nazis.

How does he prove this?

Well, one of his biggest sources of evidence is the letters that soldiers on the Eastern Front wrote home to their friends and loved ones, as well as diaries.

Which are full of Nazi shit.

And what I feel like a lot of people on here would knee-jerk think is “WHY WOULD IT MATTER WHAT A NAZI WROTE TO THEIR MOM”

Uh, because it helps you gain a more clear-eyed understanding of history that holds people accountable?

A book I will recommend forever and always is INTO THAT DARKNESS by Gitta Sereny. It’s drawn from hours of conversation with Franz Stangl, who was one of the commandants of Treblinka.

You better believe it “humanizes” him.

It features interviews with his loving wife and kids. With friends. And it features Stangl himself, defending himself, rationalizing what he’s done, arguing why he’s not a monster, and it is one of the most brutal books I have ever read in terms of how it evaluates a person.

Because Sereny, while she does include a lot of her own thoughts and reflections, spends a lot of time standing back and letting this man reveal himself with all the evil in his withered, mutilated soul.

He is repugnant. He is repulsive. And he is also human.

And it gives a voice in a very important way to his victims, in a way that’s frankly difficult to explain unless you’ve read the book.

It’s a very difficult book. One of the most difficult I’ve read.

And as someone who spent years immersed in some of the most horrific descriptions of the evil people can to to others, as someone who knows details I bet would keep you the fuck up at night, I am saying that book is worthwhile.

The problem is when those are the only books we have. The problem is when we don’t use them to fight the evil between their covers. The problem is when we don’t use that information to shine a spotlight on the people they murdered and tell their stories too.

But every story is a complicated story. Every moment in history is so complex that in hindsight it can never be fully understood.

Should we ignore those complexities? Should we pretend the actors aren’t all human beings?

That’s not how you do social science, folks. And that’s not how you fight extremism.

If we can’t take a nuanced approach to this, if no one is willing to do the hard work, I think we’re in some trouble.

So please understand why I become uneasy when I see people saying Nazis aren’t worth writing about and extremists aren’t worth understanding.

I didn’t actually read the article and I 100% agree that the mental illness framework is hugely problematic. Like I said, there is a right way to do this and very many wrong ways, and people all too often do it the wrong way.

But the whole STOP WRITING ABOUT NAZIS thing, without any appreciation for the nuance of how it’s possible to write about Nazis and why it’s sometimes worth doing so, is worryingly anti-intellectual and counter to the project of doing history, and I’d like to see less of it.

Seriously tho, Omer fucking Bartov