https://www.plough.com/en/topics/community/education/the-day-no-one-would-say-the-nazis-were-bad
I couldn’t get anyone to agree that the Nazis were bad. In fact the students completed the argument quite elegantly for me: we each have our own perspective; the Nazis aren’t strictly speaking “bad” because after all, from their perspective they thought they were good; there is no way we can ourselves claim to truthfully state from our perspective that they are bad; Q.E.D. there’s nothing bad about the Nazis.
I was unprepared for this; I walked around in a daze for at least a week. I went to high school in the late 1990s, where the last of the slow-drip of congealed, apparent prosperity before September 11, 2001 meant that, on the surface of the local newsprint at least, the biggest thing in politics going was whether or not Bill Clinton could be caught out in an embarrassing if fairly trivial lie. It was the sort of time where someone could argue that history was over, that Western liberal democracy had won conclusively, and you’d believe him. By tenth grade we had studied The Diary of Anne Frank (1947) no fewer than three times. In my youthful memories the Nazis were so bad, they had attained the boring kind of evil. When cast as villains of a piece, they couldn’t make a splash, they were so obviously over and done with; there could be no dramatic tension in their defeat.
Something had apparently shifted for my students. They clearly expected me to praise them for getting what I must see was the right answer: even the Nazis aren’t bad. The uniformity of this particular class’s reaction was singular and uncanny. I’m used to the attempt to subvert more or less hollow moral outrage; but what do you do when there’s none at all?