WWII and Nazi Germany were before my time, but I was around for the USSR.
Stalin considered himself a good person. He liked kids. Truly, honestly, he liked kids. He liked picking them up, playing with them, giving them candy and presents.
Yet he had no problem having tens of thousands kicked out onto the streets and starve or watch their parents starve. People that were close to him and not responsible for enforcing his more malicious policies had trouble believing he was as bad as he was. This wasn't just blindness. The worst evil often comes dressed up as the most virtuous good. It's not an accident that the Klan's robes were white.
Here's the logic.
X is a good goal, necessary for human prosperity and the common or collective good.
I'm on the side of that goal. In fact, I am uniquely positioned to advance that good.
There are those who don't think X is a good goal. They think Y is a good goal.
Y is objectively, historically bad. It's not just a matter of opinion. I'm right. They're wrong.
Those people are on the side of a bad goal. They must be given time to do what's right.
We must work together.
What's right is to agree with my goal and "working together" means to work with me for my goal.
Eventually I get tired of waiting. They're in the way of goodness and justice.
They're in my way, because I want only goodness and justice.
They want not just a bad goal, they want only a bad goal. They're not just evil, they're wholly evil and failed to repent. They have forfeited any right to my empathy and mercy. It is a moral good to stop them. If I'm good, I must stop them.
They must be stripped of power and authority; I will revel in making them impotent. If that doesn't work, they must be stripped of any rights, they deserve no part of the "common good"; I will enjoy seeing them cast out, disenfranchised, that good may reign. Doing this is necessary for goodness and justice, so while this looks like oppression it's actually good and just. If may look like it benefits me and mine, but I'm altruistic--this is just an expression of my passion for what is good and just. After all, I'm good and just. They're so evil they're not really human. Not like me and mine.
It's one thing to work against individuals. But just as I'm fighting for justice and goodness for everybody that should have it, a whole group, so also the evil ones are part of a cohesive, uniform, monolithic group: Kill one, and another will take his place. The entire group must be dealt with, excised like a cancer. Re-education might work to help remove false-consciousness and restore a proper sense of patriotism and loyalty.
And if that doesn't work, they must be stripped of life. We kill dogs, those people aren't human so we can kill them, too. By killing them, disposing of their group, I am asserting and reinforcing my sense of goodness and justice. At the very least, it's a morally neutral act.
Death is life. Oppression is liberty. Genocide is the common good. Democracy is one party rule with an iron hand. Freedom of expression is truly found when there's only agreement.
And so you can love kids and give them candy even as you sentence tens of thousands of them to die in misery of starvation in the streets, and even make it a crime to help them, the children of the bourgeoisie. Since their death is good, the only sleep you'd lose at night is from rejoicing that you're not like the sinners, exulting at being on the right side of history.
Instead of "human," put in any kind of tribe or group affiliation you like. Communist. Bourgeoisie. Hutu. Tutsi. Shona. Mayan. White settler. Muslim or Xian or Buddhist. Jew. Alawite. Islamist or Muslim-Brotherhood member. Xian fundie. Serb and Albanian.
This handles Hitler. It handles Stalin. The Jacobins. Pol Pot. And the N. Vietnamese education camps. It handles Rwanda and the Sudan. It handles the shootings in Egypt over the summer as well as the ANC and Inkatha and Botha in the '80s. Irgun. PLO. Hamas. Anti-Jewish pogroms; anti-Xian pogroms. It accounts for my sadistic PhD dept., who destroyed students who failed to follow the "party line". The worst "fanatics" are often fairly normal people put in positions of prominence and who see themselves endowed with a nimbus. Their moral certainty attracts followers. And it's really important when they're exposed as evil that they no longer be vieweable as "normal" in any way--they must always have clearly been seen as monsters. Retcon as needed to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Mandela said he made mistakes. Early on he was at the "kill in the name of goodness and justice" phase. He was one of those "fu#%ers" then, just one with little power (but the same mindset) and then no power, in jail. Some still think that phase was a good thing and find ways of justifying things that should keep them awake at night. Mandela (unlike his wife) backed off of that abomination and earned my respect. He had a goal--the common good--and wasn't afraid to revise the means to achieve it. In the end he focused on rehumanizing, not dehumanizing.
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