How would this have affected the judgment of the enlightened? We already know and have known for a long time: they would have made judgments on them that would be very different from the actual judgments that they make, judgments that would be much less condemning. This might seem wrong, at first. The anti-Nazi rhetoric is so strong among the enlightened that one might think that this just cannot be right. Nazis are Nazis, right? It shouldn’t matter where they come from. But it does matter. It matters very much.
Think about it. The Nazis were known for concentration camps, and during the past few years we have heard about concentration camps for Uighurs in China. How have the enlightened reacted? Their outrage is barely perceptible, which is quite astonishing given that the Uighurs are Muslims and given that during the past twenty years we have seen the enlightened bend over backwards to condemn any expression by people like me of hostility toward Muslims. So, while if I speak out against Muslims, I am condemned as an Islamophobe, the Chinese can throw them in concentration camps and never get called that. In fact, Americans have gotten into trouble for calling the virus the “Wuhan” virus, despite the fact that it is perfectly normal to talk about viruses in terms of their origin. So solicitous are the enlightened when it comes to sparing the feelings of the Chinese that they almost completely ignore the fact that they run these concentration camps. And have you heard of any demonstrations outside of Chinese embassies by the enlightened? I haven’t. One would have expected a fifty-million person strong march on it from those who are constantly condemning the Nazis, but somehow they couldn’t be bothered.
Likewise, when ISIS emerged with reports of them selling people into slavery, we heard nothing much from the enlightened. I never once heard of a demonstration against them. And more recently when we heard about the horrors of the Taliban, the enlightened went so far as to declare that Trump supporters were just as bad.
Apparently, being from the Third World is like having something like the “get out of jail free” card that one can use in the game of Monopoly. In this instance, it would be more accurately described as an “avoid all moral condemnation” card, and if you have such a card, you can pretty much do any heinous thing you like, and the enlightened here in the West will never protest. In fact, they might even do everything they can to empower you. We’ve seen this again and again with respect to how Muslims are treated by the enlightened. Things that ought to engender enormous amounts of condemnatory verbiage, such as throwing homosexuals off of tall buildings or trafficking non-Muslim girls in towns in northern England, instead generate ... crickets. Similarly, one might expect that the enlightened would side with the more enlightened Muslims against the less enlightened ones, but they actually seem to prefer the latter to the former. A few years back, for example, a liberal Muslim had to sue the Southern Poverty Law Center for declaring him Islamophobic (here).
For a long time I found this extremely confusing. I treat Nazis as Nazis wherever they are found. Ditto for fascists and reactionaries. Likewise, the communists of old (at least during my lifetime) treated any anti-communist as beyond the pale, even if they were black and from the Third World. But the vast numbers of enlightened people in our society have a completely different mindset, it seems. They will treat people here in the West who are to the right of them as Nazis (such as every Republican president since Nixon at least), despite their having no evidence for such claims, while ignoring the much stronger Nazi-like tendencies of some people in the Third World, despite their being aware of evidence for these tendencies from their own preferred media sources.
And of course we see the same tendencies among the enlightened here with respect to blacks. “They’re black, they’re dealing with racism, so we should go easy on them when they commit crimes. In fact, they should be allowed to steal things.” This ridiculous attitude is causing chaos in our more liberal cities to the point that even some liberals are complaining.
Finally, there was even a small movement in France that had similar inclinations toward the actual Nazis back in the 1930s. See here where I quoted a remarkable passage describing this episode from Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. Some leftists in France at that time wanted to be conciliatory toward the Nazis since it was felt that they had some legitimate gripes. Had they prevailed, we would be in a very different world, one much less enlightened and one much less inclined to accept the “Other.” Whatever the enlightened thought in such a world wouldn’t matter much because their numbers would be so small.
Let me just say that no matter how much it may seem that the enlightened view the Nazis as a sort of absolute in terms of moral evil, their views on the matter are much less settled than they’d like to think. Of course, that is to be expected from people who flirt with moral relativism.