Yeah I don’t disagree with that. There were studies done on Nazi psychology after World War II that attempted to tease out what was peculiar about the German mind and they found out that there wasn’t anything really. At the turn of the 20th century, if you had asked a European which country was the most likely to commit a holocaust against Jews, they would have said France, which was much more virulent in its Antisemitism.

The Nazis who were truly monstrous and reveled in cruelty were a much smaller portion of the population that could not have done what they did without the casual antisemites or the merely indifferent.

I don’t think my mother’s racism is benign. With her vote she perpetuates the system, but I still love her obviously.