#yes i realize highlighting like 80% of the page defeats the purpose of highlighting

[cabinetofotherthings]

From Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin:

[ID: The victims were people; a true identification with them would involve grasping their lives rather than grasping their deaths. By definition the victims are dead, and unable to defend themselves from the use that others make of their deaths. It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims. It is less appealing, but morally urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might be a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. Outstanding politicians and intellectuals — For example, Edvard Beneš and Ilya Ehrenberg — yielded to this temptation during the war. The Czechoslovak president and the Soviet Jewish writers were justifying revenge upon the Germans as such. People who called others subhuman were themselves subhuman. Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.

To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.

To dismiss the Nazis or Soviets as beyond human concern or historical understanding is to fall into their moral trap. The safer route is to realize that their motives for mass killing, however revolting to us, made sense to them.]