It irked me that nobody in England seemed to grasp that Nazism had been about building a new world order based on the noble ideals I still found so satisfying. For it had not taken me many weeks in the country to discover that the English definition of Nazi could be summed up in a single word, ‘Jew-gasser’. That was so misguided, such a mistake. Yes, we were taught to despise Jews, but what English people didn’t seem to appreciate was that for Nazis like me everything to do with Jews had been a minor issue, that one could be a Nazi without ever seeing or thinking about Jews.
K. Fitzherbert, True to both my selves (1997), loc. 3630
I think about these kind of things a lot. The ability to see things selectively without even trying is underappreciated in historical (and political) analysis.
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