There is active evil, and there is the passive kind. Separating our self-identity from the first is easy for Americans to do. Nobody wants to be called a Nazi, a Klansman, or an antisemite, and the average American decries acts of overtly racist violence and brazenly authoritarian philosophies.
Passive evil, however, is far more insidious and dangerous because it spreads easily. When governments put resources behind it, it emboldens neighbors into becoming bullies and, if taken far enough, murderers. This is one of the urgent themes threading through Ken Burns' latest opus, "The U.S. and the Holocaust," a six-hour examination of the ways that the United States' neutrality during Adolph Hitler's psychopathic rampage across Europe contributed to the mass murder of six million European Jews.
