Yes but plenty of people become regressive as they get older, other older people are suffering from dementia and their personality can literally become that of their younger self, or they no longer stay polite and spout whatever they think.
My mom told me when she was in school in the late 40’s a teacher told her whole class openly that black people came from white women who were raped by gorillas, as if it was a fact. I could easily see kids being influenced by that.
One of Jon Haidt’s moral touchstones is loyalty to ones “own kind”. If the man in a white non-nazi, then both people of color and nazi’s are “the other”. It is a case of “My ______, right or wrong!”
This point of morality is one (just one) of the big differences between liberals and conservatives. Loyalty is far more important to Conservatives. It is one of the reasons that it is hard to get liberals to present unified opposition to conservatives.
Damn nazi’s.
Just because two groups agree on one thing, doesn’t mean they have to like each other. You can hate Nazis without being opposed to everything Nazis believe. You can agree with a group’s goals, but not with the methods they use or advocate to achieve those goals. You can even hate the group, if you think their methods are particularly heinous. For example, I think it would be good to reduce the number of homeless dogs and cats. That doesn’t mean I would necessarily like a group that advocates putting poison out to kill feral cats.
Racial and group hatred is often not rational. If it’s not rational, why should you expect it to be logically consistent? It’s like expecting a basketball game to follow the rules of golf.
It is also a misconception, almost a mythology, that surviving the Holocaust (or any vast and devastating tragedy) makes you into a person with a lot of insight into the human condition. I suppose that’s a natural assumption if you don’t know a lot of survivors personally, since certain extremely famous writers have reflected deeply on their Holocaust experiences (Primo Levi, etc).
However, there is a certain element of luck involved in surviving. The survivors are a cross section of everyone. A good bit of the time, it just makes you a person with extremely profound and painful unexplored issues. Depression, and anxiety are common even in elderly Holocaust survivors. This study reports that Some survivors experience the move into an old age home as a repetition of their experiences of deportation and imprisonment. People protecting their own wounds can say a lot of vile shit about others without giving it a second thought.
Maybe he’s angry the Nazis made racism look so terrible by taking it to its logical conclusion.
It’s possible for a garden-variety racist to be OK with a specific minority, if they had positive interactions with them in the past. Did he ever date or love or marry a Jewish woman? Did he have a Jewish nanny or babysitter or family friend who was a really good person? That could explain why Nazism bothers him so much, but he’s still very racist wrt people of non-Jewish ethnicities.
But also, the dementia thing brought up earlier could be a major factor.
I doubt its dementia.
He’s always been like this.
everytime I visit, he cries over some patriotic purpose; and simultaneously lambasts non-europeans with sickening vitriol. He’s been like this as long as I’ve known him ~30 years.
I don’t see the irrationality. The Nazis are much more racist than he is. He’s okay with his level of racism, but not the level where you start putting them in extermination camps. Is it really news that not all racists are okay with genocide?
Just because many of us want to get rid of all racism doesn’t mean that all racism is equal.
His problem isn’t with ‘racism’; his problem is with Nazis. And, he has another problem with interracial couples. He didn’t fight, (if he was in the war) against the racists: he fought against the German political system of the time, which was Nazis.
Any man who cries about this stuff is pretty strange to begin with, however, so you may want to plan accordingly.
Hey, everybody, Eve’s in denial!
Just joking. Hey, everybody,** Eve’s** not in denial!
It’s called a “Russian” <-- Racist and anti-Nazi, a country full of them.
