You don't have to think both sides are morally or rationally the same to have empathy for both sides. The alternative is either mass slaughter or mass displacement, at the extremes. You can't eliminate your "enemy" without either murdering/displacing them or somehow coming to terms with them (ideally, being friends with them). MLK got this right, and he was able to say this without compromising in one iota his stances on social justice, class justice, etc.
Back in 1939 the world decided they had enough of my ancestors (I'm German) and put a stop to bigotry by using force. These days, such views can get you elected to US Presidency.
What a goddamn shame.
Because if you don't, why should they have empathy for you?
The paradox of tolerance is not a novel idea, and people from Plato to Popper have chewed through it, and it is pretty much incontrovertible by now that the only way that a society can remain open and tolerant is to not tolerate intolerance.
That is literally NOT what Popper says. Your own link refutes that point in Popper's own words.
"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering"
It is one's own choice to believe in hateful ideology like racism, sexism or transphobia. No one forces anyone to believe in any kind of ideology - therefore the focus and the blame should be on the people who willingly decide to believe hateful ideology (and, obviously, the spreaders of such ideology).
The US has been willing to go to war to fight the Nazi regime. For me, it is inconceivable how wide swaths of the US could have ended up with welcoming the successors of the Nazi ideology, not even a century later.
Still, they are people that should have compassion, that you can call onto.
> No one forces anyone to believe in any kind of ideology
I think you don't understand the common working of religious societies very well, or people in general that would not allow their beliefs to be questioned or think in absolutes.
The people who spent their early adulthood shooting at literal nazis generally held beliefs that would have the group you endorse in your profile calling them nazis today.
I'm not sure how you can call the current quibbling about race ethnicity "the successors of the Nazi ideology". Ignoring the "believes in literal superiority of one race" types who are a rounding error, most of the people getting called racist today say things that 1990s sociologists would have published without thinking twice.
The guys in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us"? A Presidential candidate (and later President) openly mocking a disabled person on stage? Said President who sees immigrants as a threat and has no problem being backed by literal white supremacists, antisemites and KKK members? Who made first popularity with spreading the myth that Barack Obama was not a citizen of the US? Who openly called for the illegal locking up of a political opponent? Who disrespected the freedom of the press and the independence of the legislative and judicial branch that forms the pillar of a democratic society? Who invited if not outright ordered his backers to disrupt and prevent the orderly transition of power to his democratically elected successor? Who continually and baselessly accused vote fraud?
The Trump Presidency, its campaign and its voter base was and is filled with Nazi ideology at its core.
The Holocaust did not happen over night, it built upon years of dismantling the democracy of the Weimar Republic. The Nazis took power in 1933, the Holocaust began in 1941 - that's eight years.
> But, hey, the president apparently mocked someone. Seriously? That is included in your comparison to nazis?
The Nazi ideology was based upon declaring people unworthy of the right to live - and disabled people actually were murdered prior to the Jews ("Aktion T4" and others).
I'm not going to call Trump a full-blown Nazi, but the parallels between his Presidency and the years both prior and past 1933 are clearly present. Especially the part with fanatic supporters willing to commit murder and violence in the streets for their ideology. "Never again" especially means to prevent what led to the Holocaust in the first place.
Trump was overwhelmingly popular in Israel, and notorious literal white nationalist Richard Spencer endorsed Biden in 2020.
Because it's easier to stop them believing that, if you understand why they're doing that in the first place. And understanding why they might believe that, is empathy.
Because people disagree about factual matters all the time, and if you're just going to fight people who disagree with you, you'll be fighting literally everyone for the rest of your life, and a stable society might well become untenable.
> Back in 1939 the world decided they had enough of my ancestors (I'm German) and put a stop to bigotry by using force.
That's a pretty weird take. You think countries fought Germany because of its bigotry, and not because it was an aggressive expansionist regime that invaded them?
The trend that I see as most damaging is denialism as a mainstream philosophy. Denialism leads to distrust and fuels libertarinism, which, by it's very design, is a philosophy of decohesion.
The beginnings of my education on denial came from people fighting one of the largest denialist projects in history, but the strategies across all forms of denial are very similar. It's worth studying in-depth: