Wannabe camp guards indeed. It was a sickening and sobering realization as an adult.
— William Pannapacker writing as @WernerTwertzog
You and I are biologically the same as people who became Nazis; we have the same potential in us. When we imagine we are not is when we do wrong. Lots of ordinary Germans; smart, sophisticated people; and other people in many countries supported the Nazis.
At the same time, the people who embrace Naziism, or go along, or tacitly allow it, also have good in them. A tactic of such ideologies is a display of aggression, to scare you off; it's a political tactic that solidifies their movement by distancing members from everyone else; it also dehumanizes outsiders (also through disdain from them), allowing violence. In the end, it's a tactic, a display, a barking, scared dog. It may bite, but they are the same as we are, and have the same good inside, and have allowed themselves to be misled.
The classic citation is to Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil':
The point of WW2 propaganda was to demonzie Nazis so much, and to distance them so much from the likes of you, me or your neighbour, in order to dehumanzie them in order to justify going to war with them and make killing them easier on the psyche for those who had to pull the trigger or send their sons on the battlefield to die fighting them, becasue in WW1 they discovered humans don't naturally want to kill other humans and will hesitate to pull the trigger making them shit soldiers, but if you demonzie and dehumanize the enemy enough, that hesitation loosens.
It's basic war propaganda 1-0-1. You now just realized Nazis are literally everywhere, not just in 1939 Germany.
It's also why certain groups respond very lively when you call them by their true name: they are utterly in denial about their possible futures give or take an unlucky turn of events or two. The veneer is very thin. You find them in the halls of politics, in the police force, in the armed forces, in the offices of just about any company, at your local soccer club and just about everywhere else. And none of them is going to come out to admit it. I seriously wonder how big a fraction of a society has the subscribe to this kind of ideology before it is unavoidable that it will be expressed but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was well under 50%.
This is like saying that people are offended when called racial slurs because there's some truth to what the slur means.
Racial slurs attack an individual’s personhood - calling out people’s bigotry criticizes their choices and behavior.
It is not anywhere near the same thing.
I don't think that follows. Or rather, it might be true, but I'm not sure it's meaningful. I'm a pretty peaceable individual, generally wish good things for others, consider people as individuals, etc. I stay away from political activism. I would still be pretty upset if someone called me a Nazi.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, offensive terms tend to be offensive regardless of the underlying reason. When someone gets upset about it, you can't infer that it's because you struck close to home --- it could be utter indignation about the injustice of the situation, or something else entirely.