Anne Frank insisted on seeing the good in people, her illusions are forgivable.

“Illusions”?

As a straightforward mathematical expression, people must be, on the whole, benevolent. If they were not — if they were mostly malevolent — the species, as a whole likely would not have survived to this point. We would have killed each other in an escalating frenzy of a malevolent race to a very dark bottom. Maybe you’re right and we still might do so… but the very fact we haven’t yet done so tips the balance in favor of most people being good…

There were people who committed atrocities we know as the Shoah (calling it ‘the Holocaust’ isn’t right because holocaust is a deliberate burnt offering to G-d) but there were MANY MORE people who resisted and fought the Nazis. There were others who didn’t resist, but didn’t join also, preferring death to either complicity or hatred. There are many more who simply could not fathom the evil.

Think on that. Yes, there is denial: the straightforward choice of a refusal to believe the thing happened. There is also a perhaps greater number, with an inability to believe — not due to an underlying evil, but an overriding, if naive, goodness — that obtains.

I suppose it makes you feel good to rub their noses in the fact of evil and punish them for their naivete about the prevalance of evil, but their inability to see it isn’t necessarily a marker of any evil on their part.

That’s, in fact, what it means to be good.