You claim I'm giving too much weight to public opinion. But you're not giving any at all.
Public opinion is irrelevant when judging the morality of the practice at hand (segregation, slavery etc.). It is not--at least not entirely--irrelelevant when judging people associated in some way with that practice in thought or deed (for example, George Washington and slavery).
I just fundamentally disagree. I don't know how you can say "slavery is bad, but not all slavers are bad". Like that just doesn't compute with me.
Like lying is bad, but that doesn't make every liar a terrible person.
But slavery is so extreme in its evil that yes, I think everyone who owned a slave is a terrible person.
Would you agree that every child molester is a terrible person?
And the Nazi analogy is a false one. It's not even clear that most Germans did hate Jews. Other than Daniel Goldhagen (who was roundly criticized by historians), I don't think anyone writing about the period has seriously argued that most Germans were anti-Semitic on the level of Hitler, Himmler, etc.
The Holocaust could not have happened without the consent of the German people.
With all due respect, you seem to have a very simplistic black and white way of thinking. I explained my reasoning about this multiple times and instead of addressing what I've said you just come back with your same old argument. If you don't actually engage what the other person says, it's a sign your attitude isn't really based on logic and/or that you're not open to other points of view. So be it. I don't see the point of going back and forth about this any longer.
To address the other things you've said in this post:
Lying is NOT inherently bad. It depends on what is being lied about and the reasons for the lying.
The child molester analogy doesn't work at all. No culture I know of condones child molestation--on the contrary, it is strongly condemned. A child molester cannot claim to be engaging in behavior that, even if wrong, is largely or at least broadly accepted. This is a major difference with slavery in the colonies and the pre-Civil War U.S.
If you're going to claim that Germans as a whole supported the Holocaust, you need evidence to back up that claim. Just like someone who claims that LBJ was behind JFK's assassination needs to support that with evidence. These are very serious accusations. The extent to which Germans as a whole knew about the Holocaust is a very controversial topic, and I suspect it always will be. Certainly a substantial number of individual Germans--and other Europeans--not only knew about it but willingly participated. But that is very different from saying that
most knew, let alone that most approved. Again, an assertion of that nature very much needs evidence to back it up.
