It’s weeks like this that I’m glad my bailiwick focuses on science and technology. There’s plenty of both-siderism in science, or poly-siderism for that matter that’s a big part of science; it’s arguably the whole point. To offer up ideas for debate and experiment, regroup, reformulate, and repeat. But perhaps spineless politicians and furious pundits could learn something from how that scientific process unfolds and converges to a conclusion. There comes a point, after enough experiments have been conducted, when mountains of data have been collected, when enough flurries of findings have been published and explanations debated, that one side is found to be wanting and another side is found to be right. And what matters, what helps or hurts a researcher’s academic reputation, isn’t that there were two or more sides to start with, it’s which side they were on.
There is no question that there are at least two sides to many issues. That holds true whether it’s settled with a polite argument or a deadly shootout. There were certainly two sides to D-day, some of the grisly consequences to one side are shown above: the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. No doubt scores of German defenders in the dunes and pillboxes above the beaches raining death down on those allied troops knew they were fighting for their lives, many of them surely did not want to be there, few if any of those soldiers caused the conflict or authored the terrible Nazi atrocities that would soon be brought to light. But given that there were two sides, which side would you choose to be on?
Well, the data has been collected, the research debated, and European fascism lost the argument in every measurable way. The unanimous consensus is Nazism was one of closest things to pure, unadulterated evil the 20th century would ever see. A movement so wicked that that evil transfers over in whole to anyone who clings to it in any form, or excuses it, or conceals it, or downplays it, or defends it to this day.
Donald Trump made his choice, to the great delight of the most deplorable hate groups in the US and around the world. It remains to be seen which side his fellow Republicans choose.