I thought fascism would be less squalid than this

I learned about World War Two through family and movies and in class. I wasn’t especially worried. Humans learn from experience. We seldom mess up that badly twice, I figured - or, at least, not on any kind of scale.

The battles of that time didn’t interest me, machinery grinding its bloody way over the theoretical lines on maps. The specifics of the politics, the names of the ones who ordered the machinery, interested me only a little more.

I was more intrigued by the morality of it: the big forces that bring humans to act a kind of way, and the little resistances that some will find the courage to mount in defiance. One religious education schoolteacher or other - I don’t remember who - taught our class of teenagers about Father Maximilian Kolbe, who would be canonised after the war. He’d been killed in Auschwitz, where he’d ministered to the dying and the soon-to-be. As a punishment on the prisoners, the guards one day chose ten men to starve to death. A chosen man fell to his knees: he had a family, he wept. Kolbe volunteered to replace the man. As the ten died their excruciating deaths, Kolbe led them in hymns.

The teacher’s story helped me understand that the good guys are noble. Right and wrong are stark to them, morality comes easy. When the bad guys arrive, the good guys know what to do and will do it: that much was clear.

And all this convinced me that the bad guys would be easy enough to recognise. They might be torturers and tormentors, egregious: people who’d relinquished their humanity with a shrug of shoulders bearing epaulettes, perhaps in exchange for the filling of their dismal pockets. Or they might be buffoons, goose-stepping to the beat of a mindless drum. Or they’d be cowards. Whatever. They would not be me or mine.

The bad guys would be from bad guy countries. I would be in a good guy country, safe and sane. A line on a map could be drawn between these different types of countries, good and bad; and since I lived in an island nation at the bottom of the world, no machinery could be expected to violate my place, rumble across those theoretical lines around my home.

That was how it was back then, for me at least. I imagined the threat as machines carrying nations’ flags; not algorithms infused with hate, or the vanity and greed of men who feed off of them - setting their cosmetically-altered jaws in contempt against the rest of us, raising soft hands in televised salutes.

In my good guy country, I was taught, we knew better, and people and things would be OK. Our democratic institutions. Our Tiriti. The care we kiwis have for one another. Our dignity. My trans son. The bad guys would be as easy to spot as they would be to judge; and the good guys wouldn’t hesitate to judge them.

To be fair, I was half right: the bad guys are obvious enough, as least as much now as back then.

It’s the good guys I sometimes struggle to tell.