Perhaps the best way to understand the intellectual deformations of anti-Semitism or the psychologies of those who serve totalitarian regimes is through literary explorations like Kafka’s. But for those who prefer the historical method, it’s hard to do much better than the careful works of Richard J. Evans, who recently wrote Hitler’s People, a study of the 22 high-ranking Nazis closest to Führer. Josef Joffe writes in his review:

Evans stays sober. Hitler was “neither a political nor a military genius.” Perhaps. Yet his record was quite impressive. A man who molded a disheveled, rudderless [Nazi party] into the mightiest party machine of his time. He demolished his rivals within, outfoxed the West in the runup to World War II, conquered almost all of Europe, and made it to the gates of Moscow.

Was German anti-Semitism the engine of his rise? Actually, there was less Jew-hatred in the Kaiserreich, [the German regime of 1871 to 1918] than in France (recall the Dreyfus Affair). Was it the humiliation inflicted by the victors of World War I? By 1925 Germany was back at the table, scoring diplomatic wins east and west. The Depression? It spewed forth fascism in Italy and Eastern Europe—no Teutons needed. Complicit in the Holocaust, Poles and Ukrainians did not have to read Mein Kampf.

Books like Hitler’s People and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners are helpful guides, though these, too, do not crack the cosmic puzzle.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”