This tweet was deleted but I still had it open so I recorded it to upload the video here. The text is "One difference between Putin and Hitler is that Hitler didn't kill ethnic Germans, German-speaking people. Putin slaughters the very people he said he has come to liberate." The tweet is archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220312133529/https://nitter.net/MaddowBlog/status/1502499687290617856, McFaul actually doubled down and tried to justify this before Maddow deleted the tweet (10 hours later, after 1.9M views): https://web.archive.org/web/20220312142811/https://nitter.net/McFaul/status/1502640208692617217, https://web.archive.org/web/20220312144654/https://nitter.net/McFaul
Hitler is the baseline for “evil” to a lot of people. So everything is a comparison to Hitler, and how evil he was. Therefore when they say “even Hitler didn’t do ‘that’” what they’re trying to say is this current action by such and such person is even more evil than Hitler, who is of course the most evil person they can imagine.
For some reason a lot of people feel an irresistible but completely necessary urge to contextualize Hitler which I don’t understand.
Hitler is the baseline for “evil” to a lot of people. So everything is a comparison to Hitler, and how evil he was. Therefore when they say “even Hitler didn’t do ‘that’” what they’re trying to say is this current action by such and such person is even more evil than Hitler, who is of course the most evil person they can imagine.