War & Peace Quote by Ernst Zundel

The line is engineered to launder extremism through a familiar moral script. Zundel opens with a performative concession - “I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy” - a wink meant to signal reasonableness while refusing the obvious. It’s the classic tactic of minimization: acknowledge a little so you can deny a lot. The phrase “choir boy” turns industrial genocide into a question of personal peccadilloes, shrinking history to the scale of bad manners.

Then comes the real move: “let him who was innocent... cast the first stone.” By borrowing Jesus’s admonition against self-righteous judgment, Zundel tries to reframe accountability as hypocrisy. The subtext isn’t humility; it’s paralysis. If everyone is implicated, no one is guilty. Moral clarity becomes moral vanity, and condemnation of Hitler is recast as sanctimonious posturing rather than an ethical baseline.

The context matters because Zundel is not a neutral commentator musing about wartime complexity; he’s a far-right activist known for Holocaust denial and propaganda battles that tested free-speech boundaries in Canada and beyond. Read in that light, the quote is a strategic fog machine. It smuggles in an equivalence between the Nazi project and the morally messy realities of total war, inviting the listener to slide from “no one was innocent” to “maybe the crimes were exaggerated,” to “maybe judgment is illegitimate.”

It works rhetorically because it offers audiences an easy off-ramp from discomfort: swap condemnation for “balance,” outrage for “nuance.” The result isn’t historical sophistication; it’s moral disarmament dressed up as piety.