Reply #7: Well, these kinds of people appear everywhere in our history books

[Time for change]

Whereas it's difficult to imagine such evil in every day life, for one who reads a lot of history they shouldn't be too difficult to believe in.

And you hit the nail on the head when you said "The very things they do not stand for are promoted as what they do stand for". These kinds of people must at least give off the appearance of being decent, because of they actually told the truth about what they do and what they think they would make it easy for people to hate them. But people don't want to believe such things about their government, so they deny to themselves what's going on, or they just don't take the time to inform themselves.