This is an extreme example of the excuses being harder to quit than the thing itself: Irish neutrality has ended, but the excuses made for it still haunt this earth. Here's the brief article I'd like to draw your attention to:
LINK: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-1.409461
In the midst of that article you'll find the remarkable phrase "One side was as bad as the other" —a uniquely Irish attitude toward World War Two that I still encounter in Newfoundland today. This dismissive attitude is not the same as outright Neo-Nazi-ism, but it has created the basis for the peculiar kind of antisemitism now prevalent in Ireland (and amongst those who think of themselves as Irish in Canada, to some extent).
During WW2, the Irish government did not allow the public to have any knowledge of the then-ongoing holocaust, as part of a policy of "neutrality" that can indeed be glossed as passive support for the Nazis. It also established the pretense that (i) the Irish, in their victimhood, are morally superior to the British Empire, but also (ii) the whole world outside of Ireland cannot possibly be worse than the British Empire. As the linked-to article shows, this "logic" was extended to both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
The Irish Press told its readers in April 1943, "There is no kind of oppression visited on any minority in Europe which the Six-County nationalists [of Ireland] have not also endured."
Moral superiority, alas, does not result from the things we do not do, and wisdom does not result from the things we do not know: the Irish have confused moral ignorance with morality, thinking action inferior to the purity of inaction. Neutrality justified by ignorance of evil soon starts to justify both ignorance and evil for the sake of that neutrality.
