I think what they’re saying is: “just because that’s the way it was, we should not treat it as if it was acceptable.”

I fully agree. Just because we can explain why normal people were more pessemistic and dead inside does not magically make recent history anthropology. They were people with emotions, and produced children and continued the trauma, and those children are still largely alive today.

Their misery is directly connected to the present’s history, and taking pity on them does less than nothing for solving the problems that produced them or the problems they persisted. It literally disarms your critical mind in favor of what could be misconstrued as sympathetic dismissal of the underlying concerns.