I do think those things can be believed and I do think that if a person admits that what they did is wrong and feels even a modicum of remorse, then it mitigates how I respond to their actions.
People have horrible, abusive relationships within their family units all the time. And other people behave in ways that are actually damaging to an even wider circle, their community, their professional community, their country or the world as a whole.
When I think of Kazan's response to the criticism, it really does remind of Leni Riefenstahl. There is no disputing that Triumph of the Will was a major cinematic achievement. But it was ALSO Nazi propaganda, an extreme example, perhaps, but illustrative of why I believe that all art is inherently political and can not be de-politicized merely be considering an entire body of it.
This was from the Kirkus review of books of Leni Riefenstahl's autobiography, and it seems as if her line of logic really did run in a parallel path to Kazan's:
"A sad and stupendously flat reminiscence by the doyenne of the German cinema, who even now seems unwilling to admit that she backed the wrong horse in 1933.... After the war, she was imprisoned briefly, and has been something of a pariah in the international film industry ever since. Here, she attempts to rehabilitate herself in the eyes of the world and to assert that her identity as an artist subsumed her political inclinations (which, if she's to be believed, were quite ambivalent toward Nazism). Hard to swallow, even with a grain of salt."
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