FBI Director James Comey. Photo: Carl Cox / ADL.

It is vital that power be “overseen and constrained,” the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told the Anti-Defamation League on Monday at its annual national leadership conference.

“It is our duty, regardless of race, religion or ideology — it is our obligation to refuse to let darkness win,” FBI Director James Comey told the crowd at The Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. “It is our obligation not to let evil hold the field.”

The Holocaust, Comey went on to say, was the “most significant event in human history” because “although it was a display of inhumanity that defies words, I believe it was also the most horrific display of our humanity imaginable — a display of our true capacity for evil and moral surrender.”

“And that… demonstration of humanity,” Comey noted, “is the reason we require every FBI agent and every analyst in training to come to the Holocaust Museum, because we want them to learn about abuse of power on a breathtaking scale. But we want them to confront something more painful and more frightening. We want them to see humanity. We want them to look into humanity’s mirror and see what we are capable of. We want them to see that although the slaughter of the Holocaust was led by sick and evil people, those sick and evil leaders were joined by and followed by people who loved their families, who took soup to sick neighbors, who went to church, who gave to charity — good people.”

“Good people helped murder millions and that’s the most frightening lesson of all – that our very humanity is capable of convincing itself that ‘We have to do this,’ ‘It’s the right thing to do,’” he continued. “And that should frighten all of us.”

“We want them to walk out of that great museum treasuring the constraint of oversight of divided government, the restriction of the rule of law and the binding of a free and vibrant press,” Comey said.