Без названия

I've already touched on one point: the contradiction between Itachi's attitude toward his own and others. Own raked out of Itachi everything bad the young man had hidden deep within his soul. Others knew Itachi as a gentle and noble individual, avoiding permanent harm to others and never slandering anyone. Asuma and Kurenai were barely injured by their encounter, Kakashi dusted himself off after Tsukuyomi and moved on, Hiruzen and Danzo, his clan's murderers and kekkei genkai thieves, weren't met with a single ill word. As the saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. The Uchiha clan had the misfortune of becoming Itachi enemies.

An unmovable object. He became firmly established in his views at an extremely early age, finding fault with his own family for his greatest fear—war. He exterminated the culprits. Despite living for a considerable time among anarchists, witnessing with his own eyes the victims of Konoha's war machine, he never changed his convictions one iota. He never moved an inch toward understanding that as long as people remain numerous and diverse, as long as they fear and envy, and crave solutions to their problems at others' expense, wars will never end. We credit Itachi with his rigidity and narrow-mindedness.

Unmet consequences. Let's imagine the clan wasn't completely exterminated. Let's imagine that Hiruzen does have some semblance of a conscience, and, horrified by what he's done, he stops Danzo and those two old reptiloids whose names I never can remember from slaughtering the survivors. And so they dwell in the deserted Uchiha compound, silent and shocked, wondering for the thousandth time what possessed Madara to make a pact with the Senju in the first place, and what the hell they should do next. And then Itachi appears among them. In what capacity? Perhaps he's the chief overseer of the despised rebels who were graciously spared their lives. Or perhaps, on the contrary, he was expelled from the ANBU for his insufficient efficiency in carrying out orders. And now he's forced to make eye contact every day with those who… Ah, forget it. Never happened, and never will.

He chose the strong over the weak. This is not a sin, of course; it is very human trait. The psyche seeks an anchor, a safe haven. Confronting the family proved psychologically safer than even thinking about destroying the status quo, going against those in power. Itachi saw the solution for the weak in becoming even weaker, in abandoning their absurd ambitions.

Narrative elevation. The victims are villanized, the man who fought for justice and retribution is ridiculed and criminalized, the murderers are elevated and ennobled. Note that not a single person killed during the Uchiha massacre was resurrected through the Edo Tensei to speak out, but Itachi, Hiruzen, Danzo, Hashirama and Tobirama are given the opportunity to speak freely and rationalize their actions.

One of the main takes in Naruto fandom is this: Itachi is the best Uchiha because he was immune to the "curse of hatred." It's safe to say that Itachi (intelligence of a Hokage at age seven, a history studies, freedom from the clan politics clutches, as we khow) was familiar with 'curse of hatred' narrative, and even internalized it. During a confrontation with Sasuke at the inn, while strangling him, Itachi taunts him with the words, "You don't have enough hate." The common perception is that Itachi seeks to awake Sasuke's hatred towards himself. This is not entirely fair. These words are far more direct than is commonly believed; Itachi taunts Sasuke because he is an Uchiha, and like every Uchiha, he is afflicted by the "curse of hatred," like a grave illness. Even if Itachi doesn't harbor personal hatred, he participates in the cycle of its reproduction, turning the handle of the meat grinder in which Sasuke's personality and fate are ground into mincemeat of hatred and despair. Itachi despises the clan as a multifaceted yet monolithic enemy, the bearer of a hostile ideology harmful to his homeland and its security—and, as a result, he despises Sasuke - and yes, himself.

His disdain for Sasuke is clearly evident during their fatal battle. Instead of talking to his now-mature brother about what's important to him as a human being ("Sasuke, politics sucks, it's terrible that our family has fallen victim to political squabbles, but serving the Homeland is not the same as serving politicians"—and God knows, it would have been very appropriate for Itachi to draw this distinction, because it's far from obvious in canon), Itachi follows the script he's written; the mise-en-scène is well-orchestrated (abandoned refuge of a lost bloodline, a stone throne), the actors are throughly prepared, and aesthetics trumps truth.

With his penultimate act of will, Itachi executes himself at Sasuke's hands—not as the murderer of his own clan, but as an Uchiha, a representative of a despised bloodline who selfishly favors his own people over strangers. With his final act of will, he sets a trap for Obito: anyone who attempts to destroy for Sasuke the worldview in which Konoha is the highest value, must burn before his gaze in the Amaterasu fires. Itachi dies with a smile on his lips: he is at peace with the outcome. Sasuke, with his imperfect Sharingan, is still a weak fighter, and he has received clear evidence of this. This Sasuke is firmly caught in a dialectical trap: he either returns to Konoha and faithfully serves it to the best of his ability, or becomes recreant and then destroyed by Konoha's forces due to his weakness. If he chooses to increase his strength and implants Itachi's Sharingan, his will will be shattered by Kotoamatsukami when he meets Naruto. From the perspective of Itachi's arrogant fanaticism, this is a perfect plan that fails only because his calculating abilities are limited.

As for the answer to the question Sasuke desperately and hopefully seeks from Itachi at every confrontation, it's far more prosaic. Sasuke survived because it perfectly aligned with Hiruzen's plans: to have a child with the Sharingan at Konoha's disposal, potentially capable of controlling the Nine-Tailed Fox, while simultaneously deprived of the clan's support and vulnerable to the Will of Fire indoctrination. This plan, too, didn't work perfectly, but the calculations were clear and pragmatic.