I’m unable to serve an administration that enables the atrocities in Gaza, so I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State, writes Annelle Sheline.
“Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor. … If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.” -Tim Snyder
(I’m not necessarily saying you’re wrong – I think it depends and I absolutely think there are times when staying and minimizing the damage is the right thing to do. But without really knowing much more than what she said, I sympathize with her quite a lot in her “fuck this, fuck my career, I can’t possibly be a party to this anymore”.)
Unfortunately, that’s an oversimplification of how the Nazi got their way; they worked more like a conspiracy under a legal umbrella.
Civil servants were mostly kept in the dark, lawyers got circumvented with mobs and summary executions, only a handful of doctors were aware of what was going on, businessmen… are everywhere, still fine with convicts working for scraps… only select trusted bureaucrats were ever involved with paperwork directly involving murder.
The Nazi weren’t harder pressed, because the general sentiment of the society was willing to explain away any criticism… and I’m afraid humanity hasn’t fully learned the lesson yet; plenty of present day societies harbor similar sentiments, and are equally easy to weaponize.
“Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor. … If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.” -Tim Snyder
(I’m not necessarily saying you’re wrong – I think it depends and I absolutely think there are times when staying and minimizing the damage is the right thing to do. But without really knowing much more than what she said, I sympathize with her quite a lot in her “fuck this, fuck my career, I can’t possibly be a party to this anymore”.)
Unfortunately, that’s an oversimplification of how the Nazi got their way; they worked more like a conspiracy under a legal umbrella.
Civil servants were mostly kept in the dark, lawyers got circumvented with mobs and summary executions, only a handful of doctors were aware of what was going on, businessmen… are everywhere, still fine with convicts working for scraps… only select trusted bureaucrats were ever involved with paperwork directly involving murder.
The Nazi weren’t harder pressed, because the general sentiment of the society was willing to explain away any criticism… and I’m afraid humanity hasn’t fully learned the lesson yet; plenty of present day societies harbor similar sentiments, and are equally easy to weaponize.