“On Tyranny” - Chapter 7: "Be reflective if you must be armed"
"If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no." Snyder opens with a historical look back at the special riot and secret police forces used by authoritarian regimes. Reference is made to their employment in the Great Terror in the Soviet Union and the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime. What he emphasizes is that the Nazi SS and the Soviet NKVD didn't act with out support. "Without the assistance of regular police forces, and sometimes regular soldiers, they could not have killed on such a large scale." Moreover, the NKVD might have been the most well-organized of any mass killing group. It was centralized and the officers "recorded 682,691 executions of supposed enemies of the state, most of them peasants or members of national minorities." These executions might have been carried out...