“On Tyranny” - Chapter 5: “Remember professional ethics”

This injunction is targeted for professionals in various areas of law, medicine, and politics. It might seem abstruse to many - it did for me, at least on the first read or two - but it speaks to a larger and deeper ethical framework that is supposed to underpin these professions.

Snyder points out how valuable lawyers were to the Third Reich in implementing perception, mass murder, and genocide. The ability to maintain a facade of professional legitimacy in the face of immoral acts of the highest order and broadest reach is integral to ensuring an enthusiastic, if not merely complacent, populace.

Rather like the Milgram Experiment, all it takes is the voice of an authority to wipe away conscience and shore up one’s belief that what they are doing is right.

Snyder recounts how businessmen were all in in the construction of the camps, how lawyers crafted the annexation of Austria and the Netherlands, and how, most damningly, physicians put away the Hippocratic oath to perform some of the worst tortures and medical atrocities on victims in numbers we cannot fathom.

Aside from the current run of politicians who are also members of the American Bar Association, what other professions can we see supporting the regime in ways that are devastating to the polity? How about doctors? To be sure, there aren’t likely any carrying out forced sterilizations or performing experiments on the brain as crudely as what many of the Nazi physicians did at the behest of the state, but one has to question any physician who supports the regime, in any way, knowing that funds for research, for hospitals, and medical relief around the world and domestically are being frozen or interfered with as I write this.

(This is not to say that forced sterilization and horrible medical acts haven’t been carried out at the State’s request here in the United States; only that we now can imagine a much wider scope of the same later under a hostile regime more easily than ever.)

How about IT professionals who are willing to illegally extract the private data of hundreds of millions of Americans at the request of a “special government employee”? In the cases I have in mind, these aren’t “professionals” according to anyone’s definition, but we don’t have to look much farther than to see the complicity of IT multinationals like Google, Amazon, and Meta to see how quickly any sense of restraint or professional ethics is swept under the carpet for additional profit and favorable treatment under the regime.

When bad actors know where you leave, what your spending habits are, where you go and with whom, you may say that’s no big deal; I haven’t done anything wrong. But you misunderstand how fascism works. If there is a connection with someone who is, how shall we say, unfriendly to the state or if you’ve donated to programs or institutions out of favor with the regime, you are not free from retribution. And you may never know why your credit rating has tanked, why your insurance rate just went up, or why your children are no longer wanted in the school district. I can think of worst scenarios, but here’s a lesson from long ago to bear in mind.

I was having lunch with a professor of history at Harvard in 1989. Dr. Brown and I were discussing how history would judge the Reagan administration and he was unsparing in his analysis. He also underscored that a callous or vindictive regime will engage in harassment of those deemed enemies or non-cooperative. His back story was this: he was a classmate of Henry Kissinger’s and they became fairly good friends until the Vietnam War escalated.

When the bombing of Cambodia began and when Nixon told the country that whatever the president is legal, Professor Brown called Kissinger up and lit into him. He approached him on the abuse of professional ethics, but primarily on the immorality of the war in general, Kissinger’s part in it, and the betrayal of the country’s values. I sat there stunned.

I asked him what Kissinger said and he replied that Kissinger was affable and polite and they never spoke again. However, the professor was audited annually until Kissinger was no longer Secretary of State. Because I am sometimes polite, I did not say what I was thinking but I asked if he meant that the harassment continued under the Ford years, as well, and he was quite affirmative. However, he pointed out to me that what the IRS auditors didn’t realize, nor their superiors, all the way up to Dr. Kissinger, is that as an academic and a scholar, one of his defining traits is thoroughness and attention to detail. Every year, he would present his returns with paper bags full of receipts that the auditors would have to review as thoroughly as the good professor had. He was never penalized.

Now, let’s come back to the present. If someone wants to make your life a living hell, it doesn’t really take much. The more they know about you, the easier it is. I should also point out that unlike the legal or medical professions, there is no binding rule or code of ethics for technology professionals.

For those of us who have worked in the tech sector, I suspect many of us have out own sense of what’s right, and what isn’t. I was once asked to participate in a boondoggle. A book had been published that averred generational favoritism in the Ivy League such that legacy donors’ scions would often find their entry into the halls of elite universities easy and without obstacle. This is entitlement of a completely different sort from those of us who are in danger of losing Social Security and Medicare.

In any case, I was asked to vet a colleague’s work on tracing the giving histories of a number of donors and the attendance of members of those families. My colleague had done the work; it was fine, but for some reason, I was also asked to attend a meeting with one of the major leaders of development at the university. He was framing a rebuttal to the author of the book on behalf of the university and while I actually do admire his genuine sense that the author of the book misunderstands why people give to institutions, that did little to detract from the thesis that families of privilege take advantage of power and position.

Afterward, I talked to several colleagues and we had a good laugh about the naivete of assuming goodwill and largesse on the part of all donors. Later, I asked myself, what would I have done if this had been a request for data that could damage or hurt someone? Since I worked in development, there was little to no likelihood, but I still bristled at the idea whatever an institution does is justified. That I know of, that rebuttal never saw the light of day, simply because the data didn’t support the thesis. Proving intention from raw data like giving histories is dubious in the main. For some things, it can be done, but in terms of donations to a non-profit or an educational institution, innate goodwill is assumed, if not overt support of the organization’s mission.

Snyder asks professionals to maintain their ethics, to abide by what they know is right.

“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 enforced 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.”

This feels like a big ask of many on the professional landscape today, here in this country. My hope is that professionals of goodwill will come forward and continue to speak out and refuse to comply with and increasingly unhinged regime bent on destruction of the Constitution and the order it enshrines. They are there, of course; many organizers are professionals and look no farther than many legal advocacy organizations to see how many in the legal profession are fighting the good fight.

I think, thought, that we need to train our eyes on the apolitical or the neighbor who is just going along to get along. They may be feeling as much trepidation as the rest of us. What if you are disbarred because you represented the wrong party? What if you assisted in prosecuting people favored by the regime? We are seeing that play out now and the results are horrific. If other professionals continue to obey in advance or otherwise comply with unethical edicts and acts, then the days will grow darker far more quickly.

Snyder doesn’t directly address this aspect of living under a totalitarian regime, but if anyone has visited a country where there is extreme poverty and/or corruption at the highest levels, it tends to reach down to the day-to-day level. If you’ve ever been shaken down by a cop, a bureaucrat, or some other official, you know what it’s like. It’s one thing if you can buy your way out of a situation; it’s another if you can’t.

Snyder also points out there are bonds within and between professional communities that don’t exist between an individual and “a distant government”.

“If members of a profession think of themselves as groups with common interests, with norms and rules that oblige them at all times, then they can gain confidence and indeed a certain kind of power. Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional.”

This is key. So many slides into totalitarianism begin with declarations of false states of emergency. “Law and order” must be re-established through extra-juridical means; the rule of law must be suspended so that order can be restored. Hence, the need for members of the legal professions to draft legislation for that purpose and to defend their actions as supportive of the State, particularly and especially when the State is redefining what is ethical and lawful.

“If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment…they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously thought unimaginable.”

I don’t have to add a lot here in terms of what we will likely be called on to do. You will read, again and again, how important it is to contact your reps, to volunteer your time, to march in protest, and to help where you can/as you can.

Two places to start with:

Mobilize at https://www.mobilize.us/. I have the landing page set to my area; populated with events, petitions, and volunteer opportunities, it’s practically one-stop shopping.

Indivisible at https://indivisible.org/ is another comprehensive hub. You can sign up for updates, download their guide to organizaing, find candidates to support, and more.

If you don't have a copy of "On Tyranny", you can purchase one here:

"On Tyranny" at Timothy Snyder's website where he lists several options. Support local bookstores and buy local or check it out from your local library.

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Introduction and Chapter 1

Chapter 5