“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 by a small number of men, but it means they "had thousands of political murders on their consciences." Also, following on Chapter five's points, they had the assistance of local police forces, legal professionals, and civil servants. The blood of over half a million people was spread across the citizenry.
The police may not have been the main murderers, but provided manpower to the NKVD.
It's equally important to keep in mind that the Nazi death camps weren't sui generis. They came into existence after prior experiments in mass execution had been under way for quite some time. The "plausible deniability" of the impersonal, industrial nature of the camps lay in the idea that SS guards and administrators would claim they didn't really know what was going on.
However, the executioners of the shooting pits in Eastern Europe had no such recourse. The Einsatzgruppen (these were the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany, responsible for mass murder) commanders knew very well what they were doing. As Snyder points out, though, the trials of these commanders minimized the scale of the crimes. "Not the SS commanders alone, but essentially all of the thousand of men who served under their command were murderers."
This is where it began. It was "regular Germans" who carried out mass executions. The litany begins with "more than thirty-three thousand Jews murdered outside Kyiv, more than twenty-eight thousand outside Riga, and on and on"). It was regular policemen who murdered more Jews that the SS.
What would lead "normal" people to do such things? Consider this:
"Many of them had no special preparation for this task. They found themselves in an unknown land, they had their orders, and the did want to look weak." Interestingly, Snyder also points out that those rare cases who did refuse to participate were not punished.
It's not difficult to assume that many did have convictions that aligned with the racial purity platform of the Reich and relished the work; likely many carried out their orders out of fear of standing out or being afraid of the consequences if they refused (which means that the rare cases who were not punished were so few that doing so wouldn't have made a difference?). But is conformism that lays the basis for such atrocities; "without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible."
This leaves us in our current moment with little comfort that these actions happened decades ago (never mind that genocide and mass executions continue around the world and American foreign policy has often been a lubricant for some of those); I say "little comfort" when I should say that we should be on high alert.
We have, in the twenty-first century already seen on our soil the increased militarization of local police forces. The threat of intimidation, if not the execution of police brutality on peaceful demonstrators, and we currently have a regime some of whose members have espoused the idea of turning the military loose on protesters.
And who will carry out these orders? Some who have been chomping at the bit to bust heads, and kill with impunity. Others who, like their predecessors, don't want to appear weak or be singled out and targeted, and likely others who don't want to lose their job, will find some way to justify their actions.
But those who are compelled to do so because of fear of losing face or job might think twice and find consciences and backbones if they thought through what they were asked to do, if it violates personal, professional, and constitutional ethics. I'm hard-nosed enough to say that those would be few because the apparent cons of being party to beatings, disappearances, and murder outweigh the pros of speaking up and sacrificing one's well-being for another's, let alone for fighting to preserve what little national integrity is left.
So if you do carry a gun in the service of protecting social order, ask yourself what the limits are. Yes, of course, like the "good Germans", you were merely following orders. But you must at some point, reckon that those orders are coming down from rulers who care nothing for the rule of law, for the people you will be ordered to harm or kill, and finally, they care nothing for you.
I would ask that officers of the law at all levels - local, state, federal - take a good, hard look at what is being asked of you and ask yourself that if you're asked to kill fellow citizens protesting a corrupt regime, are you part of the problem? Are you supporting a new order of fascism, as opposed to the freedoms enshrined in the constitution, that document which to date, is still representative of what we all hold dear.
Be reflective and "be ready to say no."
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.
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