On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

by Timothy Snyder

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.

Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional.

When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.