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.

In the rare cases when they refused these orders to murder Jews, policemen were not punished. Some killed from murderous conviction. But many others who killed were just afraid to stand out. Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.

“whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”

If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders.

To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something.