Be reflective if you must be armed

This is a lesson from On Tyranny that feels personally irrelevant. Like many over-educated middle class Americans, I live a life completely free of soldiers and police. I knew one police officer socially (he was an artist on the side), but he retired and is no longer a sheriff. In college I knew a few ROTC guys, but I have lost touch with them over the years. I wonder what is going through their minds as an out-and-out Christian nationalist has been nominated to run the Defense Department.

Snyder makes this point because the violence perpetrated by the NKVD in the Soviet Union or the SS in Nazi Germany would have been impossible without the cooperation of ordinary policemen and soldiers. Snyder wrote:

Every large scale shooting action of the Holocaust (more than thirty-three thousand Jews murdered outside Kyiv, and more than thwenty-eight thousand outside Riga, and on and on) involved regular German police. All in all, regular policemen murdered more Jews than the Einsatzgruppen. Many of them had no special preparation for this task. They found themselves in an unknown land, they had their orders, and they did now want to look weak. In the rare cases when they refused these orders to murder Jews, policemen were not punished.

That last sentence is the small hope that we have, that ordinary soldiers and cops will say no to obviously illegal and immoral orders. And that their friends and relations will back them up when they take this step.

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