Reply To: On Tyranny Lesson 7: Be reflective if you must be armed
In Aug. 2020, Pulitzer-prize winning historian Anne Applebaum wrote an article in The Atlantic titled, “History Will Judge the Complicit“. She asked a former East German dissident, who later ran the Stasi Archive, about the people who conformed to the regime. The answer was that complicity is the norm. If people didn’t conform, they would be expelled. Once the system had been set up, if people wanted a home, a place to work and enough money to eat, feed their families and pay for medicine and healthcare, they did what the regime wanted them to do.
Applebaum goes further to try to understand and explain conformity amongst individuals where consequences are not as severe, for example elected politicians and especially senators, where the worst case scenario is that they aren’t reelected. In many cases, politicians can go on to teach at universities – not a terrible outcome at all. However, even in these cases, we see that conformity is the norm and that principled dissent is extremely difficult. We assume that one’s natural impulse is to stand for what one believes in, but history has shown the opposite.
I think Snyder is attempting to highlight his first lesson of “Do not obey in advance”, and because of the finality of decisions made when one is armed, the lesson warrants some emphasis. Similar to our discussion of Lesson 1, Snyder is hoping that if people read his book and understand his warnings, his lessons might inoculate readers from blindly objectifying other groups of people and following orders that conflict with their morals.
