Timothy Snyder wrote in his essential book On Tyranny about how authoritarians need professionals to cooperate in carrying out their evil. We must remember that we all have a choice.
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.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
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