"I personally find Trump abhorrent, but I’m going to take a job in his administration as Assistant Deputy XYZ, because if I don’t take it, someone worse will. And by working within the system, I can do more good than if I were locked out on the outside with the Never Trump losers."
Over the last decade, that delusional rationalizing took over an entire political party as every midlevel hack told themselves that they just had to be complicit in Trumpism, because the world so needed them.
JVL, without trying to be too historical or too comparative, I was struck by this obvious point in large measure because, here in Germany, the equivalent SCOTUS just finalized the conviction of a 99 year old woman as a war criminal.
As an 18 year old she became the secretary for the commandant of a concentration camp near Danzig in Poland that killed over 65,000 "undesirables" during WWII. The conviction was for her integral part in the machinery of death that was enabled by her (typing up lists of those to be killed, reports of how it was done, etc), and thousands of other "civil servants" in equally "mundane, daily routine" types of jobs. 90-95% of the personnel at the camp were also "civil servants" who could have declined their jobs, but many of whom affirmatively applied for them, be it out of conviction for "the cause" or the perks or whatever. It has also been historically shown by careful research that a handful of those "detailed" to work as a "civil servant" at that camp either refused or arranged to be transferred, all without any known consequences.
I am not implying that we are (or were) anywhere close to what happened in that camp, just reporting for a friend who occasionally tries to look to the future in light of the past.
"I personally find Trump abhorrent, but I’m going to take a job in his administration as Assistant Deputy XYZ, because if I don’t take it, someone worse will. And by working within the system, I can do more good than if I were locked out on the outside with the Never Trump losers."
Over the last decade, that delusional rationalizing took over an entire political party as every midlevel hack told themselves that they just had to be complicit in Trumpism, because the world so needed them.
JVL, without trying to be too historical or too comparative, I was struck by this obvious point in large measure because, here in Germany, the equivalent SCOTUS just finalized the conviction of a 99 year old woman as a war criminal.
As an 18 year old she became the secretary for the commandant of a concentration camp near Danzig in Poland that killed over 65,000 "undesirables" during WWII. The conviction was for her integral part in the machinery of death that was enabled by her (typing up lists of those to be killed, reports of how it was done, etc), and thousands of other "civil servants" in equally "mundane, daily routine" types of jobs. 90-95% of the personnel at the camp were also "civil servants" who could have declined their jobs, but many of whom affirmatively applied for them, be it out of conviction for "the cause" or the perks or whatever. It has also been historically shown by careful research that a handful of those "detailed" to work as a "civil servant" at that camp either refused or arranged to be transferred, all without any known consequences.
I am not implying that we are (or were) anywhere close to what happened in that camp, just reporting for a friend who occasionally tries to look to the future in light of the past.