#5 Do not obey in advance
Start by denying their authority
In early 1938, Adolf Hitler, by then securely in power in Germany, was threatening to annex neighboring Austria. After the Austrian chancellor conceded, it was the Austrians’ anticipatory obedience that decided the fate of Austrian Jews. Local Austrian Nazis captured Jews and forced them to scrub the streets to remove symbols of independent Austria. Crucially, people who were not Nazis looked on with interest and amusement. Nazis who had kept lists of Jewish property stole what they could. Crucially, others who were not Nazis joined in the theft. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt remembered, “when German troops invaded the country and Gentile neighbors started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to commit suicide.”
The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938 taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible. It was in Vienna that August that Adolf Eichmann established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. In November 1938, following the Austrian example of March, German Nazis organized the national pogrom known as Kristallnacht. In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the SS took the initiative to devise the methods of mass killing without orders to do so. They guessed what their superiors wanted and demonstrated what was possible. It was far more than Hitler had thought. At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflecting, to a new situation. Do only Germans do such things?
The Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, contemplating Nazi atrocities, wanted to show that there was a particular authoritarian personality that explained why Germans behaved as they had. He devised an experiment to test the proposition, but failed to get permission to carry it out in Germany. So he undertook it instead in a Yale University building in 1961—at around the same time that Adolf Eichmann was being tried in Jerusalem for his part in the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.
Milgram told his subjects (some Yale students, some New Haven residents) that they would be applying an electrical shock to other participants in an experiment about learning. In fact, the people attached to the wires on the other side of a window were in on the scheme with Milgram, and only pretended to be shocked. As the subjects (thought they) shocked the (people they thought were) participants in a learning experiment, they saw a horrible sight. People whom they did not know, and against whom they had no grievance, seemed to be suffering greatly—pounding the glass and complaining of heart pain. Even so, most subjects followed Milgram’s instructions and continued to apply (what they thought were) ever greater shocks until the victims appeared to die. Even those who did not proceed all the way to the (apparent) killing of their fellow human beings left without inquiring about the health of the other participants.
Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. “I found so much obedience,” Milgram remembered, “that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany.”
— Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Fascists can make all kinds of demands. That is what they are known for. In the world of fascist tyranny, you are either with the people claiming power, or you are an enemy of the state.
I encourage you to choose the latter, especially if you have descendants you care about. Be the change you want to see in the world. If you live in the USA, you have three choices in this moment in time: fight, flee, or bow. Some things are worth dying for, and fighting the current powers that be is one of the things worth dying for.
If one person can be snatched off the streets and murdered in a foreign gulag, so can you. If someone else’s children can be disappeared, so can yours. If there are two different justice systems, and you are not in the one for billionaires, eat the rich.
The systems of power that offer basic protections to all of our human rights are being dismantled. Concentration camps for dissidents are being constructed. The enemy is us, and we have a moral and ethical obligation to resist, remove ourselves, or bend the knee to the king of losers and his evil handlers.
The United States has never been perfect, but what is happening now is the exact opposite of what Americans have always advertised themselves to be. This country was once a place people fled oppression for. That age is over. It is too late to reboot the machine. It must be destroyed. A newer, better machine of governance must be built.
The new machine must value individual human rights without regard to individual characteristics. It must be primed to reduce inequities and promote meeting basic human needs for all who come.
The American Hitler is stumbling around on the stage while his henchmen, handlers, and hirelings do the bidding of the dark forces he sold his soul to for pennies. The orange one will perish soon, but what comes next could be much, much worse. The time to disobey is now. The time to sabotage is now. The time to fight is now.
As Dr. Snyder, the author of On Tyranny suggests, choose an institution or organization you care about and take its side.
Perhaps you too will start an anti-fascist book club. If you do, reach out to me here and let me know. In solidarity, American Dissident.
They only have as much power as you are willing to give away.