Audrey Stienon
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astienon.bsky.social
Audrey Stienon
@astienon.bsky.social
530 followers 1.2K following 160 posts
industrial policy at the Open Markets Institute • fascinated about how we shape industries and markets to serve the public interest • book nerd & recovering globe trotter • views are my own • 🇧🇪🇺🇸
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astienon.bsky.social
Trump, to cabinet: I need you all to start wearing more hats

Amelia Bedelia:
Elon Musk wearing two MAGA hats at once
May 2, 2025 at 3:04 AM
astienon.bsky.social
I've been thinking a lot recently, apropos of nothing, about this passage from Milton Mayer's (1955) They Thought They Were Free.

"The world was lost one day in 1935, here in Germany. It was I who lost it, and I will tell you how..."
A chemical engineer by profession, he was a man of whom I had been told, He is one of those rare birds among Germans—a European. When we had become very friendly, I said to him, Tell me now—how was the world lost? That, he said, is easy to tell, much easier than you may suppose. The world was lost one day in 1935, here in Germany. It was I who lost it, and I will tell you how. I was employed in a defense plant. That was the year of the National Defense Law. Under the law, I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given 24 hours to think it over. In those 24 hours I lost the world. You see, refusal would have meant losing my job. Later on, the penalty was worse, but this was only 1935. But losing my job would have meant that I could not get another. Wherever I went I should be asked why I left the job I had, and, when I said why, I should certainly have been refused employment. Nobody would hire a Bolshevik. Of course I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand what I mean. I tried not to think of myself or my family. We might have got out of the country, in any case, and I could have got a job in industry or education or somewhere else. What I tried to think of was the people to whom I might be of some help later on, if things got worse, as I believed they would. I had a wide friendship in scientific circles, including many Jews, and Aryans too, who might be in trouble. If I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help as things went on. If I refused to take the oath, I would be useless to my friends, even if I remained in the country. I myself would be in their situation. The next day after thinking it over I said I would take the oath with the mental reservation that by the words with which the oath began, I swear by God, I understood that no human being and no government had the right to override my conscience. My mental reservations did not interest the official who administered the oath. He said, Do you take the oath? and I took it. That day the world was lost, and it was I who lost it. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and thus uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed the evil; but the good was only a hope, the evil was a fact. You must concede that the hope might not have been realized—either for reasons beyond my control or because I became afraid later on or even because I was afraid all the time and was simply fooling myself when I took the oath in the first place. The important point is—how many innocent people were killed by the Nazis? Shall we say, just to be safe, that 3000000 innocent people were killed all together? And how many innocent lives would you like to say I saved? Well, shall we say 100, or 1000 to be safe? And it would have been better to have saved all 3000000, instead of only 100 or 1000? There is my point. If I had refused to take the oath, I would have saved all 3000000. There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules in any country. If I had refused to take the oath, it would have meant that thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would’ve been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I wasn’t prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each of these was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost. These 100 lives I saved, what do they represent? A little something out of the whole terrible evil, when, if my faith had been strong enough in 1935, I could have prevented the whole evil.
February 12, 2025 at 10:50 PM