I’m a federal contractor for the DoD (DoW?) I have lots of friends and coworkers in the military. We’re all supporting a fascist warfighting force in some capacity.
At what point is the only ethical move to walk away? Does it depend on job or agency?
Like, at what point would a German mail carrier in the 30s have said, “You know what? I’m literally carrying the mail for Nazis.”
Some time between 9 months ago and probably 6 months from now. I’m very glad I’m not still in DoD. The ethical / practical dilemmas are getting very real very quickly.
At the point where you say to yourself “I’m just following orders”.
Primarily that, plus how far one is from the chain of command.
I’ve been under the umbrella of the Department of Commerce for 31 years and plan to stay here until I retire. Assuming I’ve not been made redundant and the government is still functional then.
Plus, I’d say, whether you might at some point be in a position to be the person who says “Hell no!” when it might matter.
(And, of course, whether you’ll do so; even if you might get shot for it.)
It also depends on whether you will be out of work for a lengthy period of time or if you can easily find a non-government-related company to hire you. If you end up starving yourself or your family by not working, how does that make any sense?
At some point, participation in a fascist regime cannot be justified as simply a way to earn a living. I’m not saying we’re at that point, yet. The OP seems to be wondering about how we’ll know if that time has come.
'Zactly. There’s more to ethics than simply “I like a paycheck”.
Now where it first becomes less-than-adequately-ethical by your standards and where the degree of unethicality exceeds your attachment to being employed, that’s a different question. But that’s not the one the OP asked. At least not as I read it.
I will also point out that ethics, like safety, is not binary. Do not fall for the fallacy of the excluded middle. There is a continuum from extremely safe/ethical to sorta safe/ethical to wildly recklessly unsafe / utterly criminally unethical.
Picking the inflection points on that sliding scale is difficult.
I think a lot also has to do with what you do as well, and who you perceive yourself doing it for.
I mean, the staff at National Parks more than likely doesn’t see themselves working for Trump, and nor do they consider themselves to be aiding and abetting.
Same thing with a lot of the DoD people; until the military is starting to be used in a capacity they personally find odious, they’re more than likely conceiving of their jobs as serving the People, not the government. And if they’re say… doing IT support at some air base, or working as a civilian professor at a DoD college (like say the National War College), they’re most likely not seeing themselves as aiding and abetting either. Same for the guy who runs the snack bar at the Pentagon.
But National Guardsmen called to occupy cities? That skates really, really close to illegal orders and they and their officers should be thinking seriously about where those lines are and how they plan to refuse those orders.
Some friends from my graduate school days are now scientists working for the federal government, e.g. in the National Labs. I have every reason to believe that they are not Trumpists, and that their scientific work is valuable. I hope they are allowed to stay on.
A hefty fraction of the upper echelons of the CDC resigned in the last handful of days. Entirely because they could not stand to continue to lend their names to the insane clown vandalism being done by RFK in trump’s name.
Serious question: is there a spot marked “wildly recklessly unsafe/utterly criminal ethical”? Not that I’m planning to head there any time soon. But blowing up Hitler, say?
Some time between (let’s be charitable) Korea and Vietnam? Specifically for military work.
Victoria Barnett (a historian of WWII-era Germany), in a podcast interview I recently listened to, said that (in effect) there was no such thing as someone who was ethically perfect under the Nazi regime. Everyone ended up compromising somewhat.
This is true even the folks we look up to in retrospect, the Niemollers and Bonhoeffers of the world. Niemoller wanted to get out of prison and volunteered to serve in the military to do so. Bonhoeffer wrote “The Church and the Jewish Question” which included a horribly anti-Semitic paragraph in the middle. Sophie Scholl started out in the Hitler Youth (though to her credit she quit when she was fairly young, and the experience rather soured her on Naziism anyway).
One of my takeaways from that is that we should also be gracious towards those who came later to their opposition to an oppressive regime.
You have to take into considering that if you are a public servant who supports democracy and the constitution, if you quit your job you may be replaced with an authoritarian lackey.
The bureaucratic machine is important to resistance to fascism. Refusing to follow orders, gumming up the works, leaking documents, malicious non-compliance, mass strikes, etc are all important. If you quit who is to say the new person to fill the job won’t be all in on destroying democracy.
With very rare exception, I think that if good people choose to boycott the government and not work in it, then you’re only further ensuring that the government will be staffed by worse and worse people.
Good people need to stay in it in order to prevent it from getting worse.
Well, about that…
At least three senior CDC leaders resigned from the agency, some citing frustration over vaccine policy and the leadership of Kennedy, also known as RFK Jr.
Among them was Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, who warned about the “rise of misinformation” about vaccines in a letter seen by the BBC’s US partner CBS News. She also argued against planned cuts to the agency’s budget.
A long-time federal government scientist, Dr Monarez was nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the CDC and was confirmed in a Senate vote along party lines in July.
Her nomination followed Trump withdrawing his first pick, former Republican Congressman Dave Weldon, who had come under fire for his views on vaccines and autism.
On Wednesday, Dr Monarez’s lawyers issued a statement saying that she had chosen “protecting the public over serving a political agenda”.
The White House statement announcing the termination of her post said: “As her attorney’s statement makes abundantly clear, Susan Monarez is not aligned with the president’s agenda.”
On Thursday, Kennedy told Fox & Friends on Fox News that the CDC leadership “needs to execute Trump’s agenda”.