Historian TImothy Snyder’s first lesson in his book On Tyranny is “Do not obey in advance.” To obey a tyrant before you are compelled to do so teaches them what they will be able to get you to do, easily, without even needing to expend the resources and energy it takes to carry out that part of their agenda.
This is wisdom and it is necessary and it is sound advice.
But I would also remind us all of a lesson that Mel Brooks taught us about dealing with petty tyrants that also applies to the actual, literal kind:
I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on The Producers, said, “The curly-haired guy — he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot. After the screening of Blazing Saddles, the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed Blazing Saddles from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out”… You say yes, and you never do it. … Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.
This works too. Brooks wasn’t “obeying in advance.” But he didn’t feel compelled to tell them that. Instead, he told them what they wanted to hear — he said to them what they wanted and required him to say. And then he kept Gene Wilder in The Producers, refused to “make the sheriff white” in Blazing Saddles, and let it rip in the campfire scene in that movie, just as it should be.
Brooks’ approach is something that many have done — effectively — when faced with real and brutal tyrants in the kind of brutal, tyrannical context where people are being rounded up by militarized thugs and thrown into camps.
This comes up repeatedly in Dave Gushee’s rich survey of The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust. That book is filled with heroic stories of moral champions who defiantly stood up against tyrants. But it’s also full of bureaucrats and middle managers and underlings who delayed and deferred and dragged their feet, all while insisting “Yes, yes, sure thing boss. Right away, just need to file the proper paperwork.” This was an effective, and often vitally necessary tactic of resistance and rescue.
There’s also a whole bunch of disputed cases — a category of people who may or may not have been rescuing others on purpose. People in their districts were ordered to be rounded up and sent to the camps and they were responsible for doing that but somehow it never quite happened on anything like the scale it did elsewhere. Scholars can’t be sure whether these folks were Righteous Gentiles because they were extremely effective bureaucratic saboteurs or if they were simply loyal Nazis who were very bad at their jobs.
During World War II, the U.S. Strategic Services published a “Simple Sabotage Manual” for resistance and liberation groups in countries occupied by those who were rounding people up and putting them in camps. I’ve discussed parts of that manual here before in a light-hearted way, noting that its schemes for bureaucratic sabotage were nearly indistinguishable from day-to-day life in many American cubicle farms. That’s still true, but tactics like the following are, nonetheless, an effective means of saving lives and saving humanity in the face of those who want to round people up and put them in camps:
(a) Organizations and Conferences
(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length., Illustrate your points.. by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic”comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible – never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision,
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “ureasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision – raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or’whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
When governments start talking about rounding people up and putting them in camps it is, as Prof. Snyder says, vitally important not to obey in advance.
And when those governments fully embrace tyranny — i.e., when they actually start rounding people up and putting them in camps — it is vitally important not to obey at all.
But you don’t need to tell them this. You can also, like Mel Brooks, “Simply say yes” and then never do it. Or you can learn the dark arts of bureaucratic sabotage and malicious compliance. This stuff has saved lives before, and may have to do so again.
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