How obedient are you? Do you conform to peer pressure?
If you had been in Germany in 1936, would you have been like this man — the one man in a crowd refusing to salute the Nazis?
Here’s a bit of what Ezra had to say about one famous photo of a dissident, August Landmesser, who was photographed refusing to perform the Nazi salute:
“…we all like to think we’re courageous and principled, and that we would have been that man.
“But it’s one thing to think of that, when you’re surfing the Internet and you think about it for a few minutes, and the move on. But that man’s name was August Landmesser, and let me tell you about him.
“He was a German, who fell in love with a Jew. They got engaged, but they couldn’t get married — because the Nuremberg laws were passed, forbidding Jews to marry non-Jews. Call it a vaccine passport of the day. Landmesser was a dissenter; he refused to salute.
“…But that’s not how it ended. Here’s how it ended. His fiancée was sent to a concentration camp where she was killed. And Landmesser was arrested and imprisoned, and was sent into a prisoner’s battalion — prisoners forced to fight for Hitler. And he was killed in action.
“So yeah. You think you’d be like Landmesser. But you wouldn’t. I mean, not one in a million would.”
We all like to think we’d be that guy. But how many of us have done anything — even a tiny thing — in the past 18 months to stop our slide into authoritarianism?
What do you think? Are you a conformist? Or worse — would you actually participate in evil, if someone in authority told you it was OK?
Rebel Media