Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as “just following orders… - Timothy Snyder

"We are told that we are "born free": untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman's blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures — and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices."

[A] turning point of the twentieth century: the Nazi-Soviet alliance... In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland... In April 1940, the Soviet secret police murdered 21,892 Polish prisoners of war... shot in the back of the head at five killing sites, one of them the Katyn Forest... Only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 could historians clarify... the mass murder had been deliberate policy, personally approved by Joseph Stalin. ...On February 3, 2010... the Russian prime minister made a surprising proposal: a joint commemoration... on the seventieth anniversary of the crime. On the seventh of April a Polish government delegation... arrived in Russia.
Two days after that, a second Polish delegation set out... One of its members was my friend Tomek Merta... April 10... Tomek boarded an airplane. It crashed... short of a landing strip at the Russian military airfield at Smolensk. There were no survivors.

Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.