Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their action… - Timothy Snyder

What would have happened if Poland, rather than the Soviet Union, had accepted Joachim von Ribbentrop’s proposals in 1939? Would the Soviet Union have withstood an invasion of Germany allied with Poland and, perhaps, Romania and Hungary as well? That Germany and Poland did not make an alliance, and that Germany and the Soviet Union did, is perhaps the single crucial fact about the war.

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.

The Nazis treated health care as a way to divide the humans from the subhumans and nonhumans. If we see others as bearers of ailments and ourselves as healthy victims, we are little better than they. If we truly oppose the Nazi evil, we will try to think our way to its opposite, to the good. A part of that effort is to understand that all humans are subject to malady, and have an equal claim to care.