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FBI Director: Holocaust Teaches Not to Surrender “Individual Moral Authority to the Group”

FBI Director James Comey explained why he requires all agents to visit the United States Holocaust Museum in a speech he gave Wednesday night in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day. His remarks were adapted and published in The Washington Post Thursday.

After sharing his thoughts about the Holocaust, Comey argued that evil can triumph when good people subordinate their moral judgment to that of an evil group:

Good people helped murder millions. And that’s the most frightening lesson of all — that our very humanity made us capable of, even susceptible to, surrendering our individual moral authority to the group, where it can be hijacked by evil. Of being so cowed by those in power. Of convincing ourselves of nearly anything.

In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That’s what people do. And that should truly frighten us.

That is why I send our agents and our analysts to the Holocaust Museum. I want them to stare at us and realize our capacity for rationalization and moral surrender. I want them to walk out of that great museum treasuring the constraint and oversight of divided government, the restriction of the rule of law, the binding of a free and vibrant press. I want them to understand that all of this is necessary as a check on us because of the way we are. We must build it, we must know it and we must nurture it now, so that it can save us later. That is the only path to the responsible exercise of power.

[Photo: Policía Nacional de los colombianos / Flickr ]