Timothy Snyder's on How to Avoid or Resist Tyranny: His quotes with my thoughts-7

I have waited awhile to put up my next quote from Timothy Snyder's book, On Tyranny. It is a very serious quote and I wasn't sure how to approach it. After several events today I believe we all need to be very serious about what is happening in our country. There is much to be ashamed of. 

 The posting below from the Whitehouse X site is one thing to be ashamed of. It is immigrants being chained before they are loaded on their deportation plane. There is the suggestion that those chaining them are experiencing euphoria. Besides that, is the fact that today the president said that Ukraine had started the war that Russia actually started. And this after not inviting Ukraine to the supposed peace talks. Our nation is descending deeper and deeper into darkness. 

 Snyder's quote is: "Be Reflective if you must be armed: If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no." 

Snyder writes about how so much of the harm and killing among both Nazi and Soviet authorities was done by regular policemen who never expected to be where they were and did not know how to say no.

 There were so many in Nazi Germany who were ashamed at what was happening to others, what was happening to the Jews, the Roma, the Poles, the Jehovah Witnesses, the LGBT communities, the disabled, the Confessing pastors. 

There were members of the white Rose a group of young people who wrote about all of the terrible actions of the Nazis. They were mostly Catholic and Lutheran. They were caught and most beheaded. 

 And there was the Confessing Church which included Bonhoeffer. In his Ethics he in his feelings of shame wrote a confession of sin for the church as a whole. It is long but I will try to put some of it here.

 "With this confession the entire guilt of the world falls upon the church, upon the Christians, and since the guilt is not denied here, but is confessed, there arises the possibility of forgiveness. ...

 I am guilty of cowardly silence at a time when I ought to have spoken. I am guilty of hypocrisy and untruthfulness in the face of force. I have been lacking in compassion, and I have denied the poorest of my brethren. I am guilty of disloyalty and of apostasy from Christ. ...

The Church confesses that she has not proclaimed often and clearly enough her message of the one God who has revealed Himself for all times in Jesus Christ and who suffers no other gods besides Himself. She confesses, her timidity, her evasiveness, her dangerous concessions. She has been often untrue to her office of guardianship and to her office of comfort. And through this she has often denied to the outcast and to the despised the compassion which she owes them."