Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.
I get putting your weight behind “fix this or I’m out”, but they’ll just find another “yes man” and you accomplished nothing but some press coverage for a small enough percentage of people and time to be insignificant.
To quote Hamilton lyrics: “You got skin in the game, you stay in the game. But you don’t get a win unless you play in the game.”
Change absolutely needs to occur, I just don’t think bouncing is going to get the desired goal.
I don’t agree. There’s a point at which you have to step away from being a cog in a genocide.
She has already tried to effect change:
Across the federal government, employees like me have tried for months to influence policy, both internally and, when that failed, publicly. My colleagues and I watched in horror as this administration delivered thousands of precision-guided munitions, bombs, small arms and other lethal aid to Israel and authorized thousands more, even bypassing Congress to do so. We are appalled by the administration’s flagrant disregard for American laws that prohibit the US from providing assistance to foreign militaries that engage in gross human rights violations or that restrict the delivery of humanitarian aid.
The fact that she chose to leave publicly makes all the difference.
This is on CNNs website, not some random blog that a half-dozen people usually see. She has helped illustrate that what’s going on in Gaza has created a major rift within our own government. I think this is one of the most important opinion pieces I’ve read in a while.
“Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor. … 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.” -Tim Snyder
(I’m not necessarily saying you’re wrong – I think it depends and I absolutely think there are times when staying and minimizing the damage is the right thing to do. But without really knowing much more than what she said, I sympathize with her quite a lot in her “fuck this, fuck my career, I can’t possibly be a party to this anymore”.)
Unfortunately, that’s an oversimplification of how the Nazi got their way; they worked more like a conspiracy under a legal umbrella.
Civil servants were mostly kept in the dark, lawyers got circumvented with mobs and summary executions, only a handful of doctors were aware of what was going on, businessmen… are everywhere, still fine with convicts working for scraps… only select trusted bureaucrats were ever involved with paperwork directly involving murder.
The Nazi weren’t harder pressed, because the general sentiment of the society was willing to explain away any criticism… and I’m afraid humanity hasn’t fully learned the lesson yet; plenty of present day societies harbor similar sentiments, and are equally easy to weaponize.
“I am being told to kill 5 people, but I think that’s wrong so I will only kill 4 people instead. That’s better than me leaving in protest. and morally absolves me of the murders I’m doing, because if I leave they’d just replace me with someone who will kill all 5. So really, I’m 1 person’s savior.”
This is not even really hyperbole, because this person was literally departing an organization that was enabling the murder of now 34,000+ people in Gaza alone, never mind the rest of the world. The idea that their less-than-full-compliance, if staying, could materially change the genocide is laughable.
Change occurs because of bottom-up actions from individuals working against the government’s status quo, not from conscientious objectors within doing malicious compliance. Lots of idealistic young conscientious objectors actually joined the military during Vietnam, thinking that they’d try to reform the military from within, and most of them just left traumatized, or didn’t leave at all. Our government literally spent the entire Cold War fortifying itself against any kind of internal pressures/ “infiltration” by Left-leaning beliefs, and that’s not going to be bypassed by just trying really hard.
“You got skin in the game, you stay in the game. But you don’t get a win unless you play in the game.”
The “game” is Politics, not Government Jobs. Political actions as an individual not employed by the government (like talking about your political objections on a national media platform) are still “stay[ing] in the game”. This woman can have a MUCH larger impact talking about her objections on CNN than by voicing objections in an internal meeting somewhere.
“Someone else will do evil if I don’t agree to do evil so I might as well do evil myself” is a bullshit argument. And your point is directly addressed in the article:
By resigning publicly, I am saddened by the knowledge that I likely foreclose a future at the State Department. I had not initially planned a public resignation. Because my time at State had been so short — I was hired on a two-year contract — I did not think I mattered enough to announce my resignation publicly. However, when I started to tell colleagues of my decision to resign, the response I heard repeatedly was, “Please speak for us.”
When you play for a team that opposes your goals, your options are:
- Reform your team
- Switch teams
- Quit
The first choice is ideal, but sometimes you’re left with only the last one.
I look up to people like this. Thanks for posting.
