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About this quote

What does it mean?
Canaris predicts future accountability for the military establishment regarding controversial methods they silently approved.
In plain terms
The world will blame the army for these methods because we allowed them to happen.
What can you take from it?
Silent consent makes you responsible for immoral actions.

Where it applies

  • military operations
  • moral judgment
  • future retrospection

Putting it to work

  • assessing complicity
  • ethical decision making

Questions to consider

  • What are we responsible for if we stay silent?
  • How is accountability determined?

Another view

Historical judgment may not align with individual intent.

More from Wilhelm Canaris

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  2. His skill in acting a part, his cunning, his imagination, the ease with which he affected naive stupidity and then emerged into the most subtle reasoning disar…

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  3. You know, my dear Lahousen, the students of history will not need to trouble their heads after this war, as they did after the last, to determine who was guilt…

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