Exclusive🍿 A Few Good Men | They Were “Just Following Orders.” So Why Were They Punished? | The Banality of Evil

Okay, quick question before we start a weekend. You get an order from your boss. It's clearly wrong. You do it anyway. Who's guilty? Him or you? Hold that thought because in 1961, a man sat inside a glass booth in a courtroom in Jerusalem and gave the world his answer. His name was Adolf Eichmann. He helped organize the deportation of millions of people to death and his defense was only five words long. I was just following orders. Well, grab your coffee because today we're talking about the most uncomfortable lie in human history. But first, it's the weekend, so let's go to the movies. 1992, A Few Good Men. Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, Jack Nicholson. And yes, the haircut situation is aggressively 1992. Well, here's the story. A young Marine named William Santiago is stationed at Guantanamo Bay. He's struggling. He can't keep up with the other Marines and eventually he goes outside the chain of command asking for a transfer. Well, inside this very tight Marine unit, that's basically breaking the family code. Then one night, two Marines, Dawson and Donnie, walk into his room. They tie Santiago up. They put a rag in his mouth. It's called a code red, unofficial punishment, handled inside the unit. Santiago dies. The two Marines don't deny what they did. Their defense is simple. We were ordered to do it. Well, the order came from above. Now, enter Tom Cruise as Lieutenant Caffey, a Navy lawyer, who would much rather settle cases quickly and get back to softball than become an Atticus Finch. But eventually, Caffey puts Cardinal Nathan Jessup on the witness stand. And then comes the scene. Even if you've never watched the movie, you probably know it. Caffey keeps pushing. Cardinal Jessup gets more angry. And finally, the Cardinal explodes. You can't handle the truth. Ending his anger and honestly his pride, he admits it. He ordered the code red. Well, the Cardinal is arrested. Great. Veiling caught. Music swells. Everyone go home. Except, that's not actually where the movie ends. There's still a verdict. Dawson and Donnie were found guilty of conduct on becoming a United States Marine. Dishonorable discharge. Career's over. Donnie is stunned. He basically asks, wait, the Cardinal admitted that he gave the order. We did what we were told. And why are we being punished? And Dawson gives him the real answer. He says they were supposed to defend people who couldn't defend themselves. That's the whole moral of the movie. Because an order somehow makes your own decision feel like somebody else's. It may arrive in a nice government letterhead, but eventually, it still has to pass through you. Your hands, your judgment, your choice. The order didn't walk into Santiago's room. Two people did. And that brings us back to Eichmann. Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany and later covered Eichmann's trial for the New Yorker. She expected to see a monster. Well, instead, she found something much more disturbing. An ordinary bureaucrat. Eichmann talked about schedules, paperwork, promotions. He spoke in cliches. He wasn't standing there going crazy or laughing like a movie villain. He looked, in Hannah's description, like a clerk in a suit. And from that came her famous phrase, the banality of evil. Her point was that people can do enormous evil while thinking very little. She called it sheer thoughtlessness. And importantly, she said that wasn't the same thing as stupidity. And that's what makes the idea frightening. Nuremberg Principle 4 says that following orders from a government or superior does not remove responsibility under international law if a moral choice was possible. Well, that last part matters. If a moral choice was possible. In other words, if you could have said no, even if saying no cost you something, then the decision belonged partly to you. Following orders may explain what you did, but it does not excuse it. And this is not just a history lesson from 70 years ago. Look at China. For 27 years, the Chinese Communist Party has carried out a campaign against Falun Gong, a spiritual practice centered on meditation, the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Practitioners have faced detention and torture, and investigations have also shown that the CCP killing prisoners of conscience for their organs. But think about what a campaign like that actually requires. It's not just the officials in Beijing, it's the police officers, the clerks, the doctors, every person along that chain. And each of them quietly has a choice to This July, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor marked the 27th anniversary and said Washington is committed to using all appropriate tools to pursue accountability for the Chinese officials involved in these repressive acts. And in June, a Senate committee advanced a bill to sanction people involved in forced organ harvesting. Not just the men giving the order, the people who carried it out. Which brings us back to Eichmann in his glass booth. He wasn't a mastermind, he was a middleman. And the court executed him anyway because the chain of command has a lot of links, and every single link is a person who could've let go. Alright, we covered a lot today. Enjoy the movie and your coffee. But our conscience? That's something worth keeping in our own hands. Because a better future begins with the right choices we make. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.