In a New York Times op-ed titled “How to Be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things,” M. Gessen asks: “When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you?” I applaud Gessen for raising this question and an otherwise stiflingly establishmentarian newspaper for publishing it. Still, it’s a bummer that the piece is primarily notable for raising an ethical quandary that older Americans believed to have been fully and correctly settled at least as far back as World War II.

Gessen is concerned with the current American dilemma. What should we do as the United States “builds more cages for immigrants, deploys military force against civilians in city after city, regularly commits murder in the high seas and systematically destroys its own democratic institutions?” There is no explanation for why, but Gessen traveled to Israel to ask Israelis opposed to their own government’s monstrous behavior what they were doing and what they thought they ought to be doing. (Because there is little organized resistance here?) Some Israelis emigrated, voting with their feet. Others became draft resisters. “Refusing to serve in the military is probably the most potent form of protest available to Israeli Jews,” Gessen writes. A select few offered themselves as human shields, throwing themselves between settler thugs and their Palestinian prey in the West Bank.

“To be a good citizen of a bad state,” Gessen concludes ambivalently, “…is weighing leaving against staying, moral obligation against fear, flying under the radar against taking a risk — and opting for the risk.”

There is, or used to be, a better answer. Being a good citizen requires you to do everything in your power to try to overthrow a bad state.

The end of World War II in 1945 prompted a massive reckoning with the actions of nation-states and their citizens. As the full extent of the atrocities committed by Germany, Japan and their vassals and their astonishing scale were unearthed and came to be widely understood, a consensus was quickly achieved over what constituted acceptable behavior under tyranny.

Roughly speaking, Nazi-era crimes were punished in proportion both to how grave the offenses were and to how powerful the person accused of them had been at the time they were committed. (Some notable exceptions escaped prosecution due to their influence or, as with Nazi scientists, their usefulness.) The “big fish” tried at the Nuremberg trials bore a greater burden than the rank and file to the extent that a low-level guard at a death camp might not only escape prison but might even be allowed to emigrate to the United States while the publisher of an anti-Semitic newspaper was sentenced to death. Neither the political pundits of the day nor the philosophers who enjoyed greater cultural currency than today much questioned the calculus of postwar victors’ justice.

The psychic smudge of World War II was hardly limited to high-ranking former officials. The average person who lived under Axis control, the “little fish,” would likewise spend the remainder of their lives justifying their actions and inactions after the end of the war.

In the context of Gessen’s question—what is the ethical obligation of an Israeli or American who doles out taxes to, contributes to the GDP of, and pays homage to a rogue government that gleefully carries out genocides, mass murders and torture?—it is well worth recalling what hundreds of millions of human beings throughout both the Western and Eastern worlds believed about the citizens of regimes like Fascist Italy, Vichy France and Croatia under the Ustaše. Ordinary citizens were complicit. They ought to have killed Pétain and Mussolini.

Hitler, most people concluded after 1945, could never have carried out the Holocaust by himself. He needed the close cooperation of the military, businesspeople and political elites, as well as the enthusiastic cooperation of millions of Germans and non-Germans, and, last but hardly least, the passive acquiescence of the vast majority of people who, while they may never have turned in a Jew to the Gestapo, much less shoved one into a gas chamber, never fulfilled their moral duty as a human being to actively resist the Nazi regime—to wage revolution against it.

Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung argued that all Germans deservedly suffered collective guilt (Kollektivschuld), whether or not they had actively participated in atrocities. Allied occupation forces agreed. The authorities dragged townspeople from areas near liberated concentration camps to view and process victims’ bodies, and ran a propaganda campaign featuring posters of Nazi concentration camps with slogans such as “These Atrocities: Your Fault!”

A moral hierarchy emerged. At the top were members of the Resistance who tried to assassinate Hitler, followed by those executed by the Nazis for their defiance. Next came Resistance guerilla fighters who made it to the end of the conflict, followed by those who helped by providing safe houses and transportation, and looking the other way when partisans passed through. Bringing up the rear in the ethical hit parade were those who did nothing either way, followed close behind by collaborators and traitors.

Then as now, apologists for the attentistes, who waited out the war by keeping their heads down and avoiding trouble, inveighed against the idea of collective guilt by pointing out that resisting a violent regime like Nazi Germany entailed great risks including death—yours as well as your family’s. Following their reasoning, even those who committed murder were blameless as long as they were following orders; the regime put a gun in their hand, placed another gun at their heads and threatened to shoot unless they shot a third person. What was a good German soldier to do under such circumstances?

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre refutes this take in Notebooks for an Ethics. The person in the middle is morally required to refuse. If living requires them to behave immorally and assist a monster—albeit under threat of death—they must choose death.

Gessen doesn’t go there. But 20^th century ethics are clear. When your government is evil, every citizen has a moral imperative, a duty to their fellow citizens as well as to everyone else in the world being victimized by that government, to rise up and overthrow it. The people of Gaza and Venezuela can’t do it. It’s up to us.

It is tempting, in this postmodern era of moral relativism, to say that old rules no longer apply. Trouble is, we haven’t come up with new ones.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)