ABSTRACT
One can easily build a connection to what is called internal freedom and the courage to defend one’s convictions … attitudes growing out of independent thinking, life experience and own values which … [are] … even then expressed when they are not shared by others. … [They] … are essential traits of an officer. … We don’t want ‘apparatchiks’ who permanently adapt to circumstances in order to further their careers. … You have every moral right, even an obligation, to articulate deviating views wherever it appears necessary to serve the basic idea or a higher value system. … There’s hardly anything worse than the ‘pre-emptive obedience’ of one who doesn’t tell the superior what knowledge and conscience demand, but instead what one assumes that the superior wants to hear. … The horrible dictum ‘this is a political issue’ suffocates all independent thinking. We don’t want to have ‘yes men.’ That would be the worst thing that could happen to an army.
