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Just Following Orders: Difference between revisions
replace redirect link with direct link to trope - Post-Jason cleanup
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* Ranga Sanga in the [[Belisarius Series]] both plays this straight and subverts it. He ''fights'' for the bad guys because of his [[I Gave My Word|feudal duties]] but doesn't commit atrocities for them and turns on them when they [[Berserk Button|go too far]].
** Belisarius himself, goes out of his way to order his men not to commit [[Rape, Pillage and Burn]] on random civilians and in fact harshly punishes those who do such things. Those are of course good orders.
* In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's play ''[[Judas Maccabeus]]'', Jason, King Antiochus' [[Les Collaborateurs|appointed]] High Priest, pleads that he was just following orders. Judah Maccabee basically tells him [["The Reason You Suck" Speech|no dice]], the King used him to do dirty work because he is a dirty person – and then orders him exiled from Israel. The whole conversation could have taken place at [[World War II|Nuremberg]].
* In Bernhard Schlink's ''[[The Reader]]'', Hanna is prosecuted as a war criminal when she is found to have been a concentration camp guard who oversaw a forced prisoner march. The guards were ordered not to lose any prisoners, and so locked them inside a church on an overnight stop. When the church caught fire, the guards chose to leave the doors chained rather than risk that any might escape, and all 300 prisoners died. When questioned about this, she points to her orders, and asks the judge naively, "What would you have done?"
* Referenced in [[World War Z]]. A unit of the German army has been ordered to retreat to a more defensible location and abandon the civilians they have been defending to the zombies. Despite the fact that he understands the awful necessity of it -their position was in imminent danger of being overrun and to stay would be a futile gesture- the officer being interviewed is appalled that the theatre commander was capable of giving this order, for everyone who enlists in the German military has it impressed on them that their first and most important duty is to their conscience.
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