Leadership Quote by Douglas Hurd

Hurd is doing something more pointed than condemning Hitler and Stalin. He’s slamming the trapdoor argument that atrocities dissolve into “context” if you wrap them in the period’s prevailing norms. By naming the dictators alongside “their immediate lieutenants,” he widens the moral perimeter from the headline monsters to the bureaucrats, ministers, police chiefs, and paper-pushers who later tried to rebrand themselves as mere products of their age. It’s a direct hit on the “just following orders” ethos that haunts postwar Europe: guilt doesn’t stop at the top, and history doesn’t function like a cultural alibi.

The line’s force comes from how it borrows the language of legal pleading - “cannot plead in defence” - to deny a defense before it’s even raised. That’s the intent: preempt relativism not with moral sermonizing, but with courtroom framing. He’s asserting a baseline of human judgment that survives fashion, ideology, and national mythmaking. “Accepted values” is almost scornful here, treating social consensus as a flimsy shield when what’s at stake is systematic murder.

The context is the late-20th-century European project of memory: war crimes trials, the Nuremberg legacy, the opening of archives, and the uncomfortable re-litigation of collaboration. Hurd, a conservative British statesman, is also defending liberal democracy’s self-image: if some acts were always indefensible, then “never again” isn’t a slogan - it’s a standard meant to bind ordinary people, not just villains.