It’s the whole ‘the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men do nothing’, combined with the very real reality that being the first (or part of it when it isn’t enough) to do something usually results in predictable catastrophic terrible consequences for whoever tries to do something.

And that successful evil uses that to ‘boil the frog’ and constantly shift the normal bit by bit in the direction they want, never doing it enough they get a critical mass of resistance, and slowly pruning out all the good people (with terrible consequences for those folks), and then being able to accelerate as they go due to lower and lower portions of folks willing and able to speak out.

It’s terrifying to watch, even more terrifying to know what it can mean unfortunately.

Because we recognize ‘evil’ as being evil and bad because of the horrible and wide reaching consequences of it for everyone in the longer term.

Hopefully Putin made too big a step here (overconfidence maybe, or his hand was forced by something else), we all have recent even painful experience to react strongly enough, and the backlash will be sufficient to actually result in critical change and not a ratcheting up of the ‘new normal’.