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Notes -
Watched Hotel Mumbai, 7/10. The most memorable part is where the head chef encourages the hotel employees to stay and be slaughtered with the guests when they could have left, out of some ridiculous sense of duty and loyalty (“the guest is God”) . They are praised for this decision at the end.
As a leader, he has no business giving them that option. As a guest, the thought of someone pointlessly sacrificing themselves for me is sickening. Forget godhood, I can offer brotherhood. And what kind of man lets his brother throw his life away?
This sacrifice is in stark contrast with the tepid intervention of the police (who to be fair, are portrayed as completely out-armed and out-trained). Here, I could use some self-sacrifice. This predilection for passive sacrifice is morally harmful. Fight or flee, but for the love of all that is holy, do not lie down and share my fate.
I despise the idea that the Captain must go down with their ship. What's that going to achieve? Sure, their duty might incorporate sticking around as long as possible to arrange an evacuation, but when that's done, they don't have any responsibility to feed the fishes.
Pointlessly suicidal demands that a captain literally go down with their ship exist, but they're outliers and often self-enforced (and sometimes overriden by other staff).
The phrase dates back to and probably originates from the Birkenhead Drill, where the ship could not float enough lifeboats for its crew and soldiers, and that as a result the officers commanded and demonstrated willingness to attempt a long (and for most, suicidal) swim to shore rather than swamp or overturn the lifeboats, resulting in a greater number of deaths.
In the modern day, (almost) all ships have enough lifeboats for an excess of passengers and crew: in these contexts, the demand is more than staff should remain until both all passengers have been disembarked (and the ship has been certainly lost, due to salvage law), closer to your preferred framework. However, spelling it out as potentially self-sacrificing is important: whether there are sufficient lifeboats and time to embark them, there remains a serious temptation for crew to save themselves while leaving their charges helpless. Passengers may not even be physically capable of the necessary actions to evacuate, nevermind have the knowledge of how or why to do so.
This is present even for other contexts, such as aviation, albeit in a lesser form. While there are exceptions for some types of incident where near-instant unsurvivable effects are likely to occur, both pilots and especially cabin crew are trained to evacuate as many passengers as their roles and positions in the plane allow before leaving themselves, and this matters.
That said, while I'm not very familiar with the 2008 Mumbai attacks, from what I've heard these causes don't really apply to hotel staff faced with spree killing terrorists.
One recent example of that is of course Costa Concordia, whose captain Francesco Schettino ran her aground while getting frisky with an exotic dancer and was the first one to evacuate. The crew, left without a leader, bungled the evacuation.
The MV Sewol is another case, and one with both more egregiously bad behavior by the crew, and an even steeper death toll.
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