Moral Dilemma (Part 1)
“...Let us say that you are a prisoner in a camp. It is the middle of Siberian winter. Each year many men in your barracks die of exposure to the weather or from brutality, sickness, and hunger. There is never enough food. Men are worked to death—death by physical exhaustion, death by exhaustion of the spirit, death by absolute demoralization. Despair kills as effectively as the bullet and the virus, and more dreadfully, for it corrupts the soul as well.
Let us say that in your camp, the camp where Aleksandr Graham is a zek, there has been a theft of bread. One of the zeks steals a quarter kilo from the kitchen. You see him do it. You know who he is. You say nothing to him, but the knowledge is now lodged permanently in your memory. The guards measure everything to the smallest gram. They know that the bread is missing. Such theft is punishable by death. They conduct an investigation. Now comes the first level of temptation: they offer a double ration of bread to whoever informs on the thief. Although you are starving, this is not so difficult to resist. It is not even a question because you know you cannot kill a man unjustly, and certainly not for an extra bit of food in your stomach.
Then comes the second level of temptation: the guards declare that unless the thief is turned over to them, one of the zeks will be chosen at random and executed. Ah, now the moral problem becomes more complex. Your silence will condemn a man to death, almost certainly an innocent man. You wrestle with this more than you did with the first temptation. You hear the arguments rage in your thoughts—remember that when you are hungry and exhausted, it is very difficult to think clearly. Even so, it does not take long for you to see that the authorities want to trick you into preserving life by taking life. They want you to participate in their evil. But you realize that you cannot let the system turn you into an extension of their apparatus.
No one comes forward. Now they pull a man from the huddled group of prisoners and throw him to the ground. You know he is not the thief. You stand paralyzed as they shoot him in the head. Blood spills out onto the snow. A pool of it spreads toward you. The loud report of the gun, your own terror, your agony of mind—it all combines, and suddenly you are no longer sure of anything so finely tuned as a moral nuance. You say to yourself, Surely his blood is on my head. Did my silence kill him?
Now they pull a second man from the crowd and throw him to his knees. A guard puts a gun to the man’s temple. The man’s eyes are open wide, staring at the ground, staring at the end of everything, at the annihilation of hope. He is an animal searching desperately inside himself for a scrap of manhood. His eyes—oh, his eyes are the most terrible thing you have ever seen.
You know who the thief is. You know he is standing only a few paces away from you, hiding in anonymity. He too has become no more than an animal in a herd of frightened animals. You plead with him silently to be a man again, to give himself up. He does not move. He does not speak...”
To be continued...
~Michael O’Brien
Let us say that in your camp, the camp where Aleksandr Graham is a zek, there has been a theft of bread. One of the zeks steals a quarter kilo from the kitchen. You see him do it. You know who he is. You say nothing to him, but the knowledge is now lodged permanently in your memory. The guards measure everything to the smallest gram. They know that the bread is missing. Such theft is punishable by death. They conduct an investigation. Now comes the first level of temptation: they offer a double ration of bread to whoever informs on the thief. Although you are starving, this is not so difficult to resist. It is not even a question because you know you cannot kill a man unjustly, and certainly not for an extra bit of food in your stomach.
Then comes the second level of temptation: the guards declare that unless the thief is turned over to them, one of the zeks will be chosen at random and executed. Ah, now the moral problem becomes more complex. Your silence will condemn a man to death, almost certainly an innocent man. You wrestle with this more than you did with the first temptation. You hear the arguments rage in your thoughts—remember that when you are hungry and exhausted, it is very difficult to think clearly. Even so, it does not take long for you to see that the authorities want to trick you into preserving life by taking life. They want you to participate in their evil. But you realize that you cannot let the system turn you into an extension of their apparatus.
No one comes forward. Now they pull a man from the huddled group of prisoners and throw him to the ground. You know he is not the thief. You stand paralyzed as they shoot him in the head. Blood spills out onto the snow. A pool of it spreads toward you. The loud report of the gun, your own terror, your agony of mind—it all combines, and suddenly you are no longer sure of anything so finely tuned as a moral nuance. You say to yourself, Surely his blood is on my head. Did my silence kill him?
Now they pull a second man from the crowd and throw him to his knees. A guard puts a gun to the man’s temple. The man’s eyes are open wide, staring at the ground, staring at the end of everything, at the annihilation of hope. He is an animal searching desperately inside himself for a scrap of manhood. His eyes—oh, his eyes are the most terrible thing you have ever seen.
You know who the thief is. You know he is standing only a few paces away from you, hiding in anonymity. He too has become no more than an animal in a herd of frightened animals. You plead with him silently to be a man again, to give himself up. He does not move. He does not speak...”
To be continued...
~Michael O’Brien
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