Thanks for the reviews!
Part III: Peter Newkirk
Many of you know Peter Newkirk as the one who could crack every safe, pick every lock and pocket. Because of this, I am writing this piece today. It is about crime, about the relativity of crime when measured on the meter of morality.
For me, picking locks and pockets was a way of life, even before the war. In Stalag 13 it became even more a matter of survival. But was it right to do this? Is crime relative to the situation?
Moral is a very ambigiuous word. For me moral is a given set of values, agreed to by the majority of humanity. These values are the codex for respect. Acting in conflict with these values is seen as bad and so the respect of people for your acts will decrease. Those moral values are also a set of rules for survival. Without them, without a moral you cannot survive in our community.
Giving as much as taking is one of the underlying principles of this moral. If you do not adhere to the values of moral, you cannot expect others to do so. So, if you do not want to be punched in the face in the middle of the street for nothing, you shouldn´t do so either.
This concept of moral is a simplistic one, but it works in normal circumstances. Don´t do to other people, what you don´t want them to do to you. Does not sound ambiguous, does it?
The ambiguity of moral comes into play when we reach the boundaries of its set of values. Moral concepts are agreed on (although not conscious) in times of peace, by people who don´t have to fear that they´ll die of hunger, thirst or bombings the next day, or even the next hour, the next minute. This fact makes morals boundaries quite clear.
What happens to moral values, when abnormal things happen? Suddenly moral values seem to have been made of rubber. All of a sudden I, as a soldier am allowed to shoot, murder, other people. In times of famine, stealing food becomes common. When one has to fear for its own life, moral values are overtaken by the instinct for self-preservation.
What happened to the moral values? Did they vanish? No, they did not, the values are still there, represented by for example the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention. How come not everyone adheres to them in times of war?
It is the problem, that is strongly connected with the ideologies Colonel Hogan talked about earlier. Ideologies introduce a kind of holiness and cleanliness into a group that believes in and follows this ideology. Everyone else is not worth mentioning anymore, because he disagrees or does not fit into the holiness of ideology.
This process is embedded in every ideology, even in our own want for democracy. Think about it, what do you think of dictatorships? The fact that you might think that a dictatorship is not the right thing represents this unholiness of everything outside the own frame of mind. But, as Colonel Hogan said democracy is the best system we have up to now.
This process then, the sanctification of a way of thinking is ultimately dangerous, because it is a small step from preferring ones way of thought over another one to truly disdain the other way of thinking. When this second step comes into action, it is but another small step to say that the believers in everything else than your ideology are inhuman and irrational.
Now we have got the underlying danger. When someone is not human, the human concepts of moral values do not apply to him. When an enemy soldier is no other human, but a swine, he is no POW, so the Geneva Convention does not apply to him anymore. This is the way, that athrocities are made possible, even with the sense for morality intact.
Is it thus right to treat enemy soldiers as inhuman? Of course not, because they are human, albeit with a different ideology. Again, ideology plays a strong role in a sense for right and wrong.
We have explored now, how moral values can be bent out of way, without feelings of guilt, by ideology. The fact that we can state a theory for the reason why athrocities are comitted does not make them excusable of course. The fact that something can be explained in a logical way is not a way of making this fact logical, or even wanted. Between the ideology and the athocity itself are always people, people with a moral judgement of their own. Responsabillity is not a matter of explanation, it is a matter of ones own judgement.
Now, what about stealing food in times of famine? Ask some people, what they would do, if a relative of them was starving to death and the only way of saving him or her is to steal food. What would they do, steal the food or let the relative die?
In this case, two moral conflicts are coming into play. One is about stealing, the other about letting someone die when you are able to prevent it. It is a matter of which conflict is stronger. Most people, I think would feel that the second option is in greater conflict with their moral sense than the first one.
So, by conflict of two or even more moral values, some can be bent to prevent another infraction of the moral values from happening. It is another sign, that in the human mnd, moral values are not made of stone. They are made of rubber, able to be bent in certain directions, by certain situations.
When the danger of dying of hunger concerns oneself, this to can be seen as a conflict of two moral values, albeit one is deeper rooted into ourselves, than the other. The sense that stealing is not right is one, that developed in the evolutionairy history with the existence of cooperative groups. Before that time, individuals existed (although they may or may not have been human), whose only desire was the desire to survive. This desire is preserved in us, to the present day.
In the given example, the drive for self-preservation is stronger than the moral conflict of stealing. Again, the moral value that stealing is wrong, is being bent out of the way.
All of this, relates to our situation at Stalag 13. We did many things, which were in conflict with human moral values. Of these, stealing some papers out of a safe were the least, I believe. We killed, murdered, all five of us. When we sent another map to London, concerning another munitions factory, we sentenced tens of guards to death. When we blew up a factory, people died.
We tried to minimise these losses, everyone does, but for us, the moral values we were violating when we killed people for the „greater good" (oh what a hollow word it is), we believed that what we were doing was a smaller conflict with our moral values than letting the Germans proceed making munition, tanks, bombs.
We valued our own countrymens lives higher than those of the Germans and we knew it, but we thought it was necessary. It is another example of our ideology, the ideology, that prevails to the present day. I can only ask one thing. Keep an eye on ideologies and on your own sense of right and wrong. Understanding your own emotions is the only key to understand the emotions and drives of the people around you.
Understanding yourself is the only way to prevent new athrocities. Ask yourself time after tim, if what you are doing is really the right thing and when you´ve got an answer to this question, ask why, and so on.
„Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right." (Isaac Asimov)