Human(e) Choices

[browngirl]

I completely managed to miss Blog Against Torture day until it happened/was over, but otoh I can't think of anything I would have said that hasn't been said by others and better too. One of the posts I found particularly notable was written by lyonesse, who reminds us that "people, by which i mean practically everybody, are capable of performing torture and not at all difficult to persuade to do so. see stanley milgram, or darfur, or rwanda, or the schoolyard."

I'm not going to let myself go on very long, but... every so often I do something like learn a new horrifying fact (frex, I was reading about WWII recently. I don't want to remember what I learned this time) and then wonder what I would do, what everyone around me would do. If an officer of the government asked me for a list of all the students of a particular ethnicity at the school where I work, what would I do? If Christianity started recovering its more-or-less mandatory status, or became flat-out mandatory, what would my Christian friends do? If the government decided to imprison people of my ethnicity, which of my friends would try to hide me and which give me up? If they started on another group, how far, if at all, would I help people from that group? Would I risk my safety? Would I risk that of my small roommates?

The only answer I have is that assuming that being a "good person" means one will automatically make the good choice, that one doesn't have to worry about such matters... I'm not very old, I haven't read much, but as far as I can see, when the chips are down such assumptions are one of the first things to be disproven.

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