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The Courage of Neutrality |
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"The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." – JFK, paraphrasing Dante.
If you venture to a small corner of vast cyberspace, you will find a group of people who will disagree vehemently with you. They are Gaia Online’s Neutral Army, and they “seek the balance of the scales.”
We have all heard of those people who lived in Nazi Germany, or Poland, or Hungary, and disagreed with the Nazi party yet did nothing to help those who they persecuted. It is true that whenever you do nothing in such a conflict, you naturally side with the oppressor. By failing to oppose the spread of hate, you are condoning it. This is passive neutrality - hoping that by taking no action, the responsibility will be removed from you. This kind of neutrality is washing one's hands of the matter.
But what of those who supported the German country, who loved it and lived within it, but sheltered those Jews who came to their door? These people are the epitome of courage. And they were neutral. Yet most people would never consider them so.
The key to this confusion is a lack of distinction between active and passive neutrality. Those who did nothing to stop the Nazis from killing Jews were passively neutral – they sought to evade responsibility through inaction. Those who sheltered the Jews without seeking to destroy the Nazis were actively neutral. They saw an imbalance in the scales – the Nazis were trying to destroy the Jews – and sought balance. Not all of them wanted to fight the Nazi party. What they did want was to save the Jews.
Martin Luther King called his Civil Rights protests extremism, and put forth the question in his Letter from Birmingham Jail "What sort of extremist will you be?" He decided that his movement was extremism for love. He was right. But, although he claimed to agree with Dante, he was also an extremist for neutrality. Did ever, in those protests, King and his followers seek to harm the whites who oppressed or even attacked them? They asked for equality, for people to be judged without regard for skin color, for racial neutrality. To achieve this aim they sought more rights for African-Americans. But unlike certain violent extremists, King's followers were willing to stop at equilibrium. They did not seek to punish. They sought a balanced scale.
When Jesus says "Love your enemies," he is putting forth a call to active neutrality. By practicing love of enemy, it is certain that we will never seek to harm others for personal gainmerely because they are our enemies. This is a vital understanding, because even in the midst of evil there is good. Not all Germans were Nazis. And even among the members of the Nazi party, there were those who sympathized with the Jews and tried to lessen their suffering. Active neutrality can encompass the good in each side of the conflict. The only belief incompatible with active neutrality is that which actively seeks to attack other beliefs.
By fighting for justice for both sides, neutrality can guard against human rights violations. The Japanese internment camps of World War II show how exactly one can take sides too far. The Japanese-Americans were not responsible for Pearl Harbor - but they were considered among the enemy. Every time you set yourself up as being against a group, even a group responsible for an injustice, you risk commiting injustice upon members of that group.
It is well known that coming together for a single cause multiplies intensity. Modern suicide bombers are taught a tremendous sense of connection with their fellows and with their country or cause. By working off of each other, each member in a group is able to surrender themselves wholly to their emotions. The Nazis were propelled by nationalistic pride and hatred of the “lesser races,” the Allies by compassion for the persecuted and by hatred of Nazis and of the Japanese. Hatred led them to prejudice. Since neutrals do not come together against anyone, they are comparatively safe from this deadly magnification of hatred.
Could Hitler have been stopped with neutrality alone? Could he have been stopped without the Allies? No. Unfortunately, no nation is invulnerable to assault. Sometimes in the course of defense force must be employed in opposition to a force. But the death tolls would have been much greater without the help of those Germans who sheltered Jews. Even when force is necessary, active neutrals can remove innocent people from the collision path. And they can do something more – they can ensure that we do not totally lose track of our common humanity in the pursuit of factional interests.
An actively neutral person must be willing to fight for the rights of either side, depending on who is being hurt. Not like the bat of Aesop's fables, who sided with the winners in the battle between mouse and bird. Rather, one must commit oneself to fight for the side that is losing – the side that is being oppressed. In this way only can we avoid siding with the oppressor. If the Allies marched into Berlin to kill every man, woman, and child who had supported the Nazis, would it not be just to stop them?
People such as Dante look down upon neutrality because it is cowardly. Yet it seems to me that active neutrality is more courageous than choosing a side. Where passive neutrality seeks to avoid responsibility, active neutrality is assuming the whole of it upon self alone. Both Allied and Nazi forces were able to share their responsibility among their organization. They had the group for support, to convince them to keep fighting. But a neutral person rarely has a group to share their actions with. They have to hope that the neighbors who see them hiding Jews are sympathetic enough to look the other way. Some may be hated by both sides for failing to choose one cause or another. In the face of so much passive neutrality, active neutrality is not seen as a virtue.
When my parents were divorced, I wanted very much to love them both. I wanted to be neutral. This was a reasonable expectation for any child of any age: the ability to love both parents. But my father convinced me that neutrality was the same as apathy. So, for a time, I fought against my mother. I took a side and I hurt my family in my ignorance. The misconception that all neutrality is wrong, always, was formed in observation of certain failures of passive neutrality. But as long as it exists, there will be people who are pushed into choosing one side or another as I was. People who join a fight without understanding what they are fighting for or against.
One must either bend or break; but the desire to fight is strongly ingrained in human nature. It is a survival instinct – you or me, us or them – it is a false dichotomy. To be unable to identify with an us, a home tribe, by refusing to also identify a them, an enemy, may be difficult and painful. But the urge to fight need not be the urge to fight against. To fight for all goods in this world rather than choose between causes – for the good of all, not merely the good of us – allows all of us to be Humanity.
Aldorel · Wed Jan 17, 2007 @ 09:24pm · 1 Comments |
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