Where force is used, force is aroused. It is up to the victor to decide what shall be done with the vanquished, in line with the rule of vae victis. The vanquished can either die or do and suffer what the victor wants. As a rule he has always preferred to live (here are the roots of the fundamental master-servant relationship as profoundly illustrated by Hegel).
Right is the sublime idea of men who derive their existence from an origin which is secured by force alone, but not determined by force. Wherever men become aware of their humanity and recognize man as man, they grasp human rights and base themselves on a natural law to which both victor and vanquished may appeal.
As soon as the idea of right arises, men may negotiate to find the true right in discussion and methodical procedure.
True, what in case of a complete victory becomes right for the vanquished and between victor and vanquished, has thus far played only a very limited role in events which are decided by acts of political will. These events become the fundament of a positive, factual law which is not justified through right.
Right can only apply to guilt in the sense of crime and in the sense of political liability, not to moral and metaphysical guilt.
But even the punished or liable party can recognize the right. The criminal can feel his punishment as his honor and rehabilitation. The one who is politically liable can admit that the living conditions he must accept now are facts determined by fate.
Mercy is what tempers the effect of undiluted right and of destructive force. The humanity of man senses in it a higher truth than may be found in the unswerving consistency of either right or force.
(a) Notwithstanding the existence of right, mercy works to open a realm of justice freed from flaws. For all human norms are full of flaws and injustice in their consequences.
(b) Notwithstanding the possibility of force, the victor shows mercy. He may be motivated by expedience, because the vanquished can serve him, or by magnanimity, because his sense of power and stature is raised by letting the vanquished live; or he may in conscience submit to the demands of a universally human natural law, by which the vanquished is no more stripped of all rights than is the criminal.
WHO JUDGES, AND WHO OR WHAT Is JUDGED?
The hail of charges moves us to ask: “Who—whom?” An accusation is meaningful only if it is defined by point of view and object and does not cross these bounds; and it is clear only if it is known who accuses and who is accused.
(a) Let us first be guided by an enumeration of four types of guilt. The accused either hears himself charged from without, by the world, or from within, by his own soul.
From without, the charges are meaningful only in regard to crimes and political guilt. They are raised with the intention of effecting punishment and holding liable. Their validity is legal and political, neither moral nor metaphysical.
From within, the guilty hears himself charged with moral failure and metaphysical weakness—and, if these led to political and criminal acts or omissions, with those as well.
Morally man can condemn only himself, not another—or, if another, then only in the solidarity of charitable struggle. No one can morally judge another. It is only where the other seems to me like myself that the closeness reigns which in free communication can make a common cause of what finally each does in solitude.
The assertion of another’s guilt cannot refer to his conviction, only to certain acts and modes of behavior. While in individual judgment we try to take motives and convictions into consideration, we can truthfully do so only insofar as they can be established by objective indications, i.e., acts and behavior.
(b) The question is in which sense can a group be judged, and in which sense only can an individual. It clearly makes sense to hold all citizens of a country liable for the results of actions taken by their state. Here a group is affected, but the liability is definite and limited, involving neither moral nor metaphysical charges against the individuals. It affects also those who opposed the régime and its actions. Analogously there are liabilities for members in organizations, parties, groups.
For crimes one can punish only an individual, whether he was acting alone or in concert with accomplices, each of whom is called to account according to the extent of complicity which as a minimum need not exceed the mere joining of such company. There are assemblages of gangsters and conspirators which may be branded criminal in their entirety, and in this case mere membership is punishable.
It is nonsensical, however, to charge a whole people with a crime. The criminal is always only an individual.
It is nonsensical, too, to lay moral guilt to a people as a whole. There is no such thing as a national character extending to every single member of a nation. There are, of course, communities of language, customs, habits and descent; but the differences which may exist at the same time are so great that people talking the same language may remain as strange to each other as if they did not belong to the same nation.
Morally one can judge the individual only, never a group. The mentality which considers, characterizes and judges people collectively is very widespread. Such characterizations—as of the Germans, the Russians, the British—never fit generic conceptions under which the individual human beings might be classified, but are type conceptions to which they may more or less correspond. This confusion, of the generic with the typological conception, marks the thinking in collective groups—the Germans, the British, the Norwegians, the Jews, and so forth ad lib.: the Frisians, the Bavarians, men, women, the young, the old. That something fits in with the typological conception must not mislead us to believe that we have covered every individual through such general characterization. For centuries this mentality has fostered hatred among nations and communities. Unfortunately natural to a majority of people, it has been most viciously applied and drilled into the heads with propaganda by the National-Socialists. It was as though there no longer-were human beings, just those collective groups.
There is no such thing as a people as a whole. All lines that we may draw to define it are crossed by facts. Language, nationality, culture, common fate—all this does not coincide but is overlapping. People and state do not coincide, nor do language, common fate and culture.
One cannot make an individual out of a people. A people cannot perish heroically, cannot be a criminal, cannot act morally or immorally; only its individuals can do so. A people as a whole can be neither guilty nor innocent, neither in the criminal nor in the political (in which only the citizenry of a state is liable) nor in the moral sense.
The categorical judgment of a people is always unjust. It presupposes a false substantialization and results in the debasement of the human being as an individual.
A world opinion which condemns a people collectively is of a kind with the fact that for thousands of years men have thought and said, “The Jews are guilty of the Crucifixion.” Who are “the Jews”? A certain group of religious and political zealots whose relative power among the Jews of that time, in cooperation with the Roman occupation authorities, led to the execution of Jesus.
That such an opinion will become a matter of course and overpower even thinking people is so amazing because the error is so simple and evident. One seems to face a blank wall. It is as though no reason, no fact were any longer heard—or, if heard, as though it were instantly and ineffectively forgotten.
Thus there can be no collective guilt of a people or a group within a people—except for political liability. To pronounce a group criminally, morally or metaphysically guilty is an error akin to the laziness and arrogance of average, uncritical thinking.