The French-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, who died earlier this month, devoted most of his career to studying how people behaved when faced with extremity, focusing particularly on inmates of concentration camps and the Soviet gulag. Reflecting on Todorov’s conclusion that moral life was not completely crushed by such inhuman circumstances, Bruce Edward Walker writes:
Todorov’s research details a king’s ransom of [moral] choices made by prisoners—often refuting those prisoners’ own claims [to the contrary]. Ena Weiss was an Austrian confined at Auschwitz who told another inmate she placed her own needs “first, second, and third. Then nothing. Then myself again—and then all the others.” [In reality, however], Weiss overstated her self-preservation dramatically. . . . Weiss assisted “tens, indeed hundreds of other prisoners.”
Other examples abound to support Todorov’s conclusion. Father Maximilian Kolbe was canonized after he gave his own life in return for the life of a father and husband while imprisoned in Auschwitz. . . .
It’s true that Todorov in his later years made lamentable comments drawing false equivalencies between the activities of Islamic terrorists and Western military actions deployed against them. While unfortunate, considering the breadth of his knowledge concerning the evils of totalitarianism, such statements are only footnotes to Todorov’s greater accomplishments.
One thing is for certain, and that is Communism and fascism weren’t defeated by the scolding of Western politicians. [Communism] collapsed of its own weight, expedited by such voices as . . . Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who bore witness to its crimes and everyday horrors. Perhaps as well it was commonplace displays of the moral qualities of kindness, caring, and recognition of each other’s dignity by the inmates in the gulags and concentration camps that helped doom such lamentable locations of human misery to the dustbin of recent history. Much of Todorov’s body of work makes a . . . compelling argument that morality is a powerful weapon against the enemies of human freedom.
Read more on Acton Center: http://blog.acton.org/archives/92138-when-morality-evaporates.html