Jaspers about complicity:
There exists among persons, because they are persons, a solidarity through which
each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the
world, and especially for crimes that-are committed in his presence or of which
he cannot be ignorant. If I do not do whatever I can to prevent them, I am an
accomplice in them. If I have not risked my life in order to prevent the murder
of other persons, if I have stood silent, I feel guilty in a sense that cannot in any
adequate fashion be understood juridically, or politically, or morally. . . . That
I am still alive after such things have been done weighs on me as a guilt that
cannot be expiated.
Somewhere in the heart of human relations an absolute command imposes
itself: In case of criminal attack or of living conditions that threaten physical
being, accept life only for all together, otherwise not at all. (Karl Jaspers, La
culpabiiite ailemande, Jeanne Hersch's French translation, pp. 60-61.)
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