“Revenge is for losers,” is a quote I remember from a moody Scottish film the name of which I can’t remember.
It came to mind as I have started reading Simon Wiesenthal’s 1969 book The Sunflower: On the Possibility of Forgiveness, which is partly a memoir and partly a philosophical question. Wiesenthal, a Jew and concentration camp survivor, was asked by a dying German soldier for forgiveness from a Jew.
The book includes responses from 53 eminent people from all fields. Here are summaries of three.
The Dalai Lama compares the Jews’ orientation toward German Nazis to the Tibetan people’s toward the 1949-50 Chinese invasion and resulting loss of more than a million Tibetan lives. He says he wants to preserve the Buddhist culture of “nonviolence and compassion.” He quotes a Tibetan who says his biggest fear while imprisoned by the Chinese was “losing his compassion for the Chinese.”
Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor who died in the late 1980s falling down stairs, says Germany at the time was “impregnated with crime” and therefore morally ambiguous. He says Wiesenthal “did well” to refuse the soldier pardon: “in a case like this it is impossible to decide categorically between the answers yes and no; there always remains something to be said for the other side.” He closes by saying the soldier’s request was “tinged with egoism, since one detects in it an attempt to load onto another one’s own anguish.”
Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu compares Wiesenthal’s apparent dilemma to black South Africans dealing with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the fall of apartheid. Tutu notes that “forgiveness is not facile or cheap. It is a costly business that makes those who are willing to forgive even more extraordinary.” He adds, “forgiveness is not some nebulous thing. It is practical politics. Without forgiveness, there is no future.”