Nilanjana S Roy’s “Gitta Sereny — The difficulty of evil” (Speaking Volumes, June 25) is moral relativism at its worst. By calling the line that separates good from evil “the flimsiest of curtains,” Roy falls prey to the classic fallacy: “Nobody is objectively right or wrong, it’s the circumstances that decide.” If ordinary Germans supported Hitler’s anti-Semitism, it wasn’t because they were good people looking the other way, but because they were evil people drunk on the promises the Führer made them. The singing last line (“No man should judge,” he writes of certain prisoners in Dachau, who transferred their brutality to their fellows, “unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”) is an exercise in hare-brained sentimentality.
Vikram Johri Mumbai
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