Workshop on Civil Courage

Audio of the session:

Text by Svetlana Broz:

Upstanders: Anonymous Human Faces of Civil Courage

When war broke out in Yugoslavia in the early nineties, every day the only words spoken in conversations and read in newspapers in its capital city Belgrade were words of the evil. The city where I had grown up, where I had completed my medical studies and which I loved as a cosmopolitan open city had turned into a beehive in which every individual bee was building its own segment, carefully feeding and storing it with hatred. The worldwide coverage of the war was black-and-white. Even my deaf, former friends participated in those unremittingly crude conversations and I found that many relationships stranded – on the question about whose contribution to evil was greater. I was surrounded by hatred, blame and evil.

Refusing to believe that nothing human existed amidst all the madness of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I searched for humanity behind the headlines. I started going to the war zones in January 1993 – first as a cardiologist, in order to help at least one human being devoid of normal medical care because of the war.

While providing care for the people of all three ethno-national backgrounds – Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosniaks, and Eastern Orthodox Christian Serbs – I felt their need to open their souls and talk without being questioned about their fates in the war. From their short, spontaneous confessions in the cardiology ward, I understood their need for truth, which, in places where grenades were actually falling, was surprisingly subtle and refined compared to Belgrade’s and the world's much more simplistic, black and white pictures of the Bosnian war zone.

Upstanders

earning about upstanders and their motivations is not an easy, prescribed recipe allowing others to simply follow their traces. What defines the upstander cannot, for example, be captured in just a few words. His or her reasons to act righteously are often personal and will depend on the circumstances, and finding what motivations upstanders perhaps generally share is a question, unfortunately not for a cardiologist like myself, but for psychologists to debate. But we do not need to pin down general, abstract motivations to understand the function of these stories. These stories stir our selves. They appeal, reach out and make us, readers and listeners, contemplate our own values and actions.

The upstander, thus, actively confronts the choice of whether to stand up against immorality and the degeneration of humanity, or keep quiet and accept things the way they are as bystanders do. The civil courage that characterizes the upstander is, in the words of Uwe Kitzinger, the courage of the rebel – it is the capacity to resist by thinking critically with one's own mind and the will to take part in life, instead of being a silent observer.

When so many other people chose to comprise their morals in order to survive, the upstander's actions suggest that we must not allow ourselves to be debased by circumstance: it is exactly to retain our dignity that we must sometimes refuse to live life at any cost. As Hannah Arendt has powerfully said about man: "It is always possible to say YES or NO" and upstanders are exactly those who want to take decisions about when to say "no" to evil.

Based on the anecdotal evidence of goodness I collected, I have found that upstanders are not extraordinary people – in fact they are very often anonymous individuals. And regardless of their differences in age, gender, literacy, religious affiliation, ethnic identity, or war time roles, what they shared was the bravery to sacrifice their lives rather than commit or be complicit in a crime. I had the opportunity to ask dozens of those who showed their civil courage and help during the war what motivated their behavior and why they didn't follow the majority, which as bystanders was either observing silently or participating actively in crimes. Their precise answers varied, but many of them spoke about the exemplary role of their parents and forefathers and how they could not have acted differently, but in accordance with their high moral norms. This is no predetermination that makes some upstanders and others not. It is a choice. It is the choice to refuse to live life at any cost. It is the choice to retain dignity and to value humanity when surrounded by evil.

The legacy of the upstander

I believe that the notion of the "upstander" has universal value and as their incidence is universal, so too is their significance. Stories like these about real, often anonymous people whose selfless acts have influenced so many make people everywhere and of all backgrounds aware that they too have choices in life, and it is just this awareness of choice that enables one to stand up for the good.

All wars, everywhere in the world, contain this often forgotten category of people: brave souls who have said "NO" in the face of a totalitarian regime, of nationalist doctrine, ethnic cleansing, and persecution. Examples of goodness that knows no ethnic, religious, racial, or political bounds are important documentary material from the wars, and they also represent an axis around which it is possible to build a healthy future after the atrocities have halted. As such they are of enormous social, cultural and religious value. The effects of an upstander's behavior can also extend well beyond a single heroic act and across geographical boundaries, as the people who benefit from such acts try to emulate them. And as they tell their own story, the effects grow.

Documenting the good

The stories of goodness in the face of evil encourage the fostering of tolerance. Because of their intrinsic moral value and because of their strong educational importance, they deserve to be archived and cherished. Documented stories, in the form of books, museums and other public spaces, offer ethical possibilities for teachers in classrooms and elsewhere to give both children and adults the chance to reflect on individual and group responsibility in the face of repressive regimes and their imposed brutalities. Any place dedicated to civil courage can serve as a significant model for the implementation of restorative justice and prevention of future conflicts. Stories of civil courage and kindness restore faith in humanity, remind citizens that in each of us lie seeds of goodness, and that even if we have been unkind or unethical at one point, the next moment we may find the strength to turn this around. Goodness allows for the redemption of the individual and the collective self. It creates a sense of dignity and allows us to act from a more mature perspective than from a stance of unmitigated blame.
 

Dr Svetlana Broz has at her web site www.svetlanabroz.org c.v. and the data about her lectures as well as her papers and books.

Nota de traducción: bystander y upstander son términos que no tienen una traducción exacta. Bystander es un testigo casual que no intercede, que no se pronuncia, cuya presencia no tiene ninguna influencia sobre el evento del que es testigo. Upstander, es un término que surge del verbo “stand up to”, que quiere decir enfrentarse a, o estar a la altura de, las circunstancias.

El CV de Svetlana Broz y toda la información correspondiente a sus conferencias y publicaciones se pueden encontrar en su web www.svetlanabroz.org.