Where is the red line drawn??

Light and love, do they even exist during such a dark, evil time? During war, do we just change ourselves to fit in such a dark war? How do we react when we are forced to make a choice, a choice of whether to preserve ourselves, our personality, or do we just mutate ourselves to match the evilness of our opponents? In order to fight darkness, one must become a little like the enemy, but where do we draw the line? Where does right and wrong get lured together?

In Harry Mulisch’s “The Assault” we are sent to a dark 1945 World War II setting. A child named Anton is thrown into a jail where he meets a prisoner that hates Fascists with a passion. She starts telling us of a poem describes light, but then switches topics and starts telling us the difference between good and bad, but it is such a paradox because she tells us how someone can fight the darkness and hate them while still fighting in the name of the light. She asserts that the secret is that by hating hate, they are better because the rebels’ hate is better than the fascists’. That is why fighting the darkness is hard, the good must become a little bit like the darkness. The good must do away with something inside themselves before they can do away with the fascists, while the fascists have no such problem, they can do anything they please without a second of remorse. So at what point do we become worse than the enemy we are fighting? Where is the red line drawn? War? Genocide?

Passage on page 38.