Taking Sides: Elie Wiesel on Moral Courage
Created at: August 11, 2025
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. — Elie Wiesel
A Survivor’s Imperative
Elie Wiesel distilled a lifetime of witness into a stark command: take sides. In his Nobel Lecture (Oslo, 1986), the Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor warned that neutrality strengthens the hand of tormentors while abandoning the tormented. The claim was not abstract; it was forged in the lived memory of people erased when bystanders looked away. Carrying forward the ethical burden of remembrance explored in Night (1960), Wiesel pressed his audience to convert memory into responsibility. Thus, his aphorism functions less as rhetoric and more as a civic instruction manual for moments when the moral scenery is fogged by fear, confusion, or convenience.
Why Neutrality Is Not Neutral
Moving from testimony to principle, Wiesel’s logic rests on the idea that inaction is also an action with beneficiaries. Silence reallocates power: it lowers the costs of oppression and raises the costs of resistance. Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the “banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) shows how ordinary compliance becomes a conveyor belt for harm. Converging with this, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) laments “the appalling silence of the good people.” Together they suggest that impartiality in the face of injustice is not fairness but a moral subsidy that the oppressor promptly cashes.
History’s Verdict on Bystanding
History illustrates the calculus. During the Holocaust, many communities averted their gaze, and trains ran on time; yet Denmark’s 1943 rescue of Jews to Sweden shows how taking sides can disrupt atrocity. Decades later, the 1994 Rwandan genocide unfolded as UN forces, constrained by a neutral mandate, watched slaughter escalate—an anguish recounted by Roméo Dallaire in Shake Hands with the Devil (2003). Likewise, at Srebrenica (1995), the posture of neutrality failed to shield civilians from genocide. These cases do not argue for rashness; they demonstrate that passivity typically favors organized violence over vulnerable lives.
From Neutrality to Responsibility
Accordingly, norms evolved to convert moral insight into policy. The Responsibility to Protect (UN World Summit, 2005) reframed sovereignty as a duty: when a state fails to safeguard its people from mass atrocities, the international community must act—first diplomatically, then, if necessary, more coercively. This doctrine is imperfect and contested, yet it recognizes Wiesel’s core claim. In short, “never again” requires more than memory. It requires mechanisms that break the inertia of neutrality before it becomes complicity.
The Peril of False Balance
The principle also applies to public discourse. Treating unequal claims as equally valid—what media critics label bothsidesism—can launder harm as mere debate. Kovach and Rosenstiel’s The Elements of Journalism (2001) urges truth-seeking over performative balance, while Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt (2010) documents how manufactured skepticism on smoking and climate thrived under faux neutrality. Thus, when facts and bad-faith are given identical footing, the oppressor’s narrative gains shelter, and the victim’s reality is sidelined.
Courageous Partiality, Practiced Wisely
Taking sides need not mean endorsing zealotry; it means aligning with those harmed and choosing tools proportionate to the danger. Listening to affected communities, protecting whistleblowers, documenting abuses, supporting targeted sanctions or boycotts, and voting for accountability are forms of ethical partiality. Desmond Tutu put it plainly in No Future Without Forgiveness (1999): if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. Even so, humility matters: seek the best available evidence, correct errors quickly, and remain open to peaceful solutions that still center the victim’s safety.
From Memory to Everyday Solidarity
Finally, Wiesel’s challenge is sustained not only in crises but in daily life. Standing with the marginalized at work, in classrooms, or online converts abstract empathy into structural change. Small interventions—amplifying a silenced voice, challenging a harmful policy, or refusing euphemisms for abuse—build the civic muscle required when larger tests arrive. In this way, remembrance becomes readiness, and readiness becomes rescue. Taking sides, then, is not a slogan; it is the disciplined habit of choosing people over indifference.