Considering a Grey Area.

I was always a little uneasy with the fact that treason is considered the most serious of all crimes. (When the death penalty was abolished in Britain, treason remained the one capital offence.) It seems to me that it can be, and sometimes is, used as the state’s ultimate tool in controlling the population. There was a time, for example, when the English monarch was considered so inseparable from the body politic that even the occasioning of personal injury to him or her was considered treasonable. That was the legal basis for the beheading of Anne Boleyn. Her basic crime – whether or not she was actually guilty of it – was infidelity to King Henry.

No doubt the supporters of such a notion would argue that the state is not a separate entity in and of itself, but the homogenous identity of the people who form it. The argument then goes on to assert that any aid given to an enemy of the state is therefore potentially injurious to all its people.

I understand that, and in some circumstances such an objection is clear. But what of those misty areas in which the aiding of an enemy, as defined by state policy, is actually beneficial to its people or serves some greater good? An obvious example to cite would be those Germans who opposed the Nazis in the 1930s/40s and helped Jews to escape the pogrom. The German state, in the form of the Nazis, logically regarded their actions as treasonable, whereas the rest of us regard such people as heroes. And I can think of another example a little closer to our own time.