There are no innocent victims

“There are no innocent victims” is a maxim the passage uses to reject the idea that a person can stand outside a war’s responsibility simply because someone else declared it. The speaker distinguishes legal complicity from existential responsibility: choosing war over death or dishonor means claiming the war as his own, without recourse to compulsion or excuse.

The Maxim and Its Context

The passage attributes the maxim to J. Romains and applies it to a first-person reflection on choosing war rather than death or dishonor. The claim is not that the speaker formally declared the war. Others did. Instead, it concerns the meaning the war has for him: by deciding that it exists, he makes it part of his own situation and accepts responsibility for that decision.

Complicity and Choice

The speaker considers whether he might be understood as merely an accomplice, but rejects that description as inadequate. Complicity, he argues, belongs to a juridical framework; it cannot capture the more fundamental relation between an individual’s freedom and the world as that individual chooses to live it. The distinction shifts attention from who initiated the war to how the speaker has chosen to respond to it.

Responsibility Without Excuse

The passage denies that compulsion could excuse the choice, because compulsion cannot take hold of freedom in the sense relevant to this argument. Nor can the speaker appeal to an excuse: human reality, the text says, is characteristically without excuse. The conclusion is therefore not an acquittal or a claim of innocence, but a demand that the speaker lay claim to the war as his own choice and responsibility.

Meaning of the Expression

The maxim functions as a compressed statement about freedom and accountability, rather than as a report that every participant had equal power or caused the war. Its force lies in the speaker’s refusal to treat the war as external to his decision. The movement from others having declared it to his own decision that it exists makes responsibility personal, even where the surrounding event was not initiated by him.