T h e  F i f t h

A government may apply all laws to its citizens and to those it accepts as its citizens, but it cannot apply its laws to those it does not accept. For they are able to say: “Since we are not citizens, you are not our government!”

Furthermore, no government can inflict two penalties at the same time. It either imprisons a murderer, or it executes him. To punish by both imprisonment and capital punishment is a principle nowhere!

However, despite the fact that I have caused no harm whatsoever to this country and nation, for eight years you have held me in captivity in a way not inflicted on even a criminal belonging to the wildest and most foreign nation. Although you have pardoned criminals, you have negated my freedom and deprived me of all civil rights. You have not said: “He too is a son of this land,” so in accordance with what principle and  law  do  you  propose,  contrary  to  the  wishes  of  your  nation,  these  freedom- destroying principles to someone like me who is a foreigner to you in every respect? Since in the Great War you have counted as nothing all the heroic deeds to which this person  was  the  means  and  were  testified  to  by  the  Army’s  commanders,  and considered his self-sacrficing struggles for the sake of this country to be crimes; and since you deemed his preserving the good morality of this unfortunate nation and his serious and effective work to secure its happiness in this world and the next to be treason; and since you have punished for eight years (and now the punishment has been for twenty-eight years) someone who does not for himself accept your injurious, dangerous, arbitrary principles, which in reality are without benefit and spring from unbelief and from Europe; the punishment is the same. I did not accept its application so you made me suffer it. So according  to what principle is it to enforce a second punishment?