halos

There was a piece in the Times about Chiune Sugihara. I've read about his story before, but I don't remember where or how. He was a Japanese diplomat, stationed at an embassy in Lithuania during World War II, who, against orders, wrote thousands of exit visas for Jewish refugees attempting to flee eastern Europe in the summer of 1940. Some were able to then secure passage on the Trans-Siberian Railway and ultimately enter Japan. After the war, his actions weren't well known in his home country, but he was interviewed some decades later while in Europe and said the following:

Someone else would have done the same thing if they were in my place. There was no other way.

How strange to say goodness is necessary...because what's apparent in the story of Mr. Sugihara is that the world around him found things otherwise. We wouldn't remember him in a better world.

An interview with Sugihara:
https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/sugihara/interview-with-sugihara.html

There's a good quote from him in his Wikipedia article too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiune_Sugihara

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Mostly unrelated further reading: forms of modality that appear in Leibniz:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-modal/#NatMod