E.M. Forster created a stir when, in Two Cheers for Democracy, he wrote, "if I had to choose
between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts
to betray my country."  Forster’s country was Great Britain, and the "Cambridge spies"–Burgess, MacLean, and Philby–were at the time much on the British mind.  It was easy to draw the inference that–given the relative attractiveness of friendship and Stalinism–it was misguided friendship that drew the traitors together.  The human, albeit fallen, thing to do was to cover for your chums, through thick and thin.

But Forster’s point was subtler.  Here’s what he wrote:

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose
between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts
to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader.… It would
not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest
circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar
rather than their country, Rome. Probably one will not be asked to make such an
agonizing choice. Still, there lies at the back of every creed something
terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer,
and there is even a terror and a hardness in this creed of personal relationships,
urbane and mild though it sounds.

Could the "terror and hardness in this creed of personal relationships" be any plainer than it is in stories like this, this and this?