Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
The National Committee expressed concerns over the utterances attributed to Julius Malema towards the leadership of the Alliance. Many men far greater and better than Julius have travelled the road that he seeks to embark, and many more of them were doomed to failure. We doubt if the majority of members of the ANC Youth League shares his sentiment of insulting Comrade Blade Nzimande, as we know that many of them holds him in high regard. We also do not believe that insults should come first in the place of intellectual discourse, and that hurling insults is merely a form of expressing intellectual bankruptcy. In the ANC and the National Liberation Movement, we have always referred to “narrow African Chauvinism” as a characterization of a tendency, not a label; this is known in the movement. We believe that Julius has crossed the line, and call on our sister organisation, the ANC Youth League, to distance itself from his insults. We want to also place on record that getting into discussions about what brand of whisky people drink, or what their social conduct is when they have drank it will not help the debate and can only hide the real issues behind racial transformation. – Young Communist League on Julius Malema
