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 courts can help to safeguard democracy. But if they are used to impose on the racial majority the will of a minority, majority politicians will resist and the independence of the courts will be destroyed. All of which explains why the court actions against the singing of a struggle song by African National Congress (ANC) Youth League leader Julius Malema are bad for democracy, the constitution — and minorities themselves. One reason why it is bad for democracy is that it may have enabled Malema to escape accounting to society. Those who tell him what to do knew a diversion was needed to draw attention away from his personal finances. The claim that the Pan Africanist Congress did not organise Sharpeville did not have the desired effect of rallying the ANC behind him and the song was no doubt seen — accurately — to be a more effective method. – Steven Friedman in Business Day
