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
I am tired of being part of a white world that sees itself largely unquestioningly as embodying the norms towards which everyone should aspire. I am tired of being called master. I am tired of the permanent distance between black and white. I am tired that my humanity is barely recognized by so many, who see me as master, as enemy or simply as alien, and that my very existence as a white person in South Africa should contribute to the dehumanisation of so many more. – Pedro Alexis Tabensky, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rhodes University, writing in the Cape Times.
