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
Even where Malema is apparently pursuing radical change, in the mining industry, he is in fact helping to entrench the spoils system at the heart of Mbeki’s ANC. He recently complained that “those who go around spreading lies and rumours linking the ANC Youth League to big business people should stop doing so because it is not funny anymore”. However, as this column has previously observed, Malema is fronting a putsch by Mbeki-era apparatchiks to create a state-owned mining company. Malema’s presentation to Parliament’s mining portfolio committee last week contained some comic gems. Those who do not yet know how the spoils will be distributed should take note of Malema’s insistence that the state-owned mining company should be “under the direct supervision of the Department of Mineral Resources” and “not public enterprises”. – Anthony Butler in Business Day
