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
For a former president in the Nelson Mandela epoch, who repeated parrot-like “a nonracist society”, and who knows how negative comments about “foreigners” can stoke massacres and civil wars (even in his beloved Nigeria), Mbeki’s spit about native whites as “foreigners”, implying they are suitable targets for xenophobic attacks, was racist provocation animated by a malicious spirit acting through a lost soul. Mbeki’s denial of reality — of the very deep roots of white people in SA, whose contributions made him an African president with virtually a private jet to gad about — is, however, mild compared with his fatal denial of a disease that is ravaging his race. His institute would be a conduit for Mbeki denialism, a tragic prospect for other generations and regions. – Meshack Mabogoane in Business Day
