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
Anton Fagan is a law professor at the University of Cape Town. We remember him in academic dress marching with TAC for the dismissal of then-Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. But speaking generally he has never understood the Constitution, the society in which lives or his privilege. He eschews context and people in his scholarship. Schooled in the formalism and steeped in the pedantry of a law professor, he came to the defence of DA leader and Western Cape Premier when she viciously and personally attacked Janet Love of the Legal Resources Centre as a “dumped cadre”. Love failed to meet Zille’s standards of independence or integrity as a Human Rights Commissioner after that body found her party’s City of Cape Town administration to have violated the Constitution. – Zackie Achmat on the Writing Rights Blog
