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
Critics have wrongly slammed as “conspicuous consumption” the Guptas’ modest demand for helicopter landing rights in the leafy Johannesburg suburb of Saxonwold. They do not realise that the family has for some weeks secretly printed a newspaper called The New Age. An air-drop distribution system may be essential if this cult publication is to be brought to members of the wider reading public for the first time. – Anthony Butler in a scathingly funny piece on the Gupta family
