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
Exactly 50 years ago Frantz Fanon wrote that the curse of post-colonial Africa were the leaders who took over from the colonialists only to become black colonialists themselves. He warned that such people take power from the whites to serve themselves, not the people, while using the rhetoric of a better life for all. He called such leaders the comprador. You have become a comprador even before you take formal power as an official politician. The comprador, according to Fanon, is engaged in “conspicuous consumption”. Please check the meaning of this concept in the dictionary, sir. – Andile Mngxitama, in an open letter to Julius Malema published in The Sowetan
