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
If the ANC’s critique of liberal democracy was accompanied by attempts to deepen democracy by, for instance, decommodifiying electoral politics and access to the courts, enabling participatory budgeting, supporting independent community media and encouraging independent popular organisation, its position would be credible. But given that its critique of liberal democracy is being accompanied by a shift in power to securocrats rather than popular forces, and repression rather than opening, its opposition to liberal democracy can only be understood as anti-democratic. – Richard Pithouse on the The South African Civil Society Information Service website.
