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
There is something surreal, absurd even, about the US supreme court’s recent three-day hearings on President Obama’s healthcare law. In essence, nine people, all appointed by presidents of the United States and not elected by nor accountable to the American people, will have the power, come June, to determine whether the president’s landmark 2010 legislation will stand as is, be ruled unconstitutional and done away with entirely, or be ruled unconstitutional in part and so be hobbled and in doubt. It is surreal and absurd that we are even having this conversation again, given that the crux of the matter is that 50 million Americans do not have health insurance. Wasn’t the point to make sure the richest and most powerful nation on the planet could protect its own people, as other nations do, including Canada, our neighbor to the north? – Kevin Powell on The Guardian website.
