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
In fact, as I argued last week, what they are trying to do, with some success, is to impose a counterreality in which the sins of apartheid are being erased by the sins, failures and weaknesses of the African National Congress (ANC). The intention is to erase the racism of the past and present with the corruption, lack of delivery, moral degeneration and the pursuit of narrow individual interests which, for reasons I will unpack in another article, form part of the dominant narrative in South African politics and radio talk shows. In other words, apartheid was not so bad after all. And because apartheid was not so bad after all, as evidenced by the unbridled racism of those who respond online to columns and articles that are published in this newspaper, the arrogance of some white people has itself become a significant component of this dominant narrative. – Aubrey Matshiqi in Business Day
