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
Con Court life a drag?
I got hold of the invite below to a party organised by some of the Clerks at the Court. The party was organised in response to the practice in Umlazi, where woman are being forbidden (and in one case stripped naked) from wearing trousers and also in response to the recent murders of lesbian women in Soweto and elsewhere.
Pity some of the (male) judges are not attending as well. Wearing a dress might just help some of the male judges to embrace their (as yet underdeveloped) empathetic side.
