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
Lame duck Mbeki?
The local Sasco branch at the University of Western Cape is contesting the SRC election to be held later this week. They usually win the elections because they run on an ANC ticket. In previous years their election posters usually contained pictures of a smiling President Thabo Mbeki, the same picture used by the ANC during the national election campaign in 2004. I see this year Sasco posters have a large picture of Nelson Mandela. No sign of President Mbeki. The students at Sasco obviously decided they will get more votes with Mandela than with Mbeki. Or did they choose a picture of the ANC leader they really like and not the one they have to pretend to like if they were going to share in the patronage of the ANC deployment committee?
