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
Now Mangcu puts in the boot
Money quote:
The problem of course is that Roberts is spending so much time convincing white people that he ignores the people who really think his subject is not fit to govern — the natives within the ANC. I suppose white people will always be a convenient diversion for racial populists.
I always feel heart sore when people misappropriate and distort Biko’s message to defend their racial chauvinism. It was perhaps in anticipation of this that Biko wrote his thoughts down.
Biko had a message for black people in his brilliant essay, Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity. This is what this intellectual and political giant said: “Blacks have had enough experience as objects of racism not to wish to turn the tables.
“While it may be relevant now to talk about black in relation to white, we must not make this our preoccupation, for it can be a negative exercise. As we proceed further towards the achievement of our goals let us talk more about ourselves and our struggle and less about whites.”
Interestingly this mirrors the critique both myself and Johnny Steinberg has leveled against Mbeki himself.
