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
Valkenburg here we come
The Vitamins magnate, Dr Matthias Rath, shows, shall we say, a rather eccentric side in papers lodged with the Cape High Court in his case with the Treatment Action Campaign. The Mail & Guardian reports:
The apartheid regime was part of a global plot by the pharmaceutical industry, according to vitamin entrepreneur Dr Matthias Rath. He said in an affidavit filed in the Cape High Court: “This regime was the political arm to turn South Africa into a bridgehead of the pharmaceutical interests with the goal to conquer and control the entire African continent.”
He also said the operations of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) were “almost a copy” of Hitler’s brown-shirt storm troopers. … “The apartheid regime in South Africa was part of this global strategy,” he said. “The apartheid regime became its political stakeholder.” He said that after World War II, thousands of high-ranking Nazi party members used the “corporate channels” of the massive German chemical-manufacturing conglomerate IG Farben to find safe haven in South Africa, where IG Farben had established subsidiaries. Also seeking refuge in this country were thousands of IG Farben managers who had participated in war crimes.
“Much the same as previously in Europe, their goal was to establish a dictatorship serving these corporate interests while keeping the majority of the population ‘under control’,” Rath said. The chemical and pharmaceutical industry became the economic pillar of the apartheid regime, and South Africa became a stronghold for pharmaceutical companies.
Rath said the goal of the “brown shirts” had been to destabilise a democratically elected German government on behalf of corporate interests and their political stakeholders. The TAC’s goal, he said, was to attack the South African government, destabilise the political situation and establish a new political leadership that would voluntarily spend millions on “toxic” antiretroviral drugs.
One sandwich short of a picnic, seems an appropriate description for Dr Rath. What has he been smoking?
