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
Xolela Mangcu nails it
We are a paranoid society — afraid of each other, afraid of the name-calling, afraid of losing business, afraid of our own shadows, and afraid of our own freedom.
This will not change for as long as the fundamentals of fear and intolerance are in place. Today it is FNB, and tomorrow it will be somebody else. The bottom line is that those who rule over us do not trust us or respect us enough to let us make up our own minds. Let FNB publish what they will, and trust us to decide whether to go along with it or not. That is the true meaning of freedom.
Of course President Mbeki and the intellectuals in his circle would argue that we do have much to be afraid of because in order to truly transform the state and society, we need to address and attack the hegemonic power of the old guard. Because the reactionary ideas and values of this old guard still hold sway and dictates public discourse to the detriment of true transformation, we ignore it and allow it to flourish at our peril.
Like Mr Mangcu I believe this is an unecessary defensive position to take. In a democracy we cannot by fiat change the balance of forces in society. We have to engage and argue with one another.
If one is the President of a powerful governing party one has a lot of scope to make an impact. But in a democracy one does not get one’s way all the time – even if one is the President.
