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
It is my contention that the ANC’s leadership crisis is greater at a collective level than it is at individual level. To some extent, the failures of an individual leader can be mitigated by a strong collective. Such a collective can be useful even when an organisation is in the middle of a golden period of leadership because it can defend the membership against the imperious tendencies of a capable and popular leader. We saw an attempt to do this in 2005, when the national executive committee of the ANC called on Zuma and Mbeki to craft a joint solution to what was becoming a bruising battle between their supporters in the months following the axing by Mbeki of Zuma as deputy president of the country. Their failure to craft such a solution precipitated another element of the leadership crisis — the collapse of the leadership collective and the open political warfare that followed. It is in this context that we must understand the battle for Mangaung. – Aubrey Matshiqi in Business Day
