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
On Catharine MacKinnon
More troubling to my mind, but broached far less often, is the question of whether it makes sense for feminists to attempt to change the world by changing the law. The worry isn’t so much that strengthening the hand of a patriarchal state can only be bad for women; MacKinnon doesn’t want to strengthen the state exactly, but to adjust the law so that state power is exercised in a way that promotes sex equality instead of maintaining and entrenching male dominance. Rather, the concern is that it’s possible that no amount of adjustment could convert the law – or at least, the law in a liberal capitalist state – into a vehicle of genuine emancipation for women.
