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 Brazil
Meanwhile, by refusing to engage in the traditional do ut des of Brazil’s pork barrel politics, and purging the government of its most blatantly compromised ministers, Dilma was antagonising forces in Congress on which her majority in the legislature depended, for whom corruption was a condition of existence. After close-grained analysis of the fractions of capital, Singer situates these tensions in a striking overview of the longue durée of the party structure in Brazil, from the postwar period to the present… Singer dubs this last ‘the party of the interior’, an amoeba-like force with no distinct ideological identity, slithering in whichever direction temporary power and emoluments, democratic or undemocratic, lay. Twenty years later, after the military stepped down, this trio essentially reappeared in the shape of the PSDB, the PT and PMDB. Neither of the first two could govern without the parasitic assistance of the third, with its wide-flung capillary network of local office-holders and nearly continuous control of the powerful presidency of the Senate. Any hint of republicanism was anathema to it.
