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 the Oscars
This year’s Oscars were the “Jurassic Park” edition: Hollywood’s dinosaurs have come back full force from their welcome obsolescence and laid waste to their own playground. In 1990, “Driving Miss Daisy,” a film of benighted attitudes toward racial comity, won Best Picture—beating out “Do the Right Thing” even before entering the auditorium, because Spike Lee’s film wasn’t nominated. This year, Lee had a film nominated —“BlacKkKlansman”— and it was beaten out for Best Picture by “Green Book,” a movie that’s at least as backward as “Driving Miss Daisy” regarding the culture and politics of the Jim Crow era, twenty-nine years later.
