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 corruption
Perhaps Ramaphosas gamble is that a strengthened and autonomous criminal justice system will provide the coercion to keep political allies honest. The problem with this, though, is that it implies an indiscriminate policing of corruption, one that does not avoid figures who are necessary to the stabilisation of the dominant coalition. Prosecution of such figures may be satisfying to all who oppose corruption – but it poses the distinct threat of destabilising a potentially stabilising coalition, and providing the pretext for anti-Ramaphosa mobilisation. It is not at all clear that this circle can be squared. Hence the far greater likelihood that the dominant coalition remains unstable and subject to frequent challenge, paralysis and fracturing, accompanied by violence and attempts to subvert the criminal justice system. It is not impossible that such a dynamic produces a split in the ANC.
