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 favourable treatment of Jacob Zuma
Despite the constitutional injunction of equal protection and benefit of the law, of which the Commission was aware, for reasons that have not been explained the Commission treated the respondent differently and with what I could call a measure of deference. He was only subjected to compulsion by summons when it was too late in the day… The question that arises is whether the current situation in which the Commission finds itself would have arisen if it had timeously invoked its powers of compulsion.
