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
The [DA’s] open opportunity society is based on a conservative political philosophy, as it provides an ideological defence of the capitalist system. The children of the historically advantaged invariably have a head start in realising inherent talent. This society attributes an individual’s lack of success to individual weaknesses, not the system. Britain’s New Labour party, under Tony Blair, also adopted the open opportunity society as the ideological counterpart to its neoliberal restructuring of the economy and society. As a result, inequality grew more rapidly than it did under John Major’s conservative government. The capacity of those on the higher rungs to reproduce their privileged positions increased, with no evidence of downward mobility if their offspring were less talented. In contrast to the stated intention, Blair’s open opportunity society became, in Alex Callinicos’ words, “entrenched inequalities of opportunity.” – Jane Duncan on the DA
