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
Captain Blackadder on Bush’s new plan for Iraq
GENERAL: Now, Field Marshal Hague has formulated a brilliant new tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field.
CAPTAIN BLACKADDER: Ah, would this brilliant plan involve us climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly towards the enemy, sir?
CAPTAIN DARLING: How could you possibly know that Blackadder, it’s classified information?
CAPTAIN BLACKADDER: It’s the same plan that we used last time, and the seventeen times before that.
GENERAL: Ex… ex… ex… actly! And that is what is so brilliant about it! It will catch the watchful Hun totally off guard. Doing precisely what we’ve done eighteen times before is exactly the last thing they’ll expect us to do this time!
There is, however, one small problem.
CAPTAIN BLACKADDER: That everyone always gets slaughtered in the first ten seconds?
GENERAL: That’s right. And Field Marshal Hague is worried that this may be depressing the men a tad. So, he’s looking to find a way to cheer them up.
CAPTAIN BLACKADDER: Well, his resignation and suicide would seem the obvious.
