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 Euro 2016
The Croatian team has not always been so ethnically homogeneous. Eight years ago the national side included the Brazilian-born Eduardo, one of the country’s most popular players, who had become a naturalised Croat when he was signed by the Dinamo Zagreb youth team. This seemed to mark the start of the diversification of European football, as players switched nationality at the same time that they moved clubs. (Eduardo had calculated that he was more likely to get into the Croatian national team than the Brazilian one; today that would not be such an obvious call.) It hasn’t happened – the melting pot never materialised.
