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
South Africans and democracy
Only 35% of South African respondents said they preferred democracy and rejected all three types of authoritarianism. To put it in perspective, Afrobarometer provided a list of polled countries. South Africa comes 27th in its public support for democracy, just below Burkina Faso and Liberia. The average support across the 35 countries was 43% (meaning, according to the survey at least, that less than half of the citizens in the countries polled are committed to democracy). Mauritius topped the chart at 74%, followed by Senegal at 66%. In the 2011-13 survey, 42% of South Africans were found to be committed to democracy.
