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 the family
Think of that entity “the family,” an impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other: a surname, a sexual dyad, a legal unit based on state-regulated marriage, a circuit of blood relationships, a system of companionship and succor, a building, a proscenium between “private” and “public”, an economic unit of earning and taxation, the prime site of economic consumption, the prime site of cultural consumption, a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children, a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations, a daily routine, a unit in a community of worship, a site of patriotic formation, and of course the list could go on.
