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
Failure to implement recommendations of the Jali Commission Report
Evidently the Department is having difficulty in complying with the recommendations emanating from the various investigations. It is this state of affairs that needs to be attended to by senior officials as a matter of urgency, as it reinforces the perception that members of the Department disregard any form of authority. Furthermore, it confirms the view, which the Commission has come across in the prisons, that the members of the Department of Correctional Services believe that no outsider can tell them how to run the prisons if that particular person has never worked in a prison. This attitude of the members in the Department is definitely self-defeating. This is not a new phenomenon.
