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
Nugent on Mpofu
The document is a disgrace. No less disgraceful than its repetition in [advocate Mpofu’s] address. The content of the document plays fast and loose with the facts, draws inferences from inadequate material, and is littered with abuse, invective, and sinister suggestion, purporting to support an allegation that, so it was said ‘the Commission has prejudged the issues before it and is merely going through the motions to reach a predetermined outcome’. The content of the document is directed also at throwing bait before the media aimed at, amongst others, reviving in the media an allegation that a ‘rogue unit’ existed within SARS.
