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 #MeToo
If you look at the monsters of #MeToo, it is easy to think that power, in some dark fairytale, requires the sexual sacrifice of women, and that these sacrifices should be not exactly public, but known. It’s possible that the people around these men were in thrall to their monstrosity, that it trapped them in some paralysing or exciting posture with regard to their authority. We don’t speak of men’s attraction to power as being problematic – they want to compete! – but when women are attracted to power they are styled as being complicit in their own exploitation.
