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.
Hannah Arendt
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
19 April 2018
WHAT THE TRC SAID ABOUT STRATCOM
From 1984, following the appointment of Brigadier Gerrit Erasmus as head of the Security Branch, Stratcom actions became less random and more co-ordinated. This shift coincided with the formal adoption of Stratcom as state policy in 1984 and the establishment of a sub-committee Tak Strategiese Kommunikasie (TSK – Strategic Communications Branch) as part of the Secretariat of the State Security Council, with representatives from the Security Branch, Military Intelligence and the NIS. Former Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok testified that Stratcom was an official policy of the government and conceded that it was engaged in unlawful actions. An example of a Stratcom action, he told the Amnesty Committee, might include spreading disinformation about an individual in order to cause people to suspect him of being an agent or even attack him.
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