I don't like the word 'evil', partly because of the heavily supernatural and religious connotations it has (I prefer a scientific, analytical approach to studying the various problems plaguing humanity and think we learn much more this way!), but I like this quote:
"Evil is humanity turned against itself and so conflict and contradiction are fundamental to its nature".
I find the statement quite applicable in our modern judgement of Communism. Communism sought, through brutally-enforced naivety, to bend humanity to behave more altruistically than we are perhaps naturally inclined to. This could lead us to have contempt for, and ultimately to hate ourselves and to be willing to commit atrocities to improve what mankind is.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
A Human Being Died That Night
...a book By Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela about her interviews with Eugene de Kock, the so-called "Prime Evil" killer of apartheid South Africa.
Highly recommended. She gets in to her subjects head extraordinarily well, apart from some incidents in which I think she doesn't understand because she's not male and doesn't understand male sexuality.
Anyway my comment about the book for readers: South Africans tried to pretend that nothing was wrong after Apartheid. By jailing the big guys, they tried to isolate the dog behaviour to just a few people, and so the blame was concentrated rather than diffused, where it belonged. What was really happening though, was that the population was disowning its popular leaders, the ones who did all the dirty work which the rest of the population was grateful for.
Highly recommended. She gets in to her subjects head extraordinarily well, apart from some incidents in which I think she doesn't understand because she's not male and doesn't understand male sexuality.
Anyway my comment about the book for readers: South Africans tried to pretend that nothing was wrong after Apartheid. By jailing the big guys, they tried to isolate the dog behaviour to just a few people, and so the blame was concentrated rather than diffused, where it belonged. What was really happening though, was that the population was disowning its popular leaders, the ones who did all the dirty work which the rest of the population was grateful for.
Blackwater
How did it get to the stage where instead of the Army or the Police doing domestic security or invading other countries / defending ones own country, we now have private companies like Blackwater waging wars, and being paid 5x what regular Army servicepeople would be paid to do so?
It is just so incredibly dodgy that you have private companies now being enlisted to defend the Army or a country's VIPs, and you have civilians of other countries being killed by private security contractors, and legally, this is all acceptable. These dodgy-ass motherfuckers also don't have the same rules apply to them than do other registered killers.
It is just so incredibly dodgy that you have private companies now being enlisted to defend the Army or a country's VIPs, and you have civilians of other countries being killed by private security contractors, and legally, this is all acceptable. These dodgy-ass motherfuckers also don't have the same rules apply to them than do other registered killers.
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