Theodore Dalrymple has a review of a book on the Rwandan Genocide. Dalrymple (a pen name, you will be relieved to know) is a prison physician who has made a reputation for himself as a rather pessimistic commentator on human nature.
I have seen so much, both at home and abroad, that I am not easily taken aback. When you have heard of baby-sitters who impale babies on railings in order to quieten them during a televised football match, or of men who suspend their girlfriends by their ankles from the fifteenth floor balcony, and this kind of thing daily for many years, you develop a kind of emotional carapace. One almost begins to take a pride in one’s own unsociability, which one takes to be a kind of sophistication. It is a form of spiritual pride, I suppose. Still, I nevertheless read a book that shocked me. It was about the Rwandan genocide, called A Time for Machetes, by a French journalist called Jean Hatzfeld. He interviewed several men who had taken part in the genocide, probably the most murderous in human history, at least in terms of numbers of deaths per day while it lasted, and were now imprisoned. One of them was under sentence of death.
The whole thing is well worth reading. Whereas the Nazi Holocaust has produced a whole industry devoted to its interpretation and history, the Rwandan genocide has barely made a ripple on the world mind. This is probably a mistake. The former event, as existentially terrible as it was, was carried out by a very highly organized state, under the influence of an unusual ideology, during a time of total war. The latter was carried out by ordinary people against their neighbors, under the influence of rather ordinary propaganda, in a more or less ordinary political situation.
For three months, the men would get up, have a hearty breakfast, gather together, and then go on hunting expeditions of their former neighbours, who had fled to the nearby marshes. They would hack anyone they found to death; and then, when the whistle blew in the evening for them to stop their ‘work’ (they regarded it as such), they returned home, had a quick wash, had dinner and socialised in a jolly way over a few beers. Their wives would be - for the most part, though not universally - content, because Tutsi property was thoroughly looted, and distributed according to the individual efficiency and ruthlessness of the killers.
The Rwandan Genocide shows how easy it is for a human society to be transformed into something monstrous. This is something that we maybe ought to know.
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