Hotel Rwanda — Schindler goes to Africa

Today, I watched Hotel Rwanda, a story about the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The story of Paul Rusesabagina closely mirrors that of Oskar Schindler from Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Unlike Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda takes place in a year that I was graduating from high school. There is something intensely disturbing to me that this could happen at the same time that I was graduating from high school. The Holocaust is disturbing to no end, but I was not alive then, and we all like to feel that times have changed, absolute evil has no real place in my life, that was my grandparent’s time. This is clearly not true, as evidenced at this second by Darfur in the Sudan.

In 1994, the governments of the world did not stand by and do nothing as Rwandan extremists killed everyone off in sight. To the contrary, France supplied weapons to the Hutus to help them even though it was known that they were massacring Tutsi civilians. Why Because they speak French, and the Tutsis speak English. This kind of unspeakably atrocious reasoning is not all that uncommon in government. For instance, let’s look at our own beloved United States. As recently as the early 1980’s, we were directly responsible for supplying weapons to a dictator who unleashed terrible attacks against neighboring countries and even citizens of his own country, because we were afraid of the commies. Who was this man Saddam Hussein. Perhaps you remember him from this photo op with our national security advisor Donald Rumsfeld I could not be forgiven without mentioning that there were several other seemingly unlikely suppliers to Iran and Iraq including France, the Soviet Union and Israel — for those who don’t click the link to the article.

Why do we condone unspeakable acts of evil