The Rwandan Genocide and Beyond
I'm not an American isolationist, but I still generally support American intervention only where it is pragmatic for our country. This is not just purely for self-interest, but because American interventionalsim has caused so much negative **** throughout the world, not only directly, but through the law of unintended consequences. A world power going into a country and doing whatever, no matter how well-intentioned, has every opportunity to do at least as much bad as good. And often worse.
But if you know anything about the Rwandan genocide in 1994, which is a subject I have only recently become even vaguely educated on, there really is a point at which non-intervention equals acceptance of evil. I'm an atheist who doesn't believe in true evil, but what happened in Rwanda is evil if anything is evil. And we did nothing. For perfectly reasonable reasons, because of the catastrophe of our intervention if Somalia, but...
At what point does pragmatism become the acquiescence of evil? At what point should the American, or UN, military complex just do something? I'm not encouraging one viewpoint over another, I'm just asking a question. I ****ing don't know, but I've been reading about that genocide recently, and am watching Hotel Rwanda, and I can come up with no moral reason why we did nothing.
Like, help me understand why what we did or did not do was or was not just. And therefore what we should do in the future.
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Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien
There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
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