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.

Intervening wouldn't be profitable. That's not how America rolls.

#downwithfrown

Rwanda was a tragedy. But it's not the US job to take care of other countries. If the country wants us to intervene, and the situation at home isnt to ****ed up I'm not against it. But that said, the UN's job is to keep peace. Something like this happens and they do nothing I find disgusting. The Rwanda genocide was the UN's job and they ****ed it up. Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, what happened in Somalia is the US fault. Not the UN. The UN is a waste of space that needs to be dismantled and rebuilt as something that actually gets work done and doesn't get so caught up in all the beaucratic horse manure.

I'd vaguely agree in general, but within a week, or two weeks, or a month, or whatever, nearly one million people died. The Rwandan refugee camps that exist today are filled with Hutu (the people massacred were the Tutsi) running from the Tutsi afraid of their reprisal, because the Tutsi were basically murdered to a man except in provinces controlled by the rebel group of the Tutsi. Within weeks, the Tutsi living in the places that were being massacred were basically all dead. All of them. The genocide was basically successful. 80% of the Tutsi in Rwanda were massacred. Straight up.

The Rwandan genocide made the Holocaust look civilised, and nobody would ever say that we should have let the Nazis murder all the Jews (and the Rwandan genocide was statistically five times as murderous as the Holocaust). So, UN or American or whatever, how can pragmatism be justified if we are to consider ourselves human beings?

And I'm not even going into the organized rape squads that left virtually every single female Tutsi survivor, almost literally every single goddamn one, a victim of rape, and the AIDS epidemic that resulted (the Hutus actually organized "rape squads" of HIV positive men to rape Tutsi women in order to poison their gene pool) was just like... holy ****.

Seriously though. I feel as a "modern Westerner" that this kind of **** should be over. And yet, as a thirty-year-old, this **** is still twenty-years-old. As a ten-year-old child, as a small boy who should not live in a world with this garbage, this **** happened.

And the most horrible **** of all is that I will continue to live in this inhuman bull****. And I will even justify some of it, due to being an American who does not want Americans to become involved in conflicts which to be perfectly ****ing honest, we actually should not be involved in... what is the purpose of this species? Why should there exist a legitimate real reason why we should allow inhuman atrocities when there is no reason to allow them? Why should the human race not just commit mass suicide?

If it weren't for the Japanese we were prepared to do just that. We might have even sided with Hitler.

I've read a couple books about the Rwanda thing. We didn't start that one and there wasn't **** we could do about it. Belgium started that **** if I remember correctly and then the Africans just carried on endlessly like absolute savage morons. I wasn't willing to die over it so I'm not about to ask some other American to.

I think we do need to seriously consider the voluntary human extinction movement. Just stop breeding and do the rest of life (besides the bacteria we host) on this planet a favor.

We do a disgusting disservice to life in general. We're repulsive creatures at best.

From what I understand the Belgians were just one of the biggest troop contributors to UNAMIR, which was basically the useless UN task force set to do something or other in Rwanda, but whose mandate to fire only if fired upon basically left them neutered, and therefore left the UN a joke force in the region.

I know America was not responsible for Rwanda, but seriously, if as a race we can let that **** go down, then what the **** is the point?

It was during the Belgian occupation that the Hutu and Tutsi division was created by a bunch of honkeys measuring people's nostrils and ****. Unless I'm getting it twisted, that's what I remember with my drug addled mind.

So go to Africa and start feeding people if you care so much. It's not like the suffering is over. Mali has been getting ****ed. Sudan. South Sudan. Are you going to go yourself or just volunteer others? In my case, I'm not even about to cross the street to help out even if my neighbor is ready to off himself. I doubt you are either. Isn't there tragedy left and right in your town? We got homeless junkies on the street. Kids getting murdered. People going hungry. What are we doing? Typing ****ing messages on here.

Do not google Pol Pot.

This ****'s been going on since the dawn of man. It's estimated that the whites killed between 15 to 60 million native Americans as they swept across and took over the west.

This is why I'm an atheist. A supposed God who was so pissed off over some orgies and homo sex in Sodom and Gomorrah that he destroyed the cites with fire and brimstone wouldn't just let subsequent evils like you are talking about happen.

He's also anti angel rape.

There's no way the Native American population was anywhere close to 60 million ever in human history. It was brutal genocide but anyone throwing that number around doesn't know **** about population growth and history.

Estimate is the key word. Columbus and his boys also killed off a ton because of the little bugs they brought over with them.

It's a stupid estimate unless you think they killed every living Native American at least 3 times each.

I understand what you're saying. But their is one issue with it, during the Holocaust, there was no UN to stop genocide. So the duty of ending it had to fall onto the enemies of the Germans, AKA the US. I think the league of nations had long since been dismantled and was useless.

Bitch I was drunk and emotional. I have no regrets.

Congratulations. I hope it was cathartic. I wouldn't want all those poor ****s to have died for nothing.

Didn't you just say that you didn't care enough to do anything? But apparently you care enough to berate others about it?

If that's the way you figure it.

Hawk's being a bit of a dick in this thread.

I think hes actually nailing it.

But in a dickish way. There's two ways to state the obvious.

I've been kind of staying away from this cause I didn't know what exactly to say, but yeah, he did. I maintain that someone who doesn't care coming down on someone else for not caring enough is silly, but he did get it right and I'm not gonna evade that.

I was drunk and ridiculous and getting emotional over a thing with which I would have just had a moderate interest in sober, and going on about it at length as I did on this thread was pretentious and stupid.

This is not an apology or anything. I'm not trying to present a picture of myself as some moral paragon and so my casual failings in that regard are irrelevant to me.

I guess I'm just trying to say that this thread was dumb and I feel like a dumbass for posting it. Even the title of the thread is cringeworthy. Why bring this up when the thread was already dead? Because I'm me, I suppose. And I just have to talk. And I'm drunk again.

And in other news, water is wet. Details at 11:00.

How dare you pollute my thread more than I already have.

I think its pretty impressive that you came back in and admitted that he was right in some regard. The thing for me is, he was right in the regard that there are neighbors and people literally hundreds of yards from you in the States in any given day that need assistance and help. I'm not comparing this to genocide as that would make me even more of a cynical ******* then I am, but I can see the point when so many people struggle in the States with no help. Run on sentence FTW. BTW this thread is no more cringeworthy then half of them. The sheer volume of pain and suffering that multiplies daily is the only real thing to feel cringe worthy over. And Don Cheadle was fantastic in the movie, it really spoke to me.

What happened in Rwanda should make us all disgusted to be human. It may seem like I was berating you, Bat, but I think we were saying the same thing. It's disappointment with humanity. In my case, the person I'm the most disappointed in is myself. I try to avoid saying too much personal stuff but I've done some third world travel and seen starving children first hand. After that I started donating to certain causes. Before that I did Food Not Bombs and a lot of things like that. I don't really have a point. I've been a maudlin drunk many many many times. I went through a period where I cried everyday because of some of the **** I saw. If the story about Rwanda broke your heart that just means you're human and frustrated with the state of humanity and you should be. If you give to unicef or the Red Cross or doctors without borders those people can use you your money and do things that really help. In my opinion, especially Doctors without Borders. They're awesome.

I don't need Rwanda to make me disgusted to be a human, I do that on my own when I wake up in the morning.

I hear you.

Same here with some of the stuff I witnessed while travelling through dirt poor sections of China and Tijuana.