More On Rwanda
Hope and Homes for Children | A family and a future for orphaned and abandoned children is an organization dedicated to providing support for the tens of thousands of ophans left from the Rwandan genocide, who must now contend with the spectre of the AIDS plague.

This is an online photo essay cataloging some personal stories from the Rwandan atrocities

Dark Corners

Tonight, I'd like to talk about evil.

So, I live in Hollywood.

Interesting segue, I know.

Those of you who are familiar with Los Angeles geography know that there is very little that is glamorous about the part of town that bears the moniker of the entertainment industry.

Case in point: roughly 3 hours ago, I heard a series of gunshots from about a block away from my bathroom window. Now, when I say a series of gunshots, I mean three distinct bursts of of about three to ten shots each. I know these were gunshots because the next sound I heard about 10 minutes later was a police helicopter zooming into position above my neighborhood.

What's ironic to me is that the bullets seemed to emmanate from the north side of Franklin Avenue, which I would normally consider the demarcation line between those of us still storming the gates of the industry and the hillside homes of those who've long since laid claim to the palace china. You'd think that The Hungry would be more likely to cap off a few rounds.

Then again, Charles Manson did lead his entourage to pick a house in those same hills at random to continue the second night of their killing spree.

Maybe I shouldn't invest in any real estate up there when I blow up.

Did I mention that the movie I just happened to be watching about an hour before all Hell broke loose in my neigborhood was The Silence of the Lambs?

This is on my mind because I just watched an interview on Charlie Rose with the producers of a documentary appearing on PBS this Thursday night called "The Ghosts of Rwanda", following the legacy of the genocide in that country, ten years later.

In April of 1994, I was a junior in college, recovering from a NSBE National Convention in Pittsburgh where I really thought I might have partied enough that I might never need to go to another party again for the rest of my life.

Needless to say, that wasn't the case.

Meanwhile, as I was reminiscing about a girl from Rutgers-NSBE who was way too fine to have such a heavy Jersey accent, half a world away, a some ethnic Hutu men paid a visit to their sister's house and proceeded to murder their young nieces & nephews with weapons ranging from machetes to hammer claws because they were half-Tutsi.

There's a whole lot I don't know about the Rwandan genocide. I haven't the slightest idea what the difference is between a Hutu and a Tutsi. And what little I did learn, I probably got from the "Sense and Antisense" episode of Chris Carter's Millenium, which, in and of itself was a very heavy exploration into the mental and spiritual costs of human evil.

Apparently, the Hutu government had enough of a problem with the Tutsi minority in that country that they armed the militias and ordered them to kill ALL the Tutsis in the country. By the time the killing stopped, they managed to kill about half of them. The number of corpses were estimated to be between 800,000 and one million.

Now, by shear numbers, the Holocaust has it beat. But the Nazis had really industrialized the process, literally creating death engines, where bunches of people were horded into a room, gassed, incinerated, and then blown out smokestacks in ash so thick it looked like it was snowing. As far as the actual executioners were concerned, they just had to press a button and brush off their shoulders at the end of the day. The Shoah was all the more horrible because of it's utter banality.

Rwanda was massacre the old fashioned way. Every one of those 800,000 to one million people was individually stabbed, bludgeoned, and/or raped, and not necessarily in that order. At its height, the death squads were said to be able to kill as many as a thousand people every twenty minutes.

There is a moment in the documentary where one of the few UN peacekeepers who actually stayed as the killing began recalls a meeting he had with one of the death squads, in an attempt to negotiate an end to the massacre. These men came to the meeting with fresh blood still on their shirts. He says that, as he looked into their eyes, he saw nothing but complete and utter darkness. "The face of evil", in his words.

I'm reminded of Quint's speech about the U.S.S. Indianapolis in Jaws:


"And the thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... 'til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'."


Now, that may or may not be a rhetorical florish. I can't really say because I've never come face to face with a man who's taken a coffee break from killing his neighbors with a machete, non-stop, for the better part of a month. I suspect that it might be a somewhat life-altering experience. One would think that you'd almost have to start seeing other human beings as something other than human. Like, perhaps, walking, talking slabs of meat. Or food. Or puddy.

Of course, at that point, you yourself have stopped being human in the process, right?

Many of these men who participated in the genocide were not trained killers or hardened criminals or anything of that nature. Did they have families to go home to, wives who'd wash, press, and fold the blood-stained shirt? And, after wallowing in the flesh of their victims all day long, could they draw the distinction between that and lovemaking with said dutiful wife?

But, at a deeper level, acts of evil are committed on a daily basis right under our noses. I recently found one of those websites that lists if any convicted sex offenders reside in your neighborhood. Apparently, there are three or four guys, like, on my block.

There are kids everywhere in my apartment complex. Who knows what's happening to them behind closed doors. Do those same people have these dead eyes? Would I know a killer or a rapist or a whatever just by looking at them?

Anyway, I could pontificate on the nature of evil ad naseum. However, I strongly recommend watching PBS Thursday night. I have a sense that there's alot to be learned. In addition to the filmmakers, Charlie Rose also had the author of this book about the genocide on his panel.




I don't really have a point to all of this, other than, perhaps this:
I recently had an argument with a friend of mine that began as a discussion about The Passion of the Christ but branched off into religion in general. One of his complaints was that he didn't like the exclusive nature of organized religions.

To which, I would say this - there are some things that are simply not OK, such as, for instance, hacking biracial members of your own family to death with an ax.

Of course, for Christians, our challenge is to find a way to offer forgiveness and even fellowship when faced with the horror. But how can you do that when you look into someone else's eyes and only see the abyss?

Quote of the Day

"Howard Dean got into a lot of trouble a few months ago for saying that America was not safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein."

"Howard Dean was right."

Charlie Rose and Richard Clark speaking on Rose's PBS talk show in advance of Clark's testimony to the 9/11 Commission and the release of his new book "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror".

So, first, a bit of background.

Clark was the senior White House official for counterterrorism for the last four American Presidents. Clark claims that, not only did G.W. Bush & Co. ignore personal warnings from Bill Clinton & his entire national security team that Al Qaeda was the biggest threat to America, not only did Bush ignore Clark's repeated requests for a coordinated effort among top staff, not only did Bush ignore DAILY admonitions from CIA director George Tenet about the threat posed by Al Qaeda, but, even AFTER 9/11, after Tenet, the FBI, and Clark all said Al Qaeda was responsible and Iraq had nothing to do with it, Bush deliberately withheld resources from going after Bin Laden & the Taliban in anticipation of an invasion of Iraq that he ordered the Pentagon to start planning on September 16, 2001.

The Charlie Rose interview was particularly stunning to me for several reasons. Clark makes Bush sound almost like Ahab, and Saddam is his white whale. Clark also states that, even if we catch Bin Laden now, it will actually have a negligible effect on stopping future terrorist attacks because, if I may use my comic book analogies, in the 2 years since the invasion of Afganistan, Al Qaeda, which used to resemble Cobra Command, where Bin Laden personally approved every major attack, has now transformed into Hydra, with huge, unknown, independent cells that can continue to function in conjunction with local terrorists (see Spain) in the absence of a centralized command. He makes the point that, while roughly the same number of terrorist attacks have been thwarted consistently since 1996, the actual number of successful Al Qaeda attacks have actually INCREASED since 9/11 and the start of the so-called War on Terror.



And, to further demonstrate the incompetence of the Bush administration, Clark also responded to those who accuse him of releasing this book now, in the thick of the Presidential election season. Apparently, there's a law that says the White House has to actually approve any book written by a staffer regarding their tenure with the President. Clark says that he submitted the book to the White House for approval in NOVEMBER, and that they are largely responsible for the book's release at this time.

Which also says to me that they had to approve Paul O'Neill's book as well.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders what advantage they could gain by allowing such books to be published. But that would be just crazy, right?

If you can catch the rebroadcast or a transcript of Clark's interview on Charlie Rose, watch it. It's well worth it.

In the meantime, in my ongoing quest for self-gratification, you can buy both the Clark book and the O'Neill book right here. Either click on the link in the main title above, or use these spiffy little Amazon buttons below.







As a side note, Charlie's first guest tonight was Rashid Khalidi, the director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, to talk about the Israeli assassination of the founder of Hamas. Now, to say that Sheik Ahmed Yassin was a moderate among the Hamas camp is kind of like saying our sun isn't very hot relative to other stars. However, the dude was at least open to the idea of a long ceasefire with Israel. Now, the only people left in charge in Palestine are the ones who want to destroy Israel and make Palestine into an Islamic theocracy. But, as Professor Khalidi pointed out, Israel has seemed to target the most moderate members of the Palestinian leadership first, and then work their way down the extremist scale throughout the entire rebellion of the last three years. Even when it started, where Hamas was clearly responsible for most of the suicide bombings, the IDF choose, instead, to go after Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, who had about as much control over Hamas as I do. Which leads Khalidi to speculate whether that was the entire point - eliminate the moderates so we can get on with this whole "clash of civilizations" thing, better known as the Ninth Crusade.

But, given the choice between some bad people who hate you who might be willing to sit in the same room with you while they hate you, and some killers who will do everything in their power to try to take your life rather than share the room with you, who in their right mind would actually prefer to deal with the killers?

Switch Hitters
One of the GOP's favorite attacks on John Kerry these days is that he's a flip-flopper, i.e. he tries to have it both ways. Which is, of course, yet another case of the pot calling the kettle black. Consider, as my fellow blogger Daily Kos has, all the myriad ways in which George W. Bush has said one thing, then done the exact opposite, and THEN, more importantly, claimed that he'd still done the first thing he said.

Sometimes I truly believe Bush has some kind of psychological disorder. The man is clearly delusional.

And shall we get into the Bush claim that Kerry is weak on defense because he voted against certain weapons systems & intelligence funding bills? First of all, it seems to me that alot of these pet military projects are relics from the Cold War, when we still expected to meet another big army on a battlefield. In other words, they're not a whole lot of help against guerilla fighters.

And, again in the pot-kettle category, Bush himself has underfunded basic stuff for troops in Iraq. They're actually encouraging military units to ask local businesses to donate steel to armour their vehicles. Families of soldiers are being asked to raise money and, instead of sending care packages, they're sending body armour to their loved ones in the Gulf because the Pentagon hadn't paid for enough of them before they shipped out.

Now, I know there are a lot of folks who support Bush because he's allegedly "tough on terror". How can anyone who loves the military support this man? He's so busy transferring the nation's wealth into the hands of his kleptocracy, that he won't even pay for the war he's tricked us into fighting.