[lbo-talk] Class lessons of genocide:Mahmood Mamdani, 'When Victims Become Killers'

[Michael Pugliese]

<URL: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/491/rwanda.html >
> ...This book, whose secondary title is Colonialism, nativism and the 
> genocide in Rwanda, contains a wealth of information and analysis on the 
> subject of what should be one of the most notorious events of the 20th 
> century. The author is of a Marxist background, a long-standing 
> contributor to the American Monthly Review journal, and the writer of 
> several books on subjects relating to the politics of Africa. He is an 
> African studies professor at Columbia University in New York, formerly of 
> Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

The death of at least 850,000 people, possibly a million, in 1994 in Rwanda 
is an event in some ways more shocking in its apparent implications than 
even the Nazi holocaust. For, though Hitler’s genocide of the Jewish people 
had considerably more victims, the actual number of perpetrators was 
comparatively small; it was carried out by a bureaucratic-military machine 
without mass involvement. In Rwanda, conversely, the act of killing one’s 
neighbour or even in some cases members of one’s own family was a mass 
phenomenon. As the publishers note, the author explains why the slaughter 
in Rwanda “was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, 
including even judges, human rights activists, doctors, nurses, priests, 
friends and spouses of the victims” (cover).
<SNIP>
-- 
Michael Pugliese