Won't you bankrupt yourself if you send me any more stuff? ;)
I was talking to a guy who spends a lot of time working in the area in disease control (malaria and HIV, mainly) and according to him there is a lot of exaggeration and outright lies when it comes to Central African horror stories (making parents eat their children and so forth), but that for some reason the region is just beyond the pale when it comes to ultraviolence, an order of magnitude beyond your typical war-torn impoverished region.
--- On Tue, 12/2/08, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> That's a reasonable suspicion, but the book he cites is
> of first-person accounts, not second person. And I've
> seen several short documentaries of Hutus giving first
> person accounts that were astonishing for their matter of
> factness and lack of any contrition whatsoever as they
> walked you down the road and told you how they did it. They
> weren't quite as lurid as what he cites -- nothing about
> rapes or having the time of their lives -- but they
> described killing people with bayonets like I might describe
> my summer bucking bales: invigorating work. And these were
> guys who weren't in jail.
>
> You're right to say it's hard to credit. Warnerd
> says that too. It is. No matter how many times I hear it,
> I'll still find it hard to credit. But you should check
> out some of the interview docs. If you have a DVD player, I
> can send you a couple.
>
> Michael
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk