Wow, it's been a while. Sorry about that. Things have been rather manic here, what with organising a big but ultimately somewhat anti-climactic demo against college arms investments (photos
here and
here) and the resulting avalanche of piled-up work to catch up on. Anyway.
A plausible candidate for outrage of the week is today's election of Nicholas Sarkozy in France, the guy who suggested that delinquents were 'scum' and that anyway deviant behaviour is genetic, so rehabilitation is pointless, and who apparently is taking his election as a mandate to radically reform France's 'over-regulated' [read: progressive] welfare state. However, this has more upset than outraged me - today I am too tired for outrage, and anyway, despite spending a week in France during the election campaign I am still too under-informed about French politics to blog about it with any degree of intelligence. I feel somewhat guilty about this, but there we go.
So, I can practically feel your desperation to know just what has been offending my socialist/environmentalist/generally self-righteous sensibilities this week. If it's not Sarkozy, I hear you cry, then what is it? Well... it's revision.
This is not as petty or selfish as it might at first appear. See, this week I have been revising the Rwandan genocide. It's not a happy topic. In fact, it's a singularly depressing topic guaranteed to destroy your faith in humanity. Surprisingly enough, this is not principally because it involves thousands of people who were willing to go out and kill hundreds of thousands of others with machetes just because they were Tutsi. Much more outrageous than this is the international complicity in what went on.
Pick a country, any country. Unless you picked New Zealand or Nigeria, it's pretty much guaranteed your country of choice either ignored the genocide, supplied arms to the perpetrators or actively campaigned to stop the UN doing anything about it for entirely selfish reasons. If you picked the US or Britain, award yourself an extra ten points, because there's pretty good evidence they knew full well what was going on and their first response was not 'my god, how can we use our tremendous wealth, power and influence to stop these people being massacred', but 'my god, how can we sabotage UN intervention to make sure they don't try and get us involved somewhere down the line'.
If you picked France, you win, because France's action throughout the genocide was utterly disgusting. It had been arming the perpetrators for years, and there's good evidence it kept arming them throughout the genocide. It consistently argued against UN intervention and supported pulling out the woefully under-resourced UN mission that was already in Rwanda. And when the Tutsi rebel leaders captured a major city, it suddenly decided it had a conscience and immediately snapped into action, sending a mission into Rwanda which saved some lives, generally made it look nice and cuddly, and, er, helped fly a lot of genocidaires out the country.
This is all just background to Outrage of the Week, but I'm not very good at being succinct about Rwanda right now because the whole thing just angers me so much. Anyone who studies the actions of the powerful states during the genocide can't possibly ever sneer at cynics or conspiracy theorists (well, except the really silly ones) again. If you look into this in any depth, you'll maybe understand a bit better why there's absolutely nothing I wouldn't believe of governments like America. People think I'm cynical, but there's no way I could be cynical enough for this world. Outrage of the Week intends to make you, too, that little bit more cynical. It's a little quote from a declassified document entitled 'Discussion Paper - Rwanda' which gives some insight into American thinking during the crisis.
"Issues for discussion.
1. Genocide investigation. Language that calls for an international investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the genocide convention.
Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday -- genocide finding could commit US Government to actually 'do something.'"
If this does not enrage you, I may just never be able to speak to you again.
