Western Liberal Guilt

Saw Hotel Rwanda today. I cried. If you haven't heard about it, it's basically a Schindler's List take on the Rwandan genocide in 1994 - but I think it is a lot better movie than Schindler's, sorry Mr Spielberg, but that is just my take on it. Maybe that is because the immediacy of the Rwandan thing is a lot closer to me than the Holocaust, I actually followed the story in the news a decade ago. It was horrid then, and it is horrid now - remembering the reports of the corpses floating down the rivers into the lakes etc.

Anyways, Don Cheadle in this movie was too good to be considered for an Oscar - the subject, the movie, transcended all the Hollywood petty my movie made more money than yours and let's all slap each other on the back kind of thing - and the other actors were all very realistic as well. And such a stellar supporting cast - Joaquin Phoenix, Jean Reno, Nick Nolte. And so very very sad - Nick Nolte's character was probably based on the UN commander in Rwanda at the time - saw the Maple Leaf patch on his shoulder, Romeo somethingorrather, when I was over in Canada he released an autobiography, he is still haunted by what he saw. Jean Reno gave a great performance even though he was hardly in the movie.

But the title of the post is that the Rwandan genocide was probably the most clinically evil thing that has happened in the world in the last twenty years, and sweet fuck all was done to assist or stop or anything. I remember at the time being cynical about the French led task force going in to 'assist', because they were supporting the Hutu government at the time. A million people killed in two months, and no one did anything. And what a double standard that Schindler's List gets all the plaudits blah blah and this movie does its best not to sink without a trace. Sorry, I am just really pissed off about the whole geopolitical situation...

And the people that were in watching with me were probably exorcising their own versions of western liberal guilt - I am thinking that they wouldn't have been voting conservative in the Australian election last November - I would write an LOL on the end of that, but the whole topic is very un-LOL-ish.

Not to mention that the whole presidential assassination that started the whole thing was probably the most destabilising single event in Africa in recent history. If that hadn't happened, the Hutu refugees wouldn't have gone into Zaire, the Rwandans wouldn't have invaded and set up Laurent Kabila as a puppet for the new Democratic Republic of Congo, and six other African countries wouldn't have sent troops in on either side and the last generalised death toll was five million in the Congo war.

I know too much about far away countries that 'we' know little about - wasn't that Neville Chamberlain's phrase after the Munich conference in 1938? And I know too much about pre WW2 European history as well it seems...

Later peeps, I hope to make my next post a more uplifting one
Pauly