A Time for Machetes

I have mostly avoided reading much about the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda in the 1990s. I did see the movie, "Hotel Rwanda," the horribly accurate and intense account of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina and his efforts to save as many people as possible. Coincidentally, Mr. Rusesabagina himself spoke at Miami University Middletown a few weeks after I had seen the movie. He seemed more matter-of-fact and less heroic than Don Cheadle had been in the film.

The British writer Theodore Dalrymple recently reviewed A Time for Machetes in New English Review, at http://www.newe
nglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=5150&sec_id=5150

Dalrymple notes,

My medical practice, admittedly of a peculiar kind, in a slum and in a prison, convinced me of the prevalence of evil. I was surprised. I had spent a number of years in countries wracked by civil wars and thereby deprived of even minimal social order, precisely the conditions in which one might expect evil to be widely committed, if only because in such situations the worst come to the fore. But nothing prepared me for the sheer malignity, the joy in doing wrong, of so many of my compatriots, when finally I returned home. Every day in my office I would hear of men who tortured women - torture is not too strong a word - or commit the basest acts of intimidation, oppression and violence, with every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. I would once have taken the opening sentence of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments for a truism:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there is evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

But now I no longer think it is even a truth, let alone a truism. I would be more inclined to write:
How good soever man may be supposed, there is evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the suffering of others… etc., etc....

No, it is impossible to console ourselves with the thought that the Rwandans are so different from us that they and their experiences have nothing to say to us. Edith and Francine are, indeed, more dignified, more articulate, more intelligently reflective, than most of the victims of small-scale evil in an English slum whom I have met.

This book penetrates deeper into the heart of evil than any other I have ever read. The author makes no claims for his work: he is still mystified by it himself. But if you want to know what depths man can sink to - an important thing to know, when your argument is that things are so bad that they cannot get any worse, so prudence is unnecessary - read this book. At the very least, it will put your worries into perspective.