There are anniversaries and anniversaries. There are some to celebrate that a marriage or a person has survived another year; There are some to remember the death of someone, or many; There are some to commemorate a national hero or a war won or – in the curious case of Catalonia – lost.
And then, in another order of things, there is the anniversary, today, of the Rwandan genocide. The normal thing when the date arrives when a close relative died is for your guts to move. In Rwanda, even though 30 years have passed, on April 7, an entire country is shaken. Two days of national mourning are imposed, but, even if the State did not insist on keeping alive the memory of so much death, people would fall into silence, or burst into tears, anyway.
Because? Because every Rwandan has at least one relative who died or who participated in a massacre that took almost a million lives in a hundred days, the vast majority with machetes. The order came from above by radio, from the command of the so-called “Hutu Power”, to exterminate the entire Tutsi minority from the face of the earth. Tens of thousands, normal people turned psychopathic butchers, signed up for the task.
Once the delirium has passed, those same people have become meek. Yes, that is the word. There is no gentler country in Africa than Rwanda, a perfect example of the fact that in order not to repeat history, we must remember it. I tell my friends that if they want to visit a place with elephants, hippos and lions, there is nowhere where human beings are sweeter or more peaceful, nowhere where they will feel safer, even with small children in tow.
And during those hundred days from April 7, 1994, parents paid murderers to kill their children. You have read it well. They paid them. So that they could be dispatched with bullets instead of machetes. Then they dismembered the parents. They often took a break from what they called, not ironically, “work.” So that their victims would not escape while they were drinking tea, they cut off one of their legs, and then came back and finished them off. This practice was very common.
I know this because I’ve been to Rwanda half a dozen times. Nothing in life is comparable to the testimonies I heard there. Like Leopold, who told me that he had killed a hundred people inside a church; or that of Marcelin, a Hutu who beat his Tutsi wife to death as a condition that a horde imposed on him not to kill his seven children; or the lady, a typical case, raped by half a dozen men who had just torn her husband to pieces.
There is more, much more, but I’ll leave it there. What I want to highlight is how so many went from being decent people to being beasts for a time, to being decent people again, and to still be decent people today. The lions lie with the lambs. Hutus and Tutsis live in harmony without revenge.
Which leads us to think, despite the evidence to the contrary, despite the fact that the drums of war are once again resounding throughout the world today, that the natural condition of human beings is peaceful coexistence. Violence is also part of man’s nature (almost always men, not women), but to a lesser extent, and in specific circumstances, and among a small sector of humanity.
See how savage the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi World War were, and see how calm – or at least non-violent – ??the Spanish and Germans have been since then. Notice that in the midst of the frenzy of those conflicts of the last century, what most people longed for most was peace. Like in Russia or Ukraine or Israel or Palestine today.
Crazy, right? A constant of the human condition is that wars and other horrors continue and will continue to occur, despite the fact that almost everyone is against them, thanks to the will of a minority. This minority consists of what we call leaders, people by definition dangerous who in extreme, but all too common cases, express their abnormality in a mixture of narcissism, resentment, megalomania, paranoia and sadism.
That is, we are talking about the Francos, the Hitlers, the Putins, the Netanyahus. I return to some words from Bertrand Russell that I quoted last week: “I cannot bear the idea that millions of people can die in agony alone, solely because the rulers of the world are stupid and evil.”
Yes, but – with all due respect to Russell – I don’t know if they’re that stupid. They have their point of cunning and cynicism too. They know how to win over people. They know how to use the most powerful persuasion tool there is. They know that fear, always fear, is the weak point of Homo sapiens. They know that through fear they can convince people to do anything, even kill.
Here is another quote, this time from someone who was the antipodes of Russell, Herman Göring, Hitler’s number two: “Naturally, ordinary people do not want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in Germany. That is understood. But, in the end, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always easy to drag people along, whether in a democracy, in a fascist dictatorship, in a Parliament or in a communist dictatorship… All you have to do is What to do is tell them that they are being attacked and denounce the peacekeepers for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Correct. It worked in Germany, of course. It worked for Franco in Spain. It worked in Rwanda, where a Hutu clique scared their people so much that they turned them into beasts, or silent accomplices of beasts. It is working now for Putin in Russia and for Netanyahu (oh, the irony, that they copy the Nazi lesson to the letter!) in Israel. It’s a winning formula that depends on two things: adapting Russell’s quote, people being stupid and leaders being evil. And why are people stupid? People are stupid because they don’t learn from history.
In Rwanda they have stopped being stupid, at least for now. The greatest fear they have, and today’s anniversary reminds them of it, is that what happened in April 1994 would happen again. It is a healthy fear to which others, depending on the horrors of each country’s history, would do well to succumb.
