Rwanda
Reading the news today, I stumbled upon the judgment and further condemnation of one of the responsible for the Rwanda genocide in 1994, where Hutus slaughtered 1,000,000 Tutsis in a period of no more than 100 days. Now, put the ethnics aside: what happened in Rwanda after some thought was worse than what happened during the Second World War. Here is the reasoning: during the Second World War, 50,000,000 people died, with about 20% to 25% of them being militaries, in a conflict spanning several countries. Now, think about Rwanda: 1,000,000 murders in 100 days is the equivalent to 10,000 murders/day. The Second World War lasted 6 years, thus the rate was 23,000 murders/day. Fine, mathematically Rwanda accounts for ~50% of what happened during the Second World War. Now comes the data that makes things in Rwanda frightening: the killed and the killers were all neighbors. They were all parents whose children played together. They were all people attending the same church. They all at some point talked to each other, had fun with each other, helped each other. And one day everything turned up-side-down and the killings begun. Unlike the Second World War, where most of the killings happened thru bombs dropped from thousands of yards up high, the killings in Rwanda took place with knives, machetes, with bare hands, with the victims looking inside the eyes of those who were killing them. Brothers killing brothers. All in the same country, same town, same neighborhood.
Ethnicity as a concept/label should be completely and permanently obliterated from the face of the earth. A human being is a human being – why label it based on color, language, religion, shape? We’re light-years away from achieving this dream, I bet you must be filling out a questionnaire which is asking you to label yourself as one of these: African-American, Latino, White, Asian, etc. What does it matter, really? Ethnicity divides people, generates segregation, and segregation leads to hate, and hate leads to genocides, like the Rwanda massacre. Ironically and sadly, Rwanda was a German colony prior to its independence, and the Germans were the ones who institutionalized and imposed the official use of the Hutu/Tutsi labels across the population.
As I said, long live Barack Hussein Obama: a guy whose father was African, mother was White, a guy who is almost native-Hawaiian, who lived in Asia for a long time (thus half-Asian), with an Arabic name. Well, I couldn’t find a Latino connection in him. Hell: “Admired by a Latino dude”. There you go! :)
My girls:
Ethnicity as a concept/label should be completely and permanently obliterated from the face of the earth. A human being is a human being – why label it based on color, language, religion, shape? We’re light-years away from achieving this dream, I bet you must be filling out a questionnaire which is asking you to label yourself as one of these: African-American, Latino, White, Asian, etc. What does it matter, really? Ethnicity divides people, generates segregation, and segregation leads to hate, and hate leads to genocides, like the Rwanda massacre. Ironically and sadly, Rwanda was a German colony prior to its independence, and the Germans were the ones who institutionalized and imposed the official use of the Hutu/Tutsi labels across the population.
As I said, long live Barack Hussein Obama: a guy whose father was African, mother was White, a guy who is almost native-Hawaiian, who lived in Asia for a long time (thus half-Asian), with an Arabic name. Well, I couldn’t find a Latino connection in him. Hell: “Admired by a Latino dude”. There you go! :)
My girls:
posted by Marcelo De Barros at 2:29 PM
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