Bill Clinton didn't care about African people, and neither did the rest of us.
I watched Hotel Rwanda yesterday. It's a good movie, I'd recommend it.
The most obvious comparison, as many commentators have said, is to Schindler's List. Paul Rusesabagina, like Oskar Schindler, was an upper-class member of a majority group who heroically protected members of a targeted minority group during a brutal genocide.
But to me the two movies felt very different. Schindler's List had the feeling of historical inevitability, a story set in our grandparents' time. The events of Hotel Rwanda happened in the 90's. We, at least those of us in our 30's+, had the opportunity to do something about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide
I'm not saying the US or the UN should have sent a military force authorized and equipped to end the Rwandan Civil War. Given experience in Somalia (and this decade in Iraq and Afghanistan) that would have been bloody, prolonged, and would have no guarantee of success.
But we could have done a lot more to aid the escape and resettlement of refugees, Tutsi and Hutu. In 1991, Israel, with 34 planes, rescued 14,000 Ethiopian Jews (Falasha) in 36 hours, under similar circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Solomon
The US and Europe have far greater resources than Israel, and had far more than 36 hours to act. Something on the scale of the Berlin Airlift could have saved hundreds of thousands. It didn't happen. We got our own citizens out and left the natives to die.
Rwandans aren't Germans. They're further away, they don't look as much like us or speak languages we recognize. There was no "Ich bin ein Banyarwanda". Even Barack Obama, with one parent born in Kenya, went to Berlin rather than Africa to make his big speech.
Have we learned better in the last decade? The government's willing to spend huge sums on military campaigns, but little on humanitarian assistance and refugee resettlement. If we took the money we spend in Iraq and put it towards welcoming and educating refugees and immigrants, I think we'd do a lot more good.
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Watching Hotel Rwanda, I was depressed to note that the main contribution of engineering technology to the situation was the wide availability of cheap, sharp, mass-produced machetes. It occurs to me now that we can at least also build better, cheaper airplanes.
The most obvious comparison, as many commentators have said, is to Schindler's List. Paul Rusesabagina, like Oskar Schindler, was an upper-class member of a majority group who heroically protected members of a targeted minority group during a brutal genocide.
But to me the two movies felt very different. Schindler's List had the feeling of historical inevitability, a story set in our grandparents' time. The events of Hotel Rwanda happened in the 90's. We, at least those of us in our 30's+, had the opportunity to do something about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide
I'm not saying the US or the UN should have sent a military force authorized and equipped to end the Rwandan Civil War. Given experience in Somalia (and this decade in Iraq and Afghanistan) that would have been bloody, prolonged, and would have no guarantee of success.
But we could have done a lot more to aid the escape and resettlement of refugees, Tutsi and Hutu. In 1991, Israel, with 34 planes, rescued 14,000 Ethiopian Jews (Falasha) in 36 hours, under similar circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Solomon
The US and Europe have far greater resources than Israel, and had far more than 36 hours to act. Something on the scale of the Berlin Airlift could have saved hundreds of thousands. It didn't happen. We got our own citizens out and left the natives to die.
Rwandans aren't Germans. They're further away, they don't look as much like us or speak languages we recognize. There was no "Ich bin ein Banyarwanda". Even Barack Obama, with one parent born in Kenya, went to Berlin rather than Africa to make his big speech.
Have we learned better in the last decade? The government's willing to spend huge sums on military campaigns, but little on humanitarian assistance and refugee resettlement. If we took the money we spend in Iraq and put it towards welcoming and educating refugees and immigrants, I think we'd do a lot more good.
---
Watching Hotel Rwanda, I was depressed to note that the main contribution of engineering technology to the situation was the wide availability of cheap, sharp, mass-produced machetes. It occurs to me now that we can at least also build better, cheaper airplanes.