NEVER HAVE I BEEN MORE ASHAMED of my former profession of journalism than I was today. Hotel Rwanda is the starkest, most compelling movie I have ever seen in part because I could not, as with the Holacaust, say that I wasn’t born when it happened. These people were abandoned by the “western world” including the very colonial powers — France and Belgium — that had created the conditions that led to the Rwandan genocide. There is blood on their hands and all of us citizens of the world’s advanced industrialized democracies. Why was there only a token force of United Nations “peacekeepers” in-country to stand by and watch the mass murder of a million people over less than a year’s time?
We saw this movie on “Super Bowl Sunday” so the theater was not crowded. For awhile after the credits started rolling no one in the theater moved a muscle. Everyone sat in stunned silence. Maybe it was a shared moment of political awareness or personal responsibility. The murder of innocent people in huge numbers is still happening. They cannot wait for America to have a new president.
