Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"At the end of the genocide of the Tutsi, the militia was 30,000 strong. The Interahamwe broke the world’s most atrocious records for the speed of the killing of human beings, estimated at five times that of the Nazis." The Violence of Denial—Rwanda and the Lived Memory of Genocide

France was a close ally of the Hutu-led government prior to the massacres and has been accused of ignoring warning signs and training the militias who carried out the attacks. Little was done internationally to stop the killings. The UN and Belgium had forces in Rwanda but the UN mission was not given a mandate to act. The Belgians and most UN peacekeepers pulled out." — The BBC Even John Mearsheimer, a scholar of the now defunct but still predominant neorealist-International Relations theory, acknowledged this in 2002: "Despite claims that American policy is infused with moralism, Somalia is the only instance during the past hundred years in which US soldiers were killed in action on a humanitarian mission’—and ‘in that case, the loss of a mere eighteen soldiers so traumatized American policymakers’ that ‘they refused to intervene in Rwanda in the spring of 1994’, although ‘stopping that genocide would have been relatively easy and would have had virtually no effect on...

"[Y]ou may observe the niceties of Holocaust Memorial Day, but still not have learned the lessons of history. You may be remembering to forget, practicing a spurious innocence, externalising evil, forgetting that, as Adorno argued, as long as we live in the conditions that could produce Auschwitz, we are all guilty . The only thing that could conceivably alleviate that guilt is to act against those conditions. Hence, Stone's preference for many and varied forms of memory, at different levels, detached from the rituals of the great and good. What are those conditions? The Trust identifies "racism and hate" in a general way, presumably intending to be as uncontroversial and therefore inclusive as possible. However, histories of Germany and fascism in recent decades, by Mark Mazower, Enzo Traverso, Jurgen Zimmerer, Isabel Hull, Sven Lindquist, Casper Erichsen, David Olusoga and Shelley Baranowski, to name just a few, have in common that they have foregrounded an emp...