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Book: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Quotes of Book: We Wish to Inform You That
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  1. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    The spectre of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual - always an annoyance to totality - ceases to exist.
    book-quoteracismidealismindividuality

  2. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    I often found it helpful to think of central Africa in the mid-1990s as comparable to late medieval Europe - plagued by serial wars of tribe and religion, corrupt despots, predatory elites and a superstitious peasantry, festering with disease, stagnating in poverty, laden with promise."
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  3. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that people be invested in the leaders' scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive. In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing ans indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history.
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  4. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    The dead at Nyarubuye were, I'm afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there - these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn't settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful.
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  5. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    As far as the political, military, and economic interests of the world's powers go, {Rwanda} might as well be Mars. In fact, Mars is probably of greater strategic concern. But Rwanda, unlike Mars, is populated by human beings, and when Rwanda had a genocide, the world's powers left Rwanda to it.
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  6. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    ...it occurred to me that if others have so often made your life their business--made your life into a question, really, and made that question their business-- then perhaps you will want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and inviolably your own.
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  7. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    This is what fascinates me most: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.
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  8. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    ...great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple and at the same time absolute. The ideology of genocide is all of those things.
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  9. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    …the war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can-in fact, must-be judged as right or wrong, good or bad. While academic debates about the possibility of objective truth and falsehood are often rarified to the point of absurdity, Rwanda demonstrated that the question is a matter of life and death.
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  10. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    ...power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happen. In this raw sense, power has always been very much the same everywhere; what varies is primarily the quality of the reality it seeks to create: is it based more on truth than in falsehood, which is to say, is it more or less abusive to its subjects? The answer is often a function of how broadly or narrowly the power is based: is it centered in one person, or is it spread out among many different centers that excercise checks on one another? And are its subjects merely subjects or are they also citizens? In principle, narrowly based power is easier to abuse, while more broadly based power requires a truer story at its core and is more likely to protect more of its subjects from abuse. This rule was famously articulated by the British historian Lord Acton in his formula "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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  11. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    I couldn't help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city--and, although we don't like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.
    book-quotemurderhuman-origins

  12. Philip Gourevitch _ We Wish to Inform You That

    In 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue 'ethnic' identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu {85%} of Tutsi {14%} or Twa {1%}. The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority… Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made 'ethnicity' the defining feature of Rwandan existence.
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