The pygmy in Gikongoro said that humanity is part of nature and that we must go against nature to get along and have peace. But mass violence, too, must be organized; it does not occur aimlessly. Even mobs and riots have a design, and 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, and in Rwanda it went by the bald name of Hutu Power.
The pygmy from Gikongoro emphasizes that humanity is intertwined with nature, suggesting that achieving peace sometimes requires going against natural instincts. However, even the most chaotic acts of mass violence are not random; they have an underlying structure and are often driven by a deliberate ambition. This complexity illustrates how such violence can be orchestrated to pursue a new societal order, no matter how misguided or criminal that vision may be.
In the context of Rwanda, this ideology took the form of Hutu Power, a movement that was compelling in its simplicity and absolute in its demands. Genocide, as a concept, embodies this organized ambition for a drastic change. The stark reality is that the motivations behind such catastrophic events, while reprehensible, can appear straightforward to those who advocate for them, demonstrating the dangerous interplay between ideology and violence.
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All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.
Race of Cain, ascend to heaven, And cast God down upon the earth!
