The Little Brown Reader

Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.

An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.

But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.