Tea at Trianon: Holocaust in Rwanda

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Holocaust in Rwanda

A story of our own day which makes my blood run cold every time I hear it.

A cloud descends. A curtain drops. The lights go out. It was seen in the horrors of Babylonian and Roman persecutions and in Nazi Germany and in Cambodia and Ukraine under the Communists and most recently in Rwanda, where the most intense genocide in history occurred in 1994. To read about this epidemic of darkness is to delve into a completely riveting story that defies normal human understanding. In less than a year, up to a million were left dead.

In house after house, village after village, town after town, tribal Tutsis were butchered without mercy by rival Hutus who dismembered and decapitated them with machetes in the most sadistic massacre with which modern history is familiar. In many cases, Hutus turned on Tutsis who were friends and neighbors and virtually indistinguishable from them -- sharing the same culture, religions, and many genetic traits. It wasn't even a clear ethnic dispute -- just an outbreak of the unthinkable.

Corpses lined the roads of Rwanda to the point where many expected the Hutus to kill every last Tutsi. The killers -- former childhood friends or schoolteachers and town officials who were now simply part of a killing mob -- wielded spears and guns and machetes and chanted, "Kill them, kill them, kill them all; kill them big and kill them small; kill the old and kill the young; a baby snake is still a snake; kill it too; let none escape; kill them, kill them, kill them all!" Some dressed like demons, wearing tree-bark skirts and goat horns strapped to their heads.