| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"The Fool" |
| Date: |
21 May 2006 12:25:02 PM |
| Object: |
Shake Hands with the Devil |
An aside, but perhaps with meaning...
It's the book by Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian head of the
Rwanda peace keepers. I'm halfway through it and it is POWERFUL. It
describes the UN bureaucracy, the politicians in Rwanda, the attitudes
at various levels, and, of course the genocide. He opens with a story
where he finds a three year old who is on the street, looking sweet
and innocent. He follows the boy as he runs away to his house -
stepping over the rotting corpse of the boy's father, as the boy goes
and sits by his dead mom, leaning against her. He picks the boy up and
decides to break all the rules and adopt him, but RPF (Tutsi) child
soldiers grab the boy and run away. He doesn't chase because he has
a small UN contingent and is in no condition to try to fight. He can
only hope that the child is cared for (at least it's Tutsis who took
him), but he wonders if he's not a child soldier today, caught in the
cycle of violence.
The book has drawn me in completely. Dallaire talks about PTSD, how
people don't understand what veterans go through, and what the impact
of a war zone is like. It's autobiographical and he clearly is a
military man - no peacenik, but a hard nosed military man from a
military family, whose father fought in WWII (and, he notes, rarely
talked about it and was clearly affected by it). Here's a bit from
his intro:
"Books were beginning to hit the bookshelves, claiming to tell the
whole story of what happened in Rwanda. They did not. While
well-researched and fairly accurate, none of them seemed to get the
story right. I was able to assist many of the authors but there always
seemed to be something lacking in the final product. The sounds,
smells, depredations, the scenes of inhuman acts were largely absent.
Yet I could not step into the void and write the missing account; for
years I was too sick, disgusted, horrified and fearful, and I made
excuses for not taking up the task. Camouflage was the order of the
day and I became an expert. Week upon week, I accepted every
invitation to speak on the subject; procrastination didn't help me
escape but pulled me deeper into the maze of feelings and memories
about the genocide."
That addresses precisely the problem with academic theories and even
with our society - one can be coldly accurate but if you miss the
human side, meaning consideration of the pain and suffering, not just
objective statistics, you don't get the full story. Moreover, his
personal story is one of feeling like he failed, even though clearly he
did all he could. He felt the guilt the rest of the world should have
felt, and it almost destroyed him (he was suicidal, abused alcohol, and
really had trouble dealing with the torture of living through and
watching the genocide, while being in charge of the UN peacekeeping
mission).
This book will definitely change how I teach about Rwanda. Before I
went the usual story: the colonial past, the RPF forcing the Hutu
majority to cut them in for power, the rise of extremists because of
that, and a coup d'etat.
The real story shows Hutus, including the Hutu moderates, were fearful
of the Tutsis taking total power, remembering the colonial past. The
RPF (Tutsi/liberal Hutu) refused to make concessions in January or
February which might have allowed the moderate Hutu factions to push
aside the extremists. The UN could have easily as late as March sent
a message that extremism would not be tolerated (Dallaire was begging
to do so, and had numerous plans that would have been do-able), and the
level of arrogance by the Belgians and French was amazing (and showed a
continuing colonial mindset).
Also, Rwanda's membership on the UN Security Council at that time
meant they had full access to the "state of thinking," and thus
knew there was no chance the nations of the UN would want to intervene.
In other words, the question of Rwanda is NOT "why didn't we
intervene to stop it," but "why didn't we do what we could have
done to stop what we knew was likely to come when it wouldn't have
required a massive military effort."
The book mixes insight on the bureaucracy Dallaire was fighting, his
own sense of moral purpose compared to the self-interest of politicians
and bureaucrats (perhaps he's biased here - military people in
general come off looking better than the politicians/bureaucrats -
but it's pretty persuasive.) I'm at the point where he with
obvious bitterness and anger describes the way in which all
"whites" were evacuated, and Rwandans left to simply be
slaughtered. He's trying to get the UN to do something, but since
the Belgians were killed (he also knew that the plan was for the Hutu
extremists to have Belgians killed, realizing they were the most
proficient of the UN forces there, and that this would likely force the
UN to dump UNAMIR. They had avoided such an event other times, but not
after everything started). It also appears that Hutu moderates were
still trying to find some way to counter the extremists and end the
killing in the first few days - he puts as April 12th the day when it
became clear the UN and outside world would do nothing to push the
moderates back into power (they needed real outside support) and Rwanda
was on its own.
Even though this is about the "big guys" for the most part, there
is such a sense of tragedy and sadness reading this, especially as he
describes his efforts (though he admits the notion of genocide didn't
really hit him right away either - it was extremists destroying the
peace accords, then killing of moderates, then mass slaughters by
militias - it took awhile for the depth of this to sink in at the
time). He also describes a report he got in March where schools were
registering students as Hutu and Tutsi, and seating them separately.
At the time they dismissed this just an example of ethnic politics, but
later the reality sunk in. The info he had and passed on really was
precise, people knew exactly what was coming - if they let
themselves. This is a book anyone who cares about humanity should
read.
And how does it relate to all these debates on god? Well, Gen.
Dallaire is a devout Catholic, and his faith and values were one reason
he refused to give in or act like the self-interested bureaucrats he
was dealing with (from all countries, including the US). I'm not a
Christian so I'm not positing this question in a way to attack atheism,
but given that religion developed not just as a myth to explain what we
don't understand, but also as a way to think about and codify ethical
beliefs about how to act in the world, doesn't one have to be prepared
to offer an alternative way of doing so if one ditches religious
traditions completely?
Society is held together by tradition and culture. Religion is a part
of that. If religion goes, as I believe organized religion in its
current form probably will, what will replace it? The enlightenment
dream of reason being the guide failed because people couldn't agree
with what reason commanded, and those who thought they had it right
felt justified in imposing their will on others. Now in Europe they
walk a line between holding on to tradition and custom (much moreso
than Americans), including religion, without actually believing the
religious teachings (or else seeing them as symbolic for a greater
ethical message). Is that enough? In any event, the book "Shake Hands
with the Devil" is POWERFUL.
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| User: "Immortalist" |
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| Title: Re: Shake Hands with the Devil |
21 May 2006 02:15:56 PM |
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The Fool wrote:
Society is held together by tradition and culture. Religion is a part
of that. If religion goes, as I believe organized religion in its
current form probably will, what will replace it? The enlightenment
dream of reason being the guide failed because people couldn't agree
with what reason commanded, and those who thought they had it right
felt justified in imposing their will on others. Now in Europe they
walk a line between holding on to tradition and custom (much moreso
than Americans), including religion, without actually believing the
religious teachings (or else seeing them as symbolic for a greater
ethical message). Is that enough? In any event, the book "Shake Hands
with the Devil" is POWERFUL.
I was just reading something along those lines this morning, here;
The Power of Myth
by Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385418868/
MOYERS: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful
mythology?
CAMPBELL: What we've got on our hands. If you want to find out what it
means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
MOYERS: And you'd find?
CAMPBELL: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts
by young people who don't know how to behave in a civilized society.
MOYERS: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become
members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice
born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving
childhood behind. I think of that passage in the first book of
Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a
child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away
childish things."
CAMPBELL: That's exactly it. That's the significance of the puberty
rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are
scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things
done. So you don't have your little baby body anymore, you're something
else entirely.
When I was a kid, we wore short trousers, you know, knee pants. And
then there was a great moment when you put on long pants. Boys now
don't get that. I see even five-year-olds walking around with long
trousers. When are they going to know that they're now men and must put
aside childish things?
MOYERS: Where do the kids growing up in the city-on 125th and Broadway,
for example-where do these kids get their myths today?
CAMPBELL: They make them up themselves. This is why we have graffiti
all over the city. These kids have their own gangs and their own
initiations and their own morality, and they're doing the best they
can. But they're dangerous because their own laws are not those of the
city. They have not been initiated into our society.
MOYERS: Rollo May says there is so much violence in American society
today because there are no more great myths to help young men and women
relate to the world or to understand that world beyond what is seen.
CAMPBELL: Yes, but another reason for the high level of violence here
is that America has no ethos.
MOYERS: Explain.
CAMPBELL: In American football, for example, the rules are very strict
and complex. If you were to go to England, however, you would find that
the rugby rules are not that strict. When I was a student back in the
twenties, there were a couple of young men who constituted a marvelous
forward-passing pair. They went to Oxford on scholarship and joined the
rugby team and one day they introduced the forward pass. And the
English players said, "Well, we have no rules for this, so please
don't. We don't play that way."
Now, in a culture that has been homogeneous for some time, there are a
number of understood, unwritten rules by which people live. There is an
ethos there, there is a mode, an understanding that "we don't do it
that way."
MOYERS: A mythology.
CAMPBELL: An unstated mythology, you might say. This is the way we use
a fork and knife, this is the way we deal with people, and so forth.
It's not all written down in books. But in America we have people from
all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently
law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what
hold us together. There is no ethos. Do you see what I mean?
MOYERS: Yes. It's what De Tocqueville described when he first arrived
here a hundred and sixty years ago to discover "a tumult of anarchy."
CAMPBELL: What we have today is a demythologized world. And, as a
result, the students I meet are very much interested in mythology
because myths bring them messages. Now, I can't tell you what the
messages are that the study of mythology is bringing to young people
today. I know what it did for me. But it is doing something for them.
When I go to lecture at any college, the room is bursting with students
who have come to hear what I have to say. The faculty very often
assigns me to a room that's a little small-smaller than it should have
been because they didn't know how much excitement there was going to be
in the student body.
The Power of Myth
by Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385418868/
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