For some time I have been haunted by a detail in an article about Rwanda that appeared in the New Yorker several years ago. It hints at aspects of the human soul I would prefer not to acknowledge. It is this comment by one of the people who took part in the massacre of Tutsi:
"For me, it became a pleasure to kill. The first time, it's to please the government. After that, I developed a taste for it. I hunted and caught and killed with real enthusiasm. It was work, but work that I enjoyed. It wasn't like working for the goverment. It was like doing your own true job - like working for myself ... I was very, very excited when I killed. I remember each killing. Yes, I woke every morning excited to go into the bush. It was the hunt."
I wouldn't mind so much, if I thought this was an isolated reaction, but what worries me is that the same potential is hidden deep inside every civilised soul, waiting for the right set of circumstances to animate it. I suppose that is what William Golding was trying to reveal in Lord of the Flies, but it is a very uncomfortable possibility to contemplate..
It's excruciatingly uncomfortable. We see this trait occasionally - though not acted upon, as far as I know - in the orphans boys we know over here, though thankfully the great majority have one or another human frailty which occupies them.
ReplyDeleteAre there many, Gadjo? I'd hoped things were getting better there.
DeleteWell, these are actually grown men now, but once an orphan always an orphan. I don't honestly know how many there are but we see quite a few as Mrs Dilo has been involved for a long time in a charity which provides a half-way house for them. Things are better; the aid - especially from folk in countries like Britain - continues to be a lot of help. Going back to the original point, it's surprising that more aren't psychopathic, though whatever charm they develop in order to ease their way through life may cover such tendencies more than one imagines.
DeleteRe their development of charm, the other day I read this comment by Alain de Botton, who I don't usually admire, although I thought this was perceptive: "How aloof and uninterested a parental figure must usually have been for someone to grow up deeply charming."
DeleteAhhh, yes, that's rather good :-)
DeleteI visited Rwanda whilst the war was on and saw plenty of dead people about. To Africans life is a lot cheaper
ReplyDeleteWhy did you go there then, Worm? Presumably for some kind of work?
DeleteI'd have to say that, if you'd visited Auschwitz just after the last WW, you might have said the same about Europeans
DeleteIn his memoir of service in Burma, Quartered Safe Out Here, George Macdonald Fraser writes frankly about the excitement of killing in battle, without particularly dwelling on it.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the potential is there in many of us--enough for conscription to have been a worthwhile method of recruitment, anyway. However, I think that in most of us who have grown up in settled communities, it requires a good deal of indoctrination before the potential can be developed and scruples unlearned.
Or maybe it has already required a good deal of indoctrination to bury the potential to kill?
DeleteI have two vivid memories of real killings shown on TV as news items as they happened. The first was the mayor of Saigon executing that VC suspect boy - everyone will have seen that at some stage, but I remember it 'live' [almost] and it sickened me physically.
ReplyDeleteThe second was the murder with an axe of a tribeswoman – either Hutu or Tutsi – by a man from the opposite tribe. He had trapped her on the road and someone videoed it from a distance. She simply sat down in despair on the road and bent her head, knowing she couldn't escape, and he smashed her skull in with one blow.
I know this was simply representative of many such events that have happened through history worldwide that thank god we never see or we'd all be mad, but I couldn't imagine the mentality of a human being committing such an act so dispassionately.
What also shocks me is the child soldier, trained to kill with no compunction. I cannot imagine any child ever being able to escape that past as an adult.
In battle, adrenalin primes action and I understand what constant charges of that powerful drug might do to personality. But it's the cold-blooded killing, whatever rush it gives, that's the one humanity has most to fear from, and the world is full of it. The drone, the suicide bomber, Pol Pot mental clones, Chechnya - anyone who has a 'higher motive' in routinised killing – they're the ones to fear most.
It's the cold-blooded killing that doesn't give a rush but which the perpetrator thinks is rationally decreed that is also awful - thinking of Auschwitz
DeleteJust this year, I taught about Rwanda in a writing class. I "team-taught" the class with a history teacher. We watched "Hotel Rwanda" and we showed the kids a documentary about the Stanley Milgram experiments in order to explore the question of why regular people have participated in genocides. I was chilled by the kids' reactions to the Milgram experiments -- they were very quick to "understand" why someone would have, under the circumstances, administered a lethal jolt of electricity to a complete (and unsees) stranger. Something dark does swim beneath the loch.
ReplyDeleteI suppose, if they're still at school, the kids are more familiar with operating within a system where you obey a figure of authority.
DeleteFriends and I are still helping one of our mates who served with the ADF in Rwanda at the Kubayho Massacre. He personally used a pace counter to count the dead. He stopped at 4,000. UN days later "revised" this number to 800.
ReplyDeleteHe was part of a 10 person Army team present during the massacre. A mix of medics, a media Corporal and less than a section of infantry.
He personally had children hacked off of his legs by machete wielding frenzied RPA attackers. Needless to say he has a terrible time wondering why he didn't do more. His soldiers held their fire as there were between 800 and a 1000 doing the slaughtering.
I cant imagine how he has coped with these memories.
Dreadful. I hope he will find some kind of escape from the horrors he's experienced.
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