Forgiving and Negotiating with Evil: Memoirs of the Rwandan Genocide (1/2)

Immaculeé’s faith carried her through the darkest days of the Rwandan genocide.  For about one hundred days thousands of Hutus armed with machetes and other makeshift weapons hunted Tutsi neighbors like 24-year-old Immaculeé Ilibagiza and her family. Her memoir, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, gives a harrowing account of survival under the most stressful of conditions, as she and six other women hid in a Hutu pastor’s small bathroom for three months.  Immaculeé became a U.S. citizen a couple of months ago and continues to write books about her Catholic faith.

 

Over the years I’ve had students read memoirs in order to understand a historical event.  Immaculeé’s account and another memoir, Paul Rusesabagina’s An Ordinary Man, discussed below, can draw the student into this somber topic more than a straightforward history book, and fortunately I have the academic freedom to choose my texts and experiment with the curriculum.  To supplement these personal accounts with a wider perspective, I usually include a short online article that gives students the necessary background information.  In the case of Rwanda, it’s important to show that both the perpetrators and victims were real people who made moral choices and faced the gravest of moral dilemmas.  The subject requires careful analysis and measured discussion, as many students tend to write off the “Dark Continent,” to use the old colonial phrase, as a place where life is not valued and mass violence is the norm.  We know that the genocide could have been avoided every step of the way; it was not the product of inevitable “ancient tribal hatreds.”  What I hope my students realize is that political forces on the local, national, and international level instigated the flames of hate and allowed them to continue unabated.  A Tutsi army invading from the north of the country managed to end the holocaust without help from the United States and in spite of French assistance to the Hutu opposition.

 

After the spring of 1994, Rwanda is not so much the country of mountain gorilla preserves, banana groves, and free trade coffee as perhaps it once was in the eyes of the international community.  The Land of a Thousand Hills is the site of one of the worse and most systematic massacres of a people in world history, and it continues to offer lessons in humanity, or the lack thereof.  The genocide tested the resolve of the United Nations, United

States and France to intervene and save lives, but the international response was found wanting in the small African nation’s hour of direst need.  We also get insights into the fragility of civilization.  Victims suffered excruciating death at the bloodied hands of neighbors and old family friends, as well as professional death squads.  Motivated by fear or a sense of ethnic obligation and historic comeuppance preached rabidly by Hutu extremists, the perpetrators were relentless in their pursuit of “cockroaches” and “snakes” hiding in the swamps, churches, or a pastor’s secret bathroom.

 

As the subtitle of her book suggests, Immaculeé searches for God in the darkness.  The author’s religious faith gives students another perspective, as the other texts in my course give a secular or Muslim point of view.  The physical comfort was bad enough, but the “mental anguish,” she writes, “was even more intense.  I was trapped alone with my thoughts, and the dark fears and doubts that had haunted me since my arrival became relentless—they wormed into my heart and undermined the foundation of my faith.”  Killers lurked outside and on a few occasions they entered the house looking for victims.  Fortunately they never spotted the bathroom door hidden behind a large wardrobe.  “When the killers were out of earshot, my thoughts drifted away from God, and the negative energy rushed in.”

 

A key theme of the book is forgiveness.  Admittedly, I have an issue with her view of forgiveness, though I don’t necessarily share my opinion in the classroom.  I understand the therapeutic importance of forgiveness.  Bitterness and hate can destroy a person.  It’s important to let it go and not keep it bottled up inside.  To a certain extent I admire people who take this road less travelled.  Most of us want vengeance.  Still, forgiving those who commit heinous acts can border on the ridiculous and even irresponsible.  And I think it’s great if someone can “discover God” during evil times, but one must keep things in perspective, no? “I thanked Him for delivering us to the bathroom,” writes Immaculeé.  “I truly believed that God had guided Pastor Murinzi to bring us here.”  That’s wonderful, but what about the other victims who weren’t so lucky?  Did God, a “cosmic sadist,” abandon them?  I like to elicit the students’ opinion on the following statement from Immaculeé: “The killers are good people, but right now evil has a hold on their hearts.”  Readers of this blog know my view here, but it's open for debate and I welcome the students' take on evil provided that they give a decent rationale for their view.  In sum, Left to Tell yields good classroom discussion and students learn some things about genocide by reading a survivor’s memoir that they would not otherwise learn.

Feminized Civilization and its Discontents

I spent the evening with a couple of good friends, John and Mark, to watch Fight Club, a 1999 movie starring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton.  We watched There Will Be Blood together a few years ago and enjoyed the fellowship so much that we wanted to meet again.  I guess the theme of these evenings would be “profiles in male character” or “case studies on the male experience in U.S. culture.”  Fight Club yielded a good post-viewing conversation about the emasculation of the postmodern American male and the search for identity more broadly.  I’m sure we could have found other interesting aspects of this evocative film, but we no doubt picked up on the salient points the director wanted to make.  I won’t be doing the film justice here; I'm not offering a complete commentary on the movie.  Instead, I’m simply conveying what we got out of it.  You eventually find out that Tyler Durden, the Brad Pitt character, is a mental projection of the main character and narrator, played by Norton.  I didn’t see that coming.  In a telling scene, Durden observes that men are no longer hunters and gatherers, but consumers barraged by images of the "perfect male" in Calvin Klein ads (my paraphrasing, mind you).  So the wild and carefree Tyler, the narrator's id, starts a “fight club” that becomes popular among males seeking to prove their manhood in a sensitized urban culture lost in consumerism.

 

John wondered if we’ve made some gains since the 1990s in addressing the feminization of our contemporary society or whether we’ve fully absorbed these cultural changes and don’t think about them anymore.  Have the social engineers of a less aggressive and more effeminate society been successful?  Fight Club portrays testicular cancer victims going through therapy after castration, and there are a couple of scenes in which a male is threatened with emasculation.  That is, the filmmaker conveys the idea of a society that’s been neutered.   On a not-unrelated note, my wife informs me that 40% of women are taking over the role of head of household.  Yet, as I've written elsewhere, you can’t so readily tame our natural instincts, since the Homo sapiens has been around far longer than civilization.  More to the point, the male of the species has an anatomy and hardwiring to survive his environment and spread his gene pool.  For what it’s worth, my bons amis and I reject these efforts at feminizing every aspect of our culture.  Must it be a sum-zero game?  Must the empowerment of women come at the expense of a man’s masculinity?  The Marlboro Man has ridden off into the sunset and won't be allowed to return until he loses the cigarette and starts donning metrosexual garb.  Anyway, we three guys had a delightful time sitting in Mark’s living room sipping little cups of cappuccino that he had prepared like a good host and nibbling on pan bread that John had cooked up in the kitchen before the movie.  We started a bit late because Mark had to tend to his two-year-old daughter while his wife was at work.

A Coastal Drive (7/8)

Kelsey had given birth to their first child, Ashley, only a few months before Mark’s deployment to Afghanistan, his third tour in five years.   It took him a while to figure out that his wife was suffering from severe postpartum depression, a condition bad enough without her husband’s frequent absences.  Mark harbored plenty of guilt for all his time away, and hearing Kelsey grieve about how tough things were for her and the baby only compounded his anxiety.  Though Kelsey had been in the military, she was tired of living at Fort Lewis and wanted a “normal” life.

All the signs of trouble were there.  Before he went overseas Mark could see Kelsey’s mounting depression, but he didn’t put it in any kind of medical context.  In retrospect he would spend nights regretting his inattention to the clues.  He took some solace in the fact that his mother-in-law Rita was going to stay with Kelsey and her new granddaughter throughout most of Mark’s tour.

 

Initially, they Skyped whenever Mark was at Bagram, Kabul, or on one of the more wired firebases, but the mission ate up more of Mark’s time as March was approaching and the Taliban-infested mountains started to turn from white to brown.  Inevitably the conversation would center on Kelsey’s feeling of inadequacy as a mother.  Mark did his best to reassure her, but, unmindful of the depths to which his wife was sinking, he grew tired of her woeful tone.  After all, he thought, wasn’t he was not only away from his young child in a bullet-ridden land but he was responsible for the lives of soldiers?  His exasperation with Kelsey only increased his wife’s sense of alienation and worthlessness.

 

Once incident kept playing in her mind, and Mark had to ask Rita via email what actually happened.  Kelsey had left Ashley on the kitchen table after changing her diaper to check the laundry.  The baby rolled off edge and fell to the floor.  Rita, who was outside watering the plants, heard the thump and Ashley’s wailing.  With horror she picked the child up from the floor.  Ashley seemed fine, but Rita took the baby to the hospital to be sure there was no serious injury to the head.  All the while, Kelsey sat on the couch in catatonic state, unable to offer aid or even express concern.  Ashley ended up being okay, but Kelsey never forgave herself for leaving her on the table.

These past few weeks had been running through his mind, as he and his men, strapped inside the CH-47, ascended the mountainside.  The voice of his first sergeant shook his mind back into the game.

“Listen up!  We’ve been here before, but this is the real deal, confirmed by SIGINT and boots on the ground.  Be sharp, Rangers.  Hooah!”

No sooner than Top finished his pep talk, the door gunner cried out, “Incoming!”  Rounds were making piercing thuds into the bottom of the gunship.  The gunner unloaded a barrage into the snowy landscape below.

"No worries!" yelled out the crew chief.  "It's just a welcoming party."

At the Piano

I sat at the piano today and let my hands and mind roam freely.  Indistinct thoughts mingled with strong feelings.  Out of this reverie something emerged in F# phrygian, a wistful, dark song that partly reflects my mood but also satisfies my need for speed.  I spend most of my time on the lower register of the keyboard these days, but I let my fingers slip and slide around the keys as is their wont.  Lyrics?  Vocals?  They'll follow in due time.  I could spend hours upon hours at the keyboard, getting lost in the music of my dreams. 

Naughty Monkeys (2/2)

Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.  Why do some people fail to acknowledge the evidence of human nature and cling tenaciously to a social constructivist theory like a monkey on a vine?  There’s nothing new under the sun.  Sanguine views of human progress and the belief in attainable utopias have been around time immemorial.  Still, after a century of two world wars and numerous genocides, not to mention oppression and civil wars, you’d think we would have done away with foolish optimism.  So we should account for such opposition to human depravity in this post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, post-911 world that we live in.  One reason for this opposition has to do with a person's training or ideology.  The contrarian might be trained as a sociologist and therefore predisposed to see social ills as a result of social forces or faulty institutions that can be corrected.  More broadly, they like the idea that humans are blank slates, with no particular predilection for evil, or good, but can be molded with the latest programs, strategies, or conceptual framework to create a more caring, equitable, and peaceful society.  This scenario puts humans, at least the smart ones, comfortably in control of their fate.  There’s something to be said for both nature and nurture.  It’s just that they exaggerate the latter and neglect or underappreciate the former.

 

Those who oppose the view of inherent human evil have some valid concerns, however.  Cults and dictatorial regimes have controlled people through ideologies of human depravity.  They instill guilt into their followers and subjects and foster the idea that they must look to Big Brother, to use Orwell’s words, to save them from their selfish ways.  After all, what conclusion does Thomas Hobbes draw from his realistic portrayal of humans left to their own devices?  They need a strongman to keep them in line, someone who can be brutal when necessary.  Perhaps he would have opposed the Iraq War precisely for this reason.  Some associate arguments of “nature” with a white patriarchy determined to keep women and minorities “in their place.”  It’s an argument for the status quo, not for revolutionary change.  These objections are legitimate, for this position has sometimes been a tool of exploitation.  However, the abuse of biological arguments doesn't take away from the fact that nature has bequeathed to us behavioral software.

The idea is to confront our inner monkey and design a social system to foster enlightened self-interest, all the while being vigilant against our dark impulses that resist from time to time.  While we’ve been born with the instinct for self-preservation, and males in particular are hard-wired for violence and aggression, we can “reverse the curse” of our evolutionary heritage.  The antidote lies within us: we have the ability to empathize and cooperate.  The ongoing work of primatologist Frans de Waal at Emory University has brought our attention to cooperation, empathy, and indeed morality among chimpanzees.  How we encourage these traits and overcome our equally inborn ethnocentrism and xenophobia is not an easy task.  We need to set up a system in which people have something to gain by trusting those outside their circle of blood kinship.  For example, it's clear that the United States government, like any other government, will only get involved in a crisis abroad if it serves our national interests.  So humanitarian groups should convince the U.S. that intervening or helping other countries serves our collective self-interest as Americans.  You won't get far with grandiose calls for the "right thing to do."  What we do not want to do, however, is give in to our base instincts.  The other day I watched a movie called The Purge, a dystopian story set in the near future.  The “new founding fathers” of the U.S. government have managed to reduce crime and unemployment significantly by setting aside a day each year, March 22, when people have 12 hours to give full vent to their hatred, jealousy, and violent impulses.  Until 7 am the next morning, all crime is permitted and no fire or police services are available.  From sundown to sunup it’s essentially a Hobbesian war of every man against every man.  The storyline is implausible in a number of ways, but I found the film instructive for our present topic. 

Graduation Day

My daughter Jessi graduated from high school today.  The entire family was present for the ceremony.  It was a large graduating class.  The keynote speaker was mediocre, but to be fair it was one of the high school faculty and not a professional speaker.  My wife is organizing a party for Jessi and her friend Lauren in a park next Thursday.  She’s off to the Naval Academy in less than two weeks, but for now she's enjoying her time with friends and a summer job as life guard and swim instructor.  These eighteen years have flown by.  I hate to use that old cliché, but it's true.  She's leaving the nest.  While she can take care of herself physically, I hope she's emotionally equipped for the challenges ahead, particularly in her near future.  I remember a little rugrat with big pretty brown eyes crying as I'd leave in the morning to work on my dissertation at the municipal archive in Augsburg, Germany.  From the get-go, she was a handful: a bit dramatic and somewhat high maintenance.  But her personality reminds me of someone else I know, namely a little boy with the initials D.V.

After the ceremony and photo op outside the Kohl Center, we ate at a place called La Brioche, a restaurant that prides itself on "true food" and feng shui (which I find both ridiculous and arrogant).  Jessi, Erika, and I ordered the same exact thing.  Weird.  Jessi wanted to eat at a quaint place far from the madding crowd.  She surprises me sometimes.  Later in the evening I found her at home taking a break from all the graduation parties, chillin' like a villain with her iPhone.  This behavior was yet another sign that, for good or ill, she's inherited my melancholy temperament.  Overall, it was a good day.  The weather was great and it's rare to have the whole family together these days.  We experienced a bit of déjà vu today, as Erika graduated a few years ago from the same place, the Kohl Center.  Likewise, I had my PhD graduation ceremony there some thirteen years ago.  Monika, my youngest, is on deck for next year. 

Activism in the Classroom

I’m writing this essay because I want to clarify in my mind a position I’ve held about education for quite some time.  I’ve vigorously opposed the idea of being an activist instructor in my history courses.  The particular subjects I teach and otherwise read about give me perhaps a certain perspective that makes me so contrarian on this issue.  I’ve broached this topic with a few colleagues, some of whom identify themselves as activists and don’t see a problem here, provided that the activist cause that's being presented in the classroom is one with which they agree.  In some cases these individuals misunderstand what I’m saying, because—I suspect—they feel so strongly about their principles, values, or sense of mission that they can't get beyond their defensive reaction or understand why there'd be a question mark here. Whether they understand me or not, it could simply be a case of disagreement.  To be honest, I'm sometimes astounded that I have to make my case for leaving activism out of the classroom, but I realize this issue requires much clarification.

 

So before I proceed, a couple of qualifications are in order.  First, I’m talking about activism in the classroom, not activism as such.  This point is often missed in these conversations.  Moreover, I’m thinking specifically of the traditional disciplines: the humanities, the behavioral and social sciences, biology, chemistry, and the quantitative sciences.  I’m somewhat open to arguments for an activist bent in co-curricular courses on, say, civics and cultural diversity, because students are arguably expecting this approach in these types of courses.  I'm still thinking through this question, though.  Second, I think it’s important to get a handle on what activism precisely means.  Let’s start with some definitions.  According to the Dictionary.com, activism is “the doctrine or practice of vigorous action or involvement as a means of achieving political or other goals, sometimes by demonstrations, protests, etc.”  Wikipedia tells us that activism “consists of efforts to promote, impede, or direct social, political, economic, or environmental change, or stasis.”  Merriam-Webster Online says it’s “a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue.”  This last definition is most pertinent here.  Okay, I think we’re ready to go forward.

 

My basic concern is that activism can mar pedagogical efforts to be as objective as possible in the classroom.  Many undergrad freshmen don't have the ability to discern a professor's advocacy for a controversial issue from analysis or Socratic dialogue.  The students who might have a different view will either be turned off by the instructor's efforts at proselytization or they won't really think about it because they agree.  In either scenario, I submit, education is not happening.  The temptation for a university instructor to preach their values or indoctrinate students with their ideological viewpoint is strong enough, as that's what humans do: they want to influence others. But giving full vent to activism in the classroom makes an instructor less willing to foster the free exchange of ideas, something that a university is supposed to facilitate.

When I’m talking about Nazism, for instance, I should be discussing how this evil came about, various theories that account for the rise of this ideology, and less on what students should be thinking about it or what they're going to do to oppose manifestations of it in our own day.  I want them to draw their own conclusions.  There are plenty of avenues for the student to get involved outside of class.  History is replete with examples of visionaries and moralists with good intentions and a razor-sharp moral sense who've nonetheless led people down the primrose path to hell.  Jim Jones and Robespierre, a pastor and a principled activist who wanted to right the wrongs of their respective societies, are just two individuals that come to mind; one enjoined his followers under gunpoint to drink poison and the other ended up cutting people’s heads off en masse.  Didn’t George Orwell warn us about public mind control?  I guess there’s a part of me that, should I let my ideological or partisan views come to the fore in my class, would feel like I'm Inner Party member O’Brien probing for thoughtcrime among my students.

I attended a GBLT speaker’s talk on campus a few months ago.  At that meeting no less than the chancellor seemed to be on board with an activist classroom.  No one even questioned or at least qualified the notion of pushing a particular social agenda.  I thought to myself: What if I wanted to promote the idea of regime change in my course on conflicts throughout the contemporary world?  That is, what if I decided to make the case with students that the U.S. military should intervene to displace genocidal dictators abroad because it serves our national interests and the interests of humanity in general?  How do you think that would go over?  I’d have good intentions, and perhaps roughly half the country wouldn’t mind this emphasis in my class.  I don't think it would be a popular idea where I teach, however.  So being an activist in the classroom hinges on your patrons and the campus culture.  What's wrong with this picture?

For those who are either explicitly or implicitly okay with activism in the classroom, the thought process presumably goes something like this: Why wouldn’t you take this great opportunity to promote a good cause?  You have a captive audience and as an authority figure their respect.  They’ll listen to you and consider your perspective.  You shouldn’t pass up this moment to correct those who might be less ardent in fighting sexism, racism, homophobia, and other expressions of social injustice.  It's not about pushing an agenda!  It's about doing the right thing.  Don’t you want to inspire?  Don’t you want to be a part of the solution?  These students are wide-eyed young people with an open mind.  They'll be moved by what you have to say, and you'll be doing humanity a favor by fostering those same values in the youth that you hold so dear.

Am I exaggerating the impact of activism in the class?  Maybe just a bit, but I’m trying to make a point.  I think some further clarification would be welcome here.  Do I make value judgments in the classroom?  You bet, especially in the subject matter that I teach.  I can tell the students that the Nazis committed evil.  I don’t leave that up for them to decide.  There are times when an instructor needs to make a stand and not moderate or throw out alternative positions on an issue.  For instance, while I'm open to the idea that the 911 attack was really a conspiracy carried out by the U.S. government doing Israel's bidding, I reject it out of hand in class because of the lack of evidence.  The burden of proof, I tell the students, is on the conspiracy theorists, not mainstream scientific investigation and data.

Listen, instructors have opinions and it can aid the learning process to share these opinions at times.  For instance, I had my students read a young Tutsi woman's memoir about surviving the Rwandan genocide by finding refuge in a Hutu pastor's home.  She talks a lot about forgiveness, as she's a devout Catholic.  I told the students that I can't agree with her view of forgiveness; instead, I expressed my agreement with a military commander that she cites in the book who said he'll forgive the perpetrators when they're dead.  I made it clear that this is my opinion.  Remember the third definition above: activism means you’re defending one side of a controversial issue.  What's controversial changes for each generation.  One must discern the moral zeitgeist from partisan positions that divide the country.  If you find yourself pushing a viewpoint tendentiously, you're likely not giving the opposing viewpoint its due.  Activism in the classroom will always conjure up for me China’s Cultural Revolution, re-education centers, propaganda, self-criticism sessions in North Korea’s gulags, Joseph Goebbels, totalitarianism, and Big Brother.