The Batlord

I'm not an American isolationist, but I still generally support American intervention only where it is pragmatic for our country. This is not just purely for self-interest, but because American interventionalsim has caused so much negative **** throughout the world, not only directly, but through the law of unintended consequences. A world power going into a country and doing whatever, no matter how well-intentioned, has every opportunity to do at least as much bad as good. And often worse.

But if you know anything about the Rwandan genocide in 1994, which is a subject I have only recently become even vaguely educated on, there really is a point at which non-intervention equals acceptance of evil. I'm an atheist who doesn't believe in true evil, but what happened in Rwanda is evil if anything is evil. And we did nothing. For perfectly reasonable reasons, because of the catastrophe of our intervention if Somalia, but...

At what point does pragmatism become the acquiescence of evil? At what point should the American, or UN, military complex just do something? I'm not encouraging one viewpoint over another, I'm just asking a question. I ****ing don't know, but I've been reading about that genocide recently, and am watching Hotel Rwanda, and I can come up with no moral reason why we did nothing.

Like, help me understand why what we did or did not do was or was not just. And therefore what we should do in the future.

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Frownland

Intervening wouldn't be profitable. That's not how America rolls.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Key

#downwithfrown

Blank.

Rwanda was a tragedy. But it's not the US job to take care of other countries. If the country wants us to intervene, and the situation at home isnt to ****ed up I'm not against it. But that said, the UN's job is to keep peace. Something like this happens and they do nothing I find disgusting. The Rwanda genocide was the UN's job and they ****ed it up. Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, what happened in Somalia is the US fault. Not the UN. The UN is a waste of space that needs to be dismantled and rebuilt as something that actually gets work done and doesn't get so caught up in all the beaucratic horse manure.

The Batlord

I'd vaguely agree in general, but within a week, or two weeks, or a month, or whatever, nearly one million people died. The Rwandan refugee camps that exist today are filled with Hutu (the people massacred were the Tutsi) running from the Tutsi afraid of their reprisal, because the Tutsi were basically murdered to a man except in provinces controlled by the rebel group of the Tutsi. Within weeks, the Tutsi living in the places that were being massacred were basically all dead. All of them. The genocide was basically successful. 80% of the Tutsi in Rwanda were massacred. Straight up.

The Rwandan genocide made the Holocaust look civilised, and nobody would ever say that we should have let the Nazis murder all the Jews (and the Rwandan genocide was statistically five times as murderous as the Holocaust). So, UN or American or whatever, how can pragmatism be justified if we are to consider ourselves human beings?

And I'm not even going into the organized rape squads that left virtually every single female Tutsi survivor, almost literally every single goddamn one, a victim of rape, and the AIDS epidemic that resulted (the Hutus actually organized "rape squads" of HIV positive men to rape Tutsi women in order to poison their gene pool) was just like... holy ****.

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The Batlord

Seriously though. I feel as a "modern Westerner" that this kind of **** should be over. And yet, as a thirty-year-old, this **** is still twenty-years-old. As a ten-year-old child, as a small boy who should not live in a world with this garbage, this **** happened.

And the most horrible **** of all is that I will continue to live in this inhuman bull****. And I will even justify some of it, due to being an American who does not want Americans to become involved in conflicts which to be perfectly ****ing honest, we actually should not be involved in... what is the purpose of this species? Why should there exist a legitimate real reason why we should allow inhuman atrocities when there is no reason to allow them? Why should the human race not just commit mass suicide?

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OccultHawk

If it weren't for the Japanese we were prepared to do just that. We might have even sided with Hitler.

I've read a couple books about the Rwanda thing. We didn't start that one and there wasn't **** we could do about it. Belgium started that **** if I remember correctly and then the Africans just carried on endlessly like absolute savage morons. I wasn't willing to die over it so I'm not about to ask some other American to.

OccultHawk

I think we do need to seriously consider the voluntary human extinction movement. Just stop breeding and do the rest of life (besides the bacteria we host) on this planet a favor.

We do a disgusting disservice to life in general. We're repulsive creatures at best.

The Batlord

From what I understand the Belgians were just one of the biggest troop contributors to UNAMIR, which was basically the useless UN task force set to do something or other in Rwanda, but whose mandate to fire only if fired upon basically left them neutered, and therefore left the UN a joke force in the region.

I know America was not responsible for Rwanda, but seriously, if as a race we can let that **** go down, then what the **** is the point?

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OccultHawk

It was during the Belgian occupation that the Hutu and Tutsi division was created by a bunch of honkeys measuring people's nostrils and ****. Unless I'm getting it twisted, that's what I remember with my drug addled mind.

So go to Africa and start feeding people if you care so much. It's not like the suffering is over. Mali has been getting ****ed. Sudan. South Sudan. Are you going to go yourself or just volunteer others? In my case, I'm not even about to cross the street to help out even if my neighbor is ready to off himself. I doubt you are either. Isn't there tragedy left and right in your town? We got homeless junkies on the street. Kids getting murdered. People going hungry. What are we doing? Typing ****ing messages on here.