Aargh!

By Heraclitus

Greetings, all. I've just come from an extremely frustrating class, in which I seemed to be alone (well, one or two fellow travelers) in arguing that the U.S. should have intervened to stop genocide in Rwanda. The mixture of vulgar relativism and vulgar self-interest in the students' objections to that course of action were astounding. Who are we to impose our culture on them? Are you really so racist as the think that genocide is the "culture" of Africans? Are they such incorrigible savages that we can't or shouldn't stop the murder of 800,000 people--and that's the conservative estimate, it may have been over a million -- and the rape, brutalization, and displacement of countless others? It doesn't work when we prop up puppet governments to serve our own interests. Thank you, Señor Chavez. What material interest(s) of the United States would have been served by preventing genocide in Rwanda? Well, we don't want genocide, and that's our interest. Right, whereas those savages in Africa can't get enough genocide. I mean, there's got to be a reason it's called the Dark Continent, right (hint: it was because Africa was the last continent to be explored and mapped).

But my favorite, the absolute kicker, was the argument, if we went in, we would be opposed to one of the sides. YES! The side committing genocide!! That's what justice is--opposing injustice and protecting the victims of things like, I don't know, motherfucking genocide.

To be fair, some of the arguments put forth against intervention were somewhat more subtle or intelligent than this. But am I just a fanatic, and have I always just been a fanatic? (Well, yes, but please keep reading.) Am I crazy to expect sheltered 18 year-olds to be a little more idealistic than this? Or am I just turning into some kind of fire-breathing, neocon regime changer?

You wonder if some of them would be able to make any sense at all out of Casablanca.