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The Future Of The USA Is Rwanda

Why looking back at this small African nation helps us to foresee what will soon occur in the world’s rapidly-collapsing former superpower

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Image credit: The Economist

It may seem odd to suggest that the future of the USA can be adumbrated by considering what began in Rwanda on 7th April 1994. For those with short memories, that was the day on which Hutus began slaughtering their Tutsi neighbors — people with whom they’d been living peacefully for decades. Ordinary people morphed into evil murderers, hacking their former friends, colleagues, and neighbors to death with machetes and knives. Women and children were raped before being mutilated and killed; some were burned to death in the buildings they’d hoped would provide refuge from the rampaging mob.

In many cases the killings were systematic: the Achilles tendons of victims would be severed so as to prevent them from escaping so the murderers could come back and finish them off later on when it was more convenient. This mass slaughter happened because cynical halfwit politicians believed they could benefit from stirring up hatred against Tutsis. It’s the same ploy Modi is using in India (stirring up hatred against Muslims) and the same ploy the sniveling creature Trump is using in the USA (stirring up hatred against immigrants). It was extremely effective in Rwanda and hundreds of thousands of Hutus gleefully began hacking to death the “cockroaches” they’d been told to fear and hate by their political leaders.

Naturally the world stood back and did nothing. The handful of UN Peacekeepers present in Rwanda were instructed explicitly by Kofi Annan (then the Director of the UN Peacekeeping organization and later, as a reward for his cowardice and stupidity, he became the UN Director General) to stand back and do nothing at all to impede the slaughter. An estimated 800,000 Tutsis were murdered in a matter of days.

Rwanda was, like many post-colonial African nations, a nominal democracy. Like all democracies, however, ordinary people voted not on the basis of a rational assessment of candidates and policies but on a tribal basis. This continues to be the case wherever we look because we’re a primate group species and our need for affiliation is infinitely greater than our very…

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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