51 Quotes by Philip Gourevitch

So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality – even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood.

I saw a group of museum staffers arriving for work. On their maroon blazers, several wore the lapel buttons that sold for a dollar each in the museum shop, inscribed with the slogans “Remember” and “Never Again”... the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated.

The spectre of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual – always an annoyance to totality – ceases to exist.

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building... In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously admistered states in history.

The genocide had been tolerated by the so-called international community, but I was told that the UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem.

The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow.