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Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

Decent Essays

“I had watched a man butchering a cow with a machete. He was quite expert at his work, taking big precise strokes that made a sharp hacking noise. The rallying cry to the killers during the genocide was "Do your work!" And I saw that it was work, this butchery; hard work. It took many hacks--two, three, four, five hard hacks--to chop through the cow's leg. How many hacks to dismember a person?” This paragraph from the introduction of Philip Gourevitch’s book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families is rather striking. It is stark enough to present the exact attitudes of the perpetrators of the genocide. For them, this was seen as a duty, or a job of some sort. Given the previous theories we have studied regarding …show more content…

If one group looks at themselves as different from another, it becomes easier to dehumanize a group to the point of if they are communally seen as other. Furthermore, justification for marginalization is all the much more potent when one considers a group of people to be truly otherized in nature. This is evident in the Rwandan situation when one examines their history. Briefly, the role colonization played in the stratification of the Rwandan society, plus the role elites play in spreading propaganda meant to otherize the Tutsi cannot be down played if one wants to understand the Rwandan genocide. Colonization established historical ties in the society that were inherently stratifying in nature. This established the historical precedent needed to allow the Hutu and the Tutsi to view themselves as some varying degree of binary opposites. This large degree of otherization in combination with historical precedent allowed for the Hutu to solidify as a group and to call for “Hutu Power.” This is where the ties to the epiphenomenal begin. Elites utilized this ethnic tension to spur the violence onward. Elite’s rhetoric regarding the Tutsi is also noteworthy. If one looks at the usage of elite rhetoric and the coercive pressure

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