For me, a typical Friday night often involves engaging with Amnesty International and delving into discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On a wilder Friday night, I might find myself sipping white wine and debating the same topic while people play beer pong in the background. Given my career path and somewhat peculiar social life, I invest a significant amount of time in reading about human rights. Lately, I've noticed something disconcerting regarding books and movies about genocide. It's not just the subject matter itself that troubles me.

Let's take Holocaust movies as an example. There are so many of them that they almost form an independent genre. You might choose to watch "Schindler's List" instead of "13 Going on 30" to, as some might argue, bear witness. While this is laudable, I sometimes wonder if there's something more insidious going on. At times, the violence depicted is so excessive and shocking that the initially somber tone turns almost frenzied. For instance, in the French Holocaust movie "Elle s'appelle Sarah," the director includes a nearly ten-minute scene of people screaming. It was uncomfortable to watch, not because it jolted me out of my complacency, but because it felt like the director was exploiting a historical tragedy for shock value. The violence seems to be fetishized as the director presents all the lurid, gory details. The Holocaust movie can start to resemble a horror movie, with the added frisson of being based on real events.

This is just my theory, but it has introduced an ethical dilemma into my leisure reading. I purchased "We Would Like to Inform You" because I'm considering a career in human rights and thus should know more about the most egregious violations. However, when I read popular books about genocide, I'm concerned that the author might be providing unnecessary bloodshed merely to hold the reader's attention. In this case, the author is a young, white, Western journalist who only arrived in Rwanda after the genocide, which gives me even more reason to be skeptical. Fortunately, Phillip Gourevitch approaches the conflict with empathy, an awareness of his own outsider status, and a profound understanding of Africa.

"We Wish to Inform You" dedicates a significant portion of its pages to explaining the cultural and historical roots of the genocide, and only a few chapters to the killings themselves. Much of the book focuses on the aftermath of the conflict. Gourevitch criticizes Clinton and the UN for first failing to recognize the genocide and then inundating the complicit, exiled Hutus with international aid. There is, of course, violence described, but when the horror becomes too overwhelming, Gourevitch doesn't tell the story himself. Instead, he quotes the accounts of genocide survivors.
The book is nuanced and thoroughly researched. Gourevitch must have conducted hundreds of interviews, not only with survivors but also with confessed killers and bureaucrats from both Africa and the West. His anger at the international community is palpable, yet it's kept in check beneath the surface of his (at times, somewhat lackluster) prose. "We Wish to Inform You" accomplishes what a book about genocide should do; it tells both sides of the story and uncovers the complex cultural factors that had been simmering for centuries. Most importantly, it presents violence with contempt, not with a hidden sense of glee. It's the kind of human rights book that I would recommend not only to my Friday night Amnesty International group but also to the well-intentioned yet misinformed policy makers who bungled the Rwanda situation.

I picked up this book with the intention of delving deeper into the Rwandan genocide that occurred in the 1990s. While I did gain a significant amount of knowledge about the events and the key figures involved, I still feel that I am no closer to understanding the root cause of why it happened. This is not to undermine the quality of the material. In fact, the writer's effort to shed light on the entire affair through interviews with various individuals such as politicians, doctors, UN peacekeepers, military personnel, aid workers, and religious leaders is highly praiseworthy.

However, it made me reflect on the fact that when we focus our attention on one aspect in a completely dark room, we inadvertently cast other things in the room into even greater darkness. This book was written in the nineties, and it makes me wonder how these events would be presented and analyzed today. Moreover, I question whether it is even possible for such happenings to fully disclose themselves. I have my doubts.

I gave this book three stars for the information it provided me and four stars for the insights I gained from it. It is impossible to overlook how poorly the West fares in this story. It is also interesting to note that so many countries, after pledging to prevent genocide following the Holocaust, managed to maintain a stance of non-intervention by simply refusing to recognize it as a genocide.

The most amazing book and historical re-telling that I've ever read is truly a masterpiece.

It has the power to shake you to your very core, making you stop and re-think how you perceive the world and the very nature of humanity.

The author's vivid and detailed descriptions bring the historical events to life, allowing you to experience them as if you were there.

Each page is filled with emotions, from joy and hope to sadness and despair.

It's an amazingly powerful book that will stay with you long after you've turned the last page.

It challenges your beliefs and makes you question everything you thought you knew.

This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in history, human nature, or just a great story.

It will open your eyes and change the way you look at the world forever.

I had possessed this book for an extended period of time, and yet I was deliberately avoiding reading it. There were two main reasons for this. Firstly, I believed that I already had a good understanding of the Rwandan genocide. Secondly, the very subject matter of the book being about the Rwandan genocide made me hesitant.

However, what I had failed to take into consideration was the fact that an outstanding writer has the remarkable ability to transform the reporting of an event into a comprehensive story that encompasses everything. This book is indeed极其 tragic and it is extremely difficult to read. Nevertheless, there are numerous astonishing moments within it where one is simply overwhelmed by both the depravity and the inherent goodness that exists within all of us.

What left me most astounded by this account was the aftermath. The Tutsi having to live together with their murderers is truly a harrowing situation. Additionally, the way in which the western nations dealt with what they had allowed to occur was equally disturbing. This was by far the most infuriating part. People were being brutally slaughtered in large numbers, and yet the other nations simply stood by and watched.

The book also served as a reminder of Hannah Arendt's works regarding totalitarianism and the Holocaust. How on earth could a nation of people be persuaded to kill their own neighbors? The spine-chilling answer is that this potential lies within all of us, but so does the potential to resist and save lives.

There is no greater cruelty than in the history of humanity. I can read about any era, any part of the world, and unfortunately, I only see how history repeats and repeats. Human beings are cruel, savage, and murderous animals.

There is the cruelty of those who directly kill another human being, the savagery of ignorance that believes one race or ethnicity is better than another, and there are the desk assassins, those who, due to political or economic circumstances, allow or even support genocide.

The conflict between the two Rwandan tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis, dates back to the 4th century. However, this worsened considerably when it became a Belgian colony in the 19th century. Once an independent country, the problem was such that it culminated in a terrible genocide carried out by the Hutus, who in 1994 systematically killed every Tutsi they came across. This massacre accounts for almost a million deaths.

This book initially tells the entire historical theme that leads these two ethnic groups to face each other, the reasons or motivations they have for hating each other, and then narrates, in the voices of some Tutsi survivors, what it was like to live through the genocide and how some of them saved their lives.

Later, it makes a profound global social and political analysis. That is, at that time, the United Nations, which was informed of what was happening, did not move a finger. And when they finally decided to intervene, they did so through France, which curiously entered Rwanda to militarily and economically support the Hutus.

The UN created refugee camps basically in what was Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Tanzania, Uganda, and Burundi, but the majority of the refugees were Hutus. Meanwhile, the Tutsi survivors were already forming their Resistance movement, which ultimately led to putting Central Africa in the middle of a war conflict, generating the first and second Congo Wars.

It was very hard to read this book, and it has also generated a tremendous frustration in me. I have felt angry about the position of the international community. In a long interview with Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda and the main actor in the pacification of the country, he says, among other things, that he does not understand why at that time they supported the Hutus and talked about the Tutsis as the assassins. What ulterior motives did they have for doing something like that when the dead were the Tutsis? This man was judged by the international community for crimes of genocide and against humanity, a situation that is incredibly incoherent when he was the one who stopped the war and united a country that was extremely devastated. Currently, he cannot be arrested because he holds the position of president, but once he leaves office, he will be imprisoned. However, on the part of the Hutus, there were really no arrests because in the end, you couldn't judge an entire people.

It is a brutal story. Here, there are no good guys. There is so much evil, so much ignorance, and so much death that you cannot separate the victims from the victimizers. The worst feeling is that of vengeance, the hatred for crimes committed, for children killed, for women raped and then killed, and just for being or belonging to a different ethnicity. Those who use the hatred of a people to generate more hatred and, of course, to have power.

I believe that this book does not narrate anything that has not been seen in other eras or in other wars. In the end, as I have said, the human being is the worst beast that inhabits this planet since it was wrongly called "the intelligent animal."

Gourevitch's account of the Hutu-led genocide in Rwanda and the disastrous handling of the aftermath by international aid agencies appears to be a quintessential example of what has seemingly been Africa's mainstay for the past forty years: internal death and destruction, along with mismanaged international aid packages.

His book is well-written. He skillfully presents the rather intricate story with clarity, employing a solid fact-based approach and never getting lost in melodramatic statements. This is no easy feat, considering the more than one million, mostly Tutsi, victims of the massacres.

The author also reveals that the international community, under the guise of the UN, was completely incapable of addressing the situation in this small, landlocked central African nation. Frequently, UN troops, prohibited from intervening, witnessed people being slain with machetes right before their eyes. Simultaneously, aid agencies were propping up camps with Hutus, just across the border in the Congo. By maintaining these camps, the international community was effectively supporting the Hutus who had killed the million Tutsis and had fled the country after it was liberated by a combined Tutsi-Hutu liberation force.

Upon reading the book, one realizes that the "never again" in reference to the Jewish extermination during World War II is merely a hollow phrase. If no international (Western) interests are at stake, no one is interested in resolving the problems.

\\n  “What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime.”\\n

What exactly took place in Rwanda in 1994? The answer is far from straightforward, and the questions that surface are anything but simple.

I am extremely glad that I read this book.

I am too young to recall any disastrous or political events from the 1990s. Everything I have learned about Rwanda since 1994 has been from my own well-informed parents or my high school history book. They don't really go into detail about what happened, and no one seems to know much more than that the country was divided into two groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, and the Hutus decided to start killing off the other. Over a million Tutsis lost their lives. And that's about it.

This book does not shy away from the actual events that occurred in Rwanda. I'm not going to sugarcoat it; this is not a pleasant book, and at times, it is even difficult to read. It presents the situations as they were, including what led to the genocide and what happened afterwards. Why did a million Hutus participate in the murdering and brutalizing of over a million Tutsis? The truth is that long-standing tensions finally boiled over, with the government systematically calling upon every Hutu to kill all Tutsis, even their own family, friends, and neighbors. And so they did. Where was the rest of the world, and why didn't they intervene?

\\n  “Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler’s war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to camps controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future.”\\n

The way Gourevitch has written this book chronologically makes it and the accounts of this part of history easy to follow. I was left with no unanswered questions (and after looking it up, unfortunately, the two sides are still fighting even 20 years later). His writing is effortless and intelligent. Every chapter has its own meaning, and no information seems superfluous. You get the whole picture from different perspectives: those who were nearly killed, those who saved others, and those who carried out and organized the killings.

What personally struck me the most was the silence of the international community (and the disastrous mistakes made by the UN and others in funding the genocide). From a Western perspective, this is sickening. We, who claim to be intelligent and far from barbaric, turned a blind eye when millions were crying out for help. Officials from that time made statements like "we can't truly say if this counts as a genocide or not." Are you kidding me? Just because there was nothing in it for the "big guys" meant they did nothing or only the bare minimum. Some countries even openly supported the government that was organizing the slaughter (this has to do with the Hutu government deceiving the international community into thinking that they, as a people, were the ones being killed and hunted). This deeply saddens me, as my thoughts keep returning to countries in Africa and the Middle East where thousands of people are dying of hunger at this very moment. Yet we don't take action because of the dangerous political tensions in those countries. To each his own.

I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in history, the philosophy of the human race, and intelligent and thought-provoking reads.

It is one of the most notable events of the last 25 years.

The author, having spent some time in that part of the world, endeavors to piece things together. He conducts a plethora of interviews in an attempt to understand and present a comprehensive account.

Ultimately, though, a significant portion of the book fails to be truly compelling or memorable. The observations lack the necessary depth and acuity. Some of the explanations are rather murky and not clear enough to provide a proper understanding. Moreover, the horror of the event is not vividly brought to life in a way that lingers in the reader's mind.

Normally, I have a penchant for books or TV/movies. In this particular case, however, I would assert that the Frontline special on Rwanda surpasses this book.

I should probably award it 3 stars. I do respect the access to this part of the world that the author provides us with. But I only bestow 3 stars upon a book if I manage to complete it. With this one, I abandoned it with approximately 10 percent of the book remaining (and indeed wished I had given up on it even earlier).

I must admit that my knowledge about Rawanda's genocide was extremely limited before delving into this book. It was the early 90s when this atrocity took place, and I was just a preteen. At that time, global news was far from being one of my life priorities.

However, this account has taught me an abundance of things. All of it is tragic, frustrating, and fills one with a sense of hopelessness. It has even made me feel ashamed of my own country, the United States, due to its aggressive refusal to respond to this genocide. It makes me wonder about the people of Rawanda. How could they be so involved in the slaughter of nearly a million of their neighbors, friends, and countrymen? And it angers me that sloppy reporting could lead to the international community harboring the murderers after the killing was finally forced to stop.

Now, I have a better understanding of what happened, yet I will never truly fathom the horror and magnitude of what actually took place.

What can be said about such an unspeakable tragedy? It is a horror that defies description, a nightmare that has become a reality.

But to not speak of it, to remain silent in the face of such atrocity, is to allow it to happen again. People need to know what happened, to understand the full extent of the pain and suffering that was endured.

We must condemn and abhor this tragedy, not only to express our outrage but also to send a message that such acts will not be tolerated. Only by speaking out and taking a stand can we hope to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future.

Let us not forget the victims of this unspeakable tragedy, and let us work together to ensure that their voices are heard and their memories are honored.

The amazing story of the Rwandan genocide is one that still haunts me deeply.

Just recently, I was reminded of it once again while reading Stassen's equally haunting and disturbing "Deogratias".

The Rwandan genocide was a tragic and horrifying event that took place in 1994. It was a period of intense violence and bloodshed, where hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives.

The details of the genocide are truly heart-wrenching, and it is difficult to fathom the level of hatred and brutality that could lead to such a massacre.

Reading "Deogratias" added another layer of depth and emotion to my understanding of this historical event. The book tells the story of a young man who survived the genocide and his journey to come to terms with the trauma and loss he experienced.

It is a powerful reminder of the importance of remembering the past and learning from it, so that we can work towards a more peaceful and just future.

The Rwandan genocide will always be a part of my consciousness, and I will continue to be inspired by the stories of those who survived and overcame such adversity.

On the flight home, I delved into Philip Gourevitch’s `We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families’.

Despite the many accolades the author has received, I found myself not particularly fond of his writing style. However, this book holds great value as it serves as a deeply disturbing reminder of the extreme violence and cruelty that man is capable of inflicting in the name of modern concepts like ethnicity and nationalism.

This kind of violence is perhaps one of the most pressing issues our world faces today. The self-interested and shameful inaction of the world's leading powers to halt the genocide in Rwanda, as well as the counter-productive efforts of international aid organizations in the aftermath, are all aspects that are worthy of our attention and study.

I am well aware that nations hold significant sway in world affairs, and it may seem naïve to think that much can be achieved without the backing of governments. Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder if large bureaucracies that are primarily accountable to powerful vested interests, such as wealthy business lobbies, can truly be trusted to respond sincerely to the threats that plague the lives of those in the poorer regions of our world.

Some of Clinton’s words to the survivors of the Genocide really struck a chord with my reservations about using violence as a means of bringing about change. He said, “…because each bloodletting hastens the next as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.”

For all of Clinton’s grandiloquent words, we must remember that it was his administration that engaged in considerable verbal gymnastics, insisting that `episodes of genocide’ and not `genocide’ were occurring in Rwanda. Under UN conventions, acknowledging the latter would have obligated the United States to take action.

Returning to Clinton's words, I firmly believe that violating fundamental human rights and lowering the standards of human behavior can never be an isolated event. I mean that such negative actions will have far-reaching consequences and will harm many more people than just the unfortunate direct victims.

The United States' trade and resulting economic power now enable one unethical authoritarian regime to support numerous other governments that have no regard for the dignity of every human being. Sudan and Burma are prime examples. I'm thinking specifically of the refusal by big C (presumably a reference to a large corporation or entity) to support U.N. sanctions on Burma for its brutal killing of an unknown number of Buddhist monks who were protesting the regime.