I was noting to a friend yesterday that when I was a young monk, one of the cranky older fathers once gave me a task to do and then added some kind of safeguard on it. When he noticed my somewhat offended reaction, he said, "It's not you I mistrust, brother, it's your human nature."
The older I have gotten, the less paranoid and the more compassionate his words have come to seem.
The human capacity both for breathtaking, jawdropping virtue and vice makes us an insoluble species.
The History Channel specializes in Nazism. You'd think very little evil had happened in the world outside of Germany. Frankly, it's safe. Lots of info and film. And long ago. And the evildoers are white males.
I just turned off a dramatic rendering of the Hutu genocide of almost a million Tutsi in the 1990's. The British priest who's with his Tutsi parishioners is informed by the UN peacekeepers that they have been ordered to leave. All he can do to prepare for their slaughter is give them communion and wait. I know some of the details of what went on. What the machete-bearing Hutu lacked in Teutonic technology and efficiency they made up for with savage enthusiasm for humiliation, torture and blood. It was too much to watch.
But why, I wonder, when you read about this horror, there are so many indications that it was somehow the fault of the French or the Belgians or some other colonizers...but no one seems to blame the French at Versailles for the German genocide of the Jews. Hutu "extremists" did the killing, by the way. Anything to spare the little brown people of responsibility.
If you excuse a savage, does that make you a savage manque?
But maybe neither the Germans, nor the Hutus, nor the Hutu excusers are personally at fault. Perhaps it's just their human nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment