This is due to colonial powers picking sides. Tutsi's were picked as a 'ruling class' and given all the government jobs. After a bunch of decades of that it engendered hatred between the peoples and genocide was the result.

Isn't this around the time that the US started to take a bunch of shit for playing "world police" getting involved in foreign conflicts that had nothing to do with them?

Other than US merely having knowlwdge of the events and the capability to intercede, what reason did they have to?

Some would say merely those two things create an obligation to intercede, others would call it imperialism.

I am currently reading “Twilight of the Gods”, the last book in Ian Toll’s Pacific Trilogy. The trilogy is the best I’ve read covering the Pacific war and gives a lot of attention to the Japanese side of the war, in particular,the political landscape. If you are interested in WW2 history, this is a must read as far as I’m concerned.

It's not nonsense when you look at imperialism...

300 year old average life expectancy? There'd be no one alive in 1923 who could reach 300 by 2023, much less enough for it to be an average.

Ah, if only the 4-hour workday became true.

Just a reminder that France investigated itself and found no evidence of purposeful wrongdoing. Wow, how brave.

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Yeah, the book Daillaire wrote about the genocide is pretty horrifying on all levels. It is an accelerating descent into madness and the reader can feel the helplessness plaguing him and the ones on the ground. Had to put down the book several times.

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colonial linguistics moment

An outstanding book. It does a great job detailing the atmosphere in Rwanda before and during the genocide, and also breaks down the complete and utter ineptitude of the UN in treating it as a “peacekeeping” mission, which prevented them from stopping the genocide in its tracks.

If I remember correctly, the inaction of the US/NATO during the Rwanda genocide is believed to be one of the reasons why Clinton decided to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo later on to stop the genocides of Bosnians and Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs.

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Thank you.

Shake Hands with the Devil is really good. It's written by Romeo Dellaire, the Canadian commander of UN forces in Rwanda. It doesn't necessarily have the best overall view, but it is best for understanding how the international community failed to help Rwanda.

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Reminds me of the Sarajevo roses

It’s was obvious to literally everyone involved that they where complicit. Look up Opération Turquoise in which they literally helped hutus who had just committed genoicde escape into the Congo

It’s because the tutsi rebel group the rpf where base in English speaking Uganda.

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Happy Wednesday everyone!

Just finished Reign of Arrows: The Rise of the Parthian Empire in the Hellenistic Middle East , by Nikolaus Leo Overtoom, and I absolutely loved it!

Although the book leans more on the academic style of writing, I personally found that it flows quite well. I quite enjoyed the author's framing of Parthian history against the contexts of the Hellenistic world, geopolitics, and even political theory.