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September 11, 2006

Ferdy at the Movies - Looking Back at Hotel Rwanda

Seven and a half years before September 11, a nightmare descended on the horn of Africa. In the space of 100 days, a million people were killed.

The Internet was at the time a mere shadow of its current influence, and news travelled slowly. Bruce remembers hearing about a civil war in Rwanda, but thought at the time that the reports couldn't possibly be true.

Bruce has lived too long under the rule of law and doesn't understand what happens when it breaks down. I know better: whenever you tell people they can take other people's property by killing them, you have a bloodbath.

In the film Hotel Rwanda, which chronicles Paul Rusesabagina's use of his hotel to protect over 1600 people from the violence, there is a scene where a fictionalized UN military commander explains to Paul that the international community won't help because they don't care about black people.

At the time, Bill Clinton was the President of the United States and he had a Democratically-controlled Congress at his beck and call. I find it hard to believe that Bill Clinton-- whatever his faults-- doesn't care about black people. Instead, it's worth considering what the world was like in April of 1994.

Only six months earlier, the U.S. Army had suffered a defeat in Somalia. Six months before that, the FBI seige at Waco had ended in tragedy. A house-to-house civil war in a country with no acting government probably seemed like an invitation to another disaster. Indeed, the presence of sectarian hatreds in Iraq is commonly cited as a reason we can't win there.

As we look back on September 11, we need to understand that the United States government is not going to be able to solve all the world's problems, or even just the really really bad ones. The true heroes amidst these tragedies are the individuals who chose to do the right thing, whether it was airplane passengers sacrificing themselves to derail a hijacking or a single hotel manager buying time by bluffing a genocidal militia.

That idea of individuals doing the right thing because they're at the right place is the fundamental principle of modern conservatism. The liberal response to Katrina was to complain about President Bush. But what actually got the problem solved was individual charity efforts.

And in the end, it will be individual people, the decent ones willing to stand up to protect their friends and families, that gives us a victory in Iraq, and in the wider War on Terror.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

# At Mon 3:22 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (1) | More Ferdy at the Movies | Tags: 9/11 Bill Clinton conservative George W Bush Hotel Rwanda Katrina liberals Mogadishu Paul Rusesabagina Rwanda War and Peace

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Posted by: Mick at September 11, 2006 7:32 PM