A guilty conscience from knowing your own complicity in a genocide is a terrible thing; it pushes the criminal - especially the kind, like France, that ceaselessly tries to sell itself as the inventor of human rights - into trying to stuff memory that contradicts its conceited self-regard down the deepest memory hole.
Editor,
RE: "France doesn’t fight Rwanda, it fights with the memory of the 1994 Genocide” (The New Times, October 29).
A guilty conscience from knowing your own complicity in a genocide is a terrible thing; it pushes the criminal — especially the kind, like France, that ceaselessly tries to sell itself as the inventor of human rights — into trying to stuff memory that contradicts its conceited self-regard down the deepest memory hole. Unfortunately for the guilty, this is a fight France has already lost, for "les faits sont vraiment têtus!”
Fighting the memory of its guilt is like a man wrestling with his own evil shadow, the guilty can never win. Especially as those who survived the attempt to fully exterminate Rwanda’s Tutsi remain around to remind France of its guilt, both by just being around, but also by constantly and loudly reminding it of its crime.
Thus France’s hatred of today’s Rwanda, especially its leader who foiled the complete achievement of their plan, with the consequence that Paris can now never be allowed to forget as the case would be had there been no survivor of their joint crime with the Bagosoras of this world.
One almost feels pity for them.
Mwene Kalinda