Genocide denial is the dying gasp of culpability, a contorted masquerade of words designed to strangle truth. It is not merely an act of rejection but a calculated psychosis, where language becomes a weapon wielded by those who fear justice and clarity. In this macabre theater, genocide deniers do not argue—they obfuscate, confuse, and distort, turning truth into a smokescreen. Patrice Rudatinya Mbonyumutwa, a trained and practicing lawyer, is no amateur in this dark art. His February 12, 2018, article in Jambo News, Rwanda: What Crimes Were Committed Against the Hutus and Tutsis?, is a masterclass in linguistic manipulation. With the precision of a legal scalpel and the duplicity of a seasoned juggler, Rudatinya twists historical facts into a Gordian knot of questions, half-truths, and false equivalencies. His aim? To paralyze reason and plunge readers into a fog of confusion. The stouthearted The name Rudatinya carries a weighty promise in Kinyarwanda— “one who is fearless.” It conjures the image of a brave soul, unyielding in the face of danger, a defender of the defenseless. Yet, in the twisted theater of genocide denial, Rudatinya flips the script. Fearless, yes—but in the service of an evil cause. He wields his courage not to protect truth but to assassinate it, slicing it into fragments and burying it beneath layers of lies. Rudatinya, in his audacity, embodies the ethos of the genocide denier. He is a warrior of deceit, unafraid to juggle lies, to defend the indefensible, and to call it justice. Yeah, —one who is unafraid. But what is this courage worth when it’s used to defend the indefensible? Fearless not in the pursuit of justice, but in the slaughter of truth. Fearless not in standing for the innocent, but in shielding the guilty. A lion-hearted advocate of genocidaires, wielding legal jargon like a machete, cutting through facts with chilling precision. He does not just deny the genocide against the Tutsi; he murders its memory. Psychologically, denial strangles its survivors, and buries their pain under a tombstone etched with lies. There is genocidal reasoning—if there are people who killed fellow human beings at the roadblock without remorse, why not kill the truth with the same fearlessness using a keyboard and internet? Logic? Why not slaughter memory and drape oneself in the tattered cloak of victimhood? Rudatinya has taken his name to heart, fearlessly plunging into the abyss of denial with the swagger of one convinced the truth will tremble before him. A lawyer’s contortionist act Rudatinya opens his piece with a flourish of faux neutrality: The crimes that were committed, mainly in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1 October 1990, against Rwandans, Hutus and Tutsis cannot be summed up in a single word or assigned a specific name without the risk of globalizing and falsifying history indefinitely. This is not the voice of impartiality but of evasion. A trained lawyer, Rudatinya knows the power of precise language. Yet here, he rejects clarity in favor of ambiguity, framing specificity as a threat to historical accuracy. He is not clarifying; he is preemptively dismantling the foundation of truth. His legal training shines in the barrage of questions he poses, each more calculated to destabilize than the last: Can we truly assign a single term to encompass all the crimes committed? Was it a genocide, a double genocide, or a civil war? Who were the true victims—the Tutsis, the Hutus, or both? These are not genuine inquiries but rhetorical sleights of hand. Each question is a stratagem, calculated to introduce doubt and derail focus. Rudatinya knows that in the courtroom of public opinion, doubt is a powerful defence. By peppering his article with these questions, he assumes the role of a juggler, tossing contradictory terms into the air and daring the reader to catch any of them. The proper abuse of legal training Rudatinya’s use of language mirrors the tactics of a defense attorney defending the indefensible. Take, for instance, his dissection of the term “moderate Hutus”: This term is incoherent because a genocide...cannot have been committed by the same perpetrator at the same time against both Tutsis and Hutus. Here, he employs a legalistic argument to dismiss historical reality. His logic is as devious as it is flawed. By rejecting the term “moderate Hutus”, he erases the existence of Hutus who resisted the genocide and were targeted for their defiance. This is not an act of clarification but of erasure, a calculated move to sanitize the narrative and absolve the perpetrators. Rudatinya’s coup de grâce comes when he attacks the identity of victims and perpetrators: Few are able to agree on the identity of the perpetrators of these crimes. This is a lawyer’s gambit, shifting the focus from the crimes to the complexity of assigning blame. It is a deliberate effort to muddy the waters, as though the inability to agree on every detail invalidates the central truth of the Genocide Against the Tutsi. A web of contradictions Rudatinya’s article is a stroke of genius of contradiction, a labyrinth designed to exhaust and confuse. He lists a litany of terms, each more convoluted than the last: “Rwandan genocide” “double genocide” “genocide of the Tutsis and moderate Hutus” “counter-genocide” “inter-ethnic massacres” Each term serves a dual purpose: to dilute the specificity of the Genocide Against the Tutsi and to spread the blame as widely as possible. His pièce de résistance is the absurd claim that the genocide could be described as “a war of reclaiming power” or “of occupation”. By framing genocide as a war, Rudatinya trivializes the systematic extermination of the Tutsi, reducing it to a mere political conflict. Rudatinya’s barrage of questions reaches a crescendo when he writes: Was the genocide committed against the Tutsis alone, or were the Hutus also victims? Can we distinguish between the crimes of war and those of genocide? What about the crimes committed in Congo—are they part of the same narrative? These questions are not posed to seek answers but to overwhelm. They are the hallmarks of denialism: relentless, unyielding, and devoid of sincerity. In this rhetorical psychosis, the reader is not invited to think but to drown in a sea of doubt. Countering the lies of the “fearless” Rudatinya. Fearless, yes—but fearlessly wrong. He stands atop the rubble of shattered facts, puffing his chest and head as though denial were a noble crusade. But his courage is an empty shell, a dark parody of bravery that dares to defend murderers by assassinating reality itself. If truth had a pulse, Rudatinya would ensure it is flat-lined, all while grinning in the courtroom of lies he’s so meticulously constructed. Yet, truth is not so easily slain. It survives the sharpest tongues, the boldest lies, and the fearless deniers who march in step with genocide’s shadow. Rudatinya may wield his name like a sword, but it is a weapon dulled by his own moral rot. Fearlessness in the service of falsehood is no virtue—it is cowardice dressed as daring. Let Rudatinya and his ilk strut in their theater of denial, fearless actors in a play of their own making. The truth does not perform for them; it waits, patiently and unbroken, ready to expose the fearless for what they truly are: accomplices to oblivion. Rudatinya. Fearless indeed—but fearless like a fire that consumes everything in its path. He and his ilk walk boldly into the courtroom of history, their weapons sharpened with denial and distortion, their battle cry one of confusion. They fear no truth because truth, to them, is just another victim to be silenced. But courage in the service of lies is not bravery; it is moral cowardice dressed in stolen robes. Rudatinya and his fellow deniers may proudly wield their audacious lies, but history does not bow to the fearless—it bows to the truthful. And truth, though bruised, will outlast even the boldest of its assassins. Let Rudatinya carry his name like a banner into the battlefield of denial. Let him and those like him march with their fearless resolve to distort. The facts, like the memory of the victims, are unyielding. Truth does not fear the fearless. It endures. Truth, however, is not so easily vanquished. The Genocide Against the Tutsi is not a matter of opinion but a documented historical fact. The perpetrators were not faceless abstractions but individuals driven by an ideology of hate, armed with machetes and lists of names. The victims were not amorphous groups but real people, targeted for their identity. Rudatinya’s insistence on framing the genocide as a “double genocide” is a particularly vile tactic. It implies equivalence where there is none, suggesting that the victims and the perpetrators were equally culpable. This is not just a lie—it is an act of violence against memory and justice. In the end, Rudatinya’s article is less an argument and more a confession—a window into the mind of a denialist, where truth is a threat to be neutralized. His legal training, far from being a tool for justice, becomes a weapon of obfuscation, a juggler’s act designed to distract and deceive. But no amount of rhetorical gymnastics can erase the truth. The Genocide Against the Tutsi is a historical reality, etched in the blood of its victims and the testimony of its survivors. Rudatinya’s psychotic dance of denial may obscure, confuse, and distort, but it cannot kill the truth. In the theater of denial, the performers may twist and turn, but the audience knows the final act: truth, standing tall, unyielding, and undeniable. Let Rudatinya juggle his questions, spin his lies, and twist his words—truth will not be silenced.
