推 hera3388:嗯嗯 是啊 我也是這麼覺得 06/01 23:46
推 Wolfen:有道理 ′_>` 06/01 23:50
→ Doraemi:只有我覺得好難懂嗎 06/02 00:26
The movie Hotel Rwanda (2004) depicts the Rwandan Genocide during the
spring of 1994. Started with an escalating conflict between Hutu and Tutsi
peoples, the storyline follows Paul, a Hutu manager of a high class hotel,
who tried to save Tutsi refugees and his family by utilizing his friendship
with influential Western businessmen and diplomats in vain and therefore
underwent anomie when he found that“swallowing up Western culture”is not
going to make him a westerner. However, by bribing Rwandan Army officers and
heads of anti-Tutsi militia, Paul and the Tutsi refugees did reach safety
behind Tutsi rebel lines under the protection of a UN convoy at the end of
the movie.
Based on a true story, the movie raised some real-life moral questions to
audiences.“I think that when people turn on their TVs and see this footage,
they'll say,‘Oh my God, that's horrible,’and then they'll go back to
eating their dinners,”said one photographer in the film. Indeed, we had
seen careless performance of UN peacekeepers and indifferent attitude of
Western businessmen throughout the movie, over and over again. There may be
both superficial and substantial reasons for the international community to
refuse to intervene. The superficial one, as the US spokeswoman said in the
movie, was that“the acts of genocide in Rwanda were not sufficient to be
consistent with the US formulation of genocide.”However, the real reason
might be a too realistic one: the intervention had nothing to do with their
national interests.
Jared Diamond, the author of The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future
of the Human Animal, asserts that it is human nature to have massacres, and
it is also human nature to become indifferent with those things. So many
massacres all over the world, including those happened in Bengal, Brazil,
Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia, Lebanon, Paraguay, and
Rwanda, to name just a few, had never attracted international attention. Few
notorious massacres, like the Nazi Holocaust or the Armenian Holocaust, were
actually outliers which need to be explained. The explanation made by the
author is that the victims of the Nazi and Armenian Holocausts were white,
the murderers were against US, and there are some very influential survivors.
If it is not the case, to be indifferent with tragedies like this is a
disappointingly normal reaction.
Aside from the general reason for massacres discussed above, the reason for
the Rwandan Genocide certainly needs to be explained contextually. According
to the film, the Belgian colonists had recruited Tutsi people as collaborators
during the colonial time, while Hutu people remained peasants exploited by
colonists and Tutsi people. If it is the case, the Ethnic nationalism among
these two peoples was actually an artificial construction, rather than a
primordial development.
A view of Nationalism studies asserts that it is the state which creates
the nation and nationalism, but a nation and nationalism never create a
state. From this point of view, the rise of nationalism always comes after
industrialization and modernization. Modern states are thus able to utilize
modern technologies and infrastructures, such as mass media or educational
systems, to ignite ideologies serving interests of the state.
It seems that the progress of technology is to blame. However, as Jared
Diamond asserts, free flow of information in modern societies may decrease
the cost of understanding other kinds of people, and increase the cost of
demonizing them; together makes ethnic extremist ideologies more and more
unreasonable. So, it seems that our hopes for solution rest on communications
among peoples. As far as I am concerned, this movie has done a great job on
this.
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