"In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something deeper---namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I'm right about my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Thomas Nagel, "The Last Word"

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

-----C.S. Lewis, "God in the Dock"

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.


-----T.S. Eliot, "Gerontion" lines 33-47

"Philosophical questions can and should give way and be subsumed to human questions, for in the end we are a society of people and not of ideas, a fragile web of interdependent humans, not of stances."

-----Pumla Gobodo-Madikezela, "A Human Being Died That Night"

"I have read all of Chekhov now. He is so great, and his letters and his life and what people remember of him is greater. Yet it is consoling that if he did not know all about cruelty, gluttony, cowardice, coldness in himself, he could not have written about them. Great men feel and know everything that mean men feel, even more clearly, but they seem to have made some kind of an ascension, and these evil feelings, though they still understand them sympathetically, no longer exert any power over them."


-----Brenda Ueland, "If You Want to Write"

on loving one's neighbor. . .

"---to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not."

-----Mere Christianity

"I had a friend, who died. She thought she could control everything. See? The story creeps up whether we want it to or not."

-----Madeleine L'Engle, as quoted in an interview in the New Yorker, April 12, 2004

Remember the Blood Frenzy of Rwanda


Genocide prevention must become a foreign policy priority to avoid a repetition of those hideous crimes.
By Samantha Power
Samantha Power is the author of "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction

April 4, 2004

BOSTON — When Hutu began murdering Tutsi in Rwanda 10 years ago this week, many Rwandans had to decide whether to desert their loved ones. At a church in the town of Kibuye, two Hutu sisters, each married to a Tutsi man, faced such a choice. One of the women decided to die with her husband. The other, hoping to save her 11 children, chose to leave. Because her husband was Tutsi, her children had been categorized as Tutsi and thus were technically forbidden to live. But the machete-wielding Hutu attackers had assured the woman that the children would be permitted to depart safely if she joined them.

When the woman stepped outside the church, however, the assailants butchered eight of her 11 children as she watched in horror. The youngest, a 3-year-old boy who saw his brothers and sisters slain, pleaded for his life. "Please don't kill me," he said. "I'll never be Tutsi again." The killers, unmoved, struck him down.

In three short, cruel months, between April and July 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide more efficient than that carried out by the Nazis in World War II. The killers were a varied bunch: drunk extremists chanting "Hutu power, Hutu power"; uniformed soldiers and militia men intent on wiping out the Tutsi inyenzi, or "cockroaches"; ordinary villagers who had never themselves contemplated killing before but who decided to join the frenzy.

The murderers, and their ebullient abettors, were turned into ghastly marionettes, consumed by a manic wrath. Men and women, young and old, religious and agnostic, became killers. They killed with machetes in one hand and radios broadcasting instructions in the other. They killed in churches, at traffic lights, in supermarkets and in homes. They killed after taunting, after savagely beating and, often, after raping.

The Clinton administration's response was best captured by a State Department press conference two days into the slaughter. Prudence Bushnell, the midlevel official who had been put in charge of managing the evacuation of Americans — and only Americans — from Rwanda, spoke with journalists about the Rwandan horrors. After she left the podium, State Department spokesman Michael McCurry took her place and seamlessly turned to the next item on the day's agenda: U.S. criticism of foreign governments that were preventing the screening of the Steven Spielberg film "Schindler's List."

"This film movingly portrays the 20th century's most horrible catastrophe," McCurry said. "And it shows that even in the midst of genocide, one individual can make a difference." McCurry urged that the film be shown worldwide.

"The most effective way to avoid the recurrence of genocidal tragedy," he declared, "is to ensure that past acts of genocide are never forgotten."

No one made any connection between Bushnell's remarks and McCurry's, between Rwanda and the Holocaust. Neither journalists nor officials in the United States were focused then — or in the ensuing three months — on the fate of Rwanda's Tutsis.

By July 1994, when Tutsi rebels took control of the country, the killers had accomplished much of what they set out to achieve. At least 800,000 people — half of the Tutsis who had lived in Rwanda three months earlier — had been eliminated.

The Rwandan genocide revealed, more than any other event in the 20th century, the shallowness of the pledge of "never again." Again, a dozen key plotters managed to organize a society around mass murder. Again, an inconvenient minority found itself targeted for extermination. And again, the world watched.

Indeed, the U.S. and its allies on the U.N. Security Council didn't simply watch. They voted to withdraw the U.N. peacekeepers who were in Rwanda, abandoning Rwandans who had relied upon the blue helmets for their protection.

While it was once possible to view the world's neglect of Europe's Jewry as a monstrous aberration, the Rwanda genocide shows how three patterns persist: The U.S. and other states ignore the warning signs that would enable them to act early. When the killing starts, "mere genocide" doesn't command high-level attention or resources. And domestically, U.S. leaders do not fear they will pay a political price for being bystanders to genocide.

Genocide comes with ample early warning, as would-be perpetrators are careful to test the waters before plunging in. In the months preceding their slaughter, the Rwandan killers staged a number of mini-massacres in order to gauge international reaction. By January 1994, Rwanda had become so militarized — and imported machetes had become so omnipresent — that the U.N. commander in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, urgently cabled Kofi Annan, the U.N. head of peacekeeping, in New York. Dallaire warned that militia members could exterminate "up to 1,000 [Tutsis] in 20 minutes."

Dallaire sent his cable three months after 18 U.S. soldiers had been killed in a Somalia firefight. Annan, believing that the United States and its allies were unwilling to confront the militants, opted not to cross what became known as "the Mogadishu line." He buried what has become known as the "genocide fax," and the militia members took their cue.

Annan was wrong not to sound an alarm, but he accurately predicted the U.S. attitude: Stopping Rwanda's massacres was not seen as in the U.S. national interest. The foreign policy of the United States is devoted to advancing a narrow national interest, which has long been defined in terms of economic and security gains for American citizens. Genocide rarely affects such interests, so no matter how many men, women and children are killed, the occurrence of genocide rarely rises within the bureaucracy to command the attention of influential U.S. policymakers. Focusing foreign policy attention on acts of genocide would require presidential leadership, which has rarely been forthcoming.

More shocking than the U.S. avoidance of military intervention in Rwanda was the fact that President Clinton never even convened his Cabinet to discuss what might be done about the murder of nearly a million human beings. The response was low-level, and neither Bushnell nor the other career bureaucrats nor Africa specialists had the clout needed to move the machinery of a risk-averse system in time to save lives. Thus, the U.S. not only failed to intervene, it also failed to even denounce the "genocide," or to use its technology to jam the "hate radio," or to rally additional U.N. troops from other countries, or to freeze the financial assets of the killers. The Rwandan killers went utterly unchallenged.

It's easy and right to hold Clinton accountable for American by- standing, but his administration's inaction was affirmed by societywide silence. While U.S. officials dithered, the rest of us failed to generate the "noise" that would have gotten their attention. Editorial writers at the major newspapers who pushed for intervention in Bosnia made no such appeals on behalf of the Rwandans.

The Congressional Black Caucus was consumed with the refugee crisis in Haiti. And we voters never picked up our telephones, so the congressional and White House switchboards didn't ring.

Then-Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) described the relative silence in her district. "There are some groups terribly concerned about the gorillas," she said, noting that Colorado was home to a research group that studied Rwanda's imperiled gorilla population. "But — it sounds terrible — people just don't know what can be done about the people."

The Clinton administration didn't help inform Americans — indeed it distorted the facts, deliberately avoiding use of the word "genocide" — and then it invoked the public and congressional indifference as yet one more alibi for its inaction.

On this historic 10-year anniversary, we must try not to allow 800,000 to become a faceless statistic. Each Rwandan lived a precious life and died a horrible death. And if we are serious about learning the "lessons of Rwanda," we must do more than remember and regret; we must press our leaders to make genocide prevention and suppression the foreign policy priority it has never been. Otherwise, when we pledge "never again Rwanda," what we will really be saying is "never again will Rwandan Hutus kill 800,000 Tutsis between April and July, 1994."

___________ Samantha Power is the author of "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and a lecturer in human rights policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

"Depart from evil, and do good; Seek peace, and pursue it."


-----Psalm 34:14 (KJV)

do you see the way that tree bends?
does it inspire?
leaning out to catch the sun's rays
a lesson to be applied
are you getting something out of this all encompassing trip?

you can spend your time alone, redigesting past regrets, oh
or you can come to terms and realize
you're the only one who can't forgive yourself, oh
makes much more sense to live in the present tense
have you ideas on how this life ends?
checked your hands and studied the lines
have you the belief that the road ahead ascends off into the light?

seems that needlessly it's getting harder
to find an approach and a way to live
are we getting something out of this all-encompassing trip?

you can spend your time alone redigesting past regrets, oh
or you can come to terms and realize
you're the only one who cannot forgive yourself, oh
makes much more sense to live in the present tense


-----Pearl Jam, "Present Tense"

I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him. And so, as I warned you , we are driven on to something more inward---driven on from social matters to religious matters. For the longest way round is the shortest way home."

-----C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"

"This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of Orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as Orthodoxy. It was sanity, and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist, as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christentdom---that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the hevaenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect."

-----G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy" (pp. 305-306)

"We have a foreign policy based on our amoral economic interests run by amateurs who want to stand for something---hence the agony---but ultimately don't want to exercise any leadership that has a cost.
They say there may be as many as a million massacred in Rwanda. The militias continue to slay the innocent and the educated. . . . Has it really cost the United States nothing?"

-----Anonymous Clinton Administration Cabinent member's journal entry. As quoted from Samantha Power's book "A Problem from Hell"

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!/ The world forgetting, by the world forgot./ Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!/ Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.


-----Alexander Pope, "Eloisa and Abelard"

Finally I don't mind
Worthless tries at finding something else
Best not talk too loud
You're not as smart as you require of them
Your body breaks
Your needs consume you forever
And with this lies the need
To be here together
Funny thing with blood
You try to stand but neither leg's awake
Just this side of love
Is where you'll find the confidence not to continue

-----Built To Spill, "Else"

"Why don't you just scrap this God business, says one of my bitter suffering friends. It's a rotten world, you and I have been shafted, and that's that.

I'm pinned down. When I survey this gigantic intricate world, I cannot believe that it just came about. I do not mean that I have some good arguments for its being made and that I believe in the arguments. I mean that this conviction wells up irresistibly within me when I contemplate the world. The experiment of trying to abolish it does not work. When looking at the heavens, I cannot manage to believe that they do not declare the glory of God.

When looking at the earth, I cannot bring off the attempt to believe that it does not display his handiwork. And when I read the New Testament and look into the material surrounding it, I am convinced that the man Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead. In that, I see the sign that he was more than a prophet. He was the Son of God.

Faith is a footbridge that you don't know will hold you up over the chasm until you're forced to walk out onto it. I'm standing there now, over the chasm. I inspect the bridge. Am I deluded in believing that in God the question shouted out by the wounds of the world has its answer? Am I deluded in believing that someday I will know the answer? Am I deluded in believing that once I know the answer, I will see that love has conquered?

I cannot dispel the sense of conducting my inspection in the presence of the Creating/Resurrecting One."


-----Nicholas Wolterstorff, from "Lament for a Son" (professor at Yale Divinity School)

Quotations from Deidrich Bonhoeffer:

"Cheap grace is grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ. Costly grace is the gospel. It costs people their lives. It cost the life of God's son, and nothing can be cheap to us which is costly to God." ----Discipleship, 1935

"Christ is really present only in the community. The Church is the presence of Christ, just as Christ is the presence of God. But our church today is bourgeois. The best proof is that the poor working classes have turned away from the church, whereas the bourgeois--the petty officials, the artisans and the merchants--have remained. When the community is split, is Christ himself divided?" -----"Sanctorum Communio", 1927

"The church is the church only when it exists for others. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not by dominating but by helping and serving." ----Outline for a book, 1944

"We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled, in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. Mere waiting and looking is not Christian behavior. Christians are called to compassion and action." ----"After Ten Years: A letter to family and conspirators", 1942

"I discovered later, and am still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes, failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own suffering but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith." ----"Letter to Eberhard Bethge", 1944

"Who am I? I have been told that i suffer the days of misfortune with serenity, smiles and pride, as someone accustomed to victory. Am I really what others say about me? Or am I only what I know of myself?...Bedeviled by anxiety, awaiting great events that might never occur, fearfully powerless and worried for friends far away, weary and empty in prayer, in thinking, in doing, weak and ready to take leave of it all. Who am I? They mock me these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, you know me, Oh God, you know I am yours." ----"Who Am I?", 1944

two quotations I heard recently. These are from memory and thus probably not verbatim:

"With the first religious question, sin entered the world." -----Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Non-participation in evil is as much a moral obligation as participation in good." -----Mahatma Ghandi

If I had read this passage earlier on in my life, it would have saved me a great deal of grief and struggle, or at least put me on the road to overcoming my wrongheaded religious tendencies.

You cannot be a Christian until you understand this passage at the core of your being. I was nothing more than a Pharisee for 20 something years of my life, and still am at times, but I'm learning to live in God's love and grace and thus to Love the things He loves, or another way of saying it, to follow Him.

"The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep them: the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs a clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep the law---a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty."

-----George MacDonald, "The Way" Unspoken Sermons Volume II

I had seven faces thought i knew which one to wear
I'm sick of spending these lonely nights training myself not to care
the subway is a porno pavements they are a mess
i know you've supported me for a long time
somehow i'm not impressed

New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)

subway she is a porno and the pavements they are a mess
i know you've supported me for a long time
somehow i'm not impressed

It's up to me now turn on the bright lights
It's up to me now turn on the bright lights

New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)

It's up to me now turn on the bright lights
(got to be some more change in my life)
oh, It's up to me now turn on the bright lights
(got to be some more change in my life)


-----Interpol, "NYC"