Rwanda and the Holocaust

the result of another late-nighter...

In order to understand and compare tribal controversies in Rwanda and the Nazi Holocaust, it is necessary that we review the history and actual events of these conflicts.
What is commonly referred to as the Rwandan Genocide was the result of civil war in Rwanda, one of the smallest countries in the world, located in central Africa. This event was essentially brought on by the pressure of human inequality. The Hutus and the Tutsis were the two primary ethnic groups in Rwanda. The Tutsis, although the significantly smaller group, tended to dominate the middle and upper classes, and the Hutus, about seventy percent of the population, were mostly peasants.
However, in 1962, Rwanda gained independence from Belgium, and shortly thereafter the underprivileged Hutus took up arms and revolted as a majority against the Tutsis, forcing over 200,000 to flee to nearby countries. But the Tutsis, determined to regain at least some of their power, formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with intent of reentering Rwanda.
In 1990, the RPF invaded Rwanda and forced the president, Juvenal Habyalimana, to sign legislature that would ensure a balance of power between the Hutus and the Tutsis.
This was not taken too well by the Hutus, for they had no desire to share their power. Three years later, in nearby Burundi, the first popularly elected Hutu president was murdered. Tension began to take dramatic steps upward. In April of 1994, numerous peace meetings were held between the new Burundi President, Cyprien Ntaryamira, and Habyalimana, Rwanda’s President. An anonymous ground assault was made upon the flight that was to take them both home after one of these meetings, killing both the Presidents. Hutus broke out in uncontrolled wrath and commenced the onslaught against virtually all Tutsis. This massacre lasted one hundred days, and in the final analysis more than 800,000 Tutsis died.
Hitler rose to power in Germany in January of 1933. During this rise, he condemned the Jews. He declared that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s loss in World War I. He also believed the Germans were the superior race. He said the best form of human was the light skinned German with blonde hair and blue eyes. In the midst of this he said that the Jews were quite the opposite, and their presence would only prevent the Germans from obtaining the racial supremacy that was rightfully theirs.
Roughly one percent of Germany’s population of fifty-five million was Jewish at the time, and the German Jews professed a relationship with the Jews only on the basis of religion. But they were slowly and surely suppressed. The Nuremburg Laws of 1935 stripped from them their German citizenship and allowed them to marry only Jews. Other cultural suppressants were enforced, leaving the Jews essentially disempowered.
The Holocaust actually began on November 9th, 1938, when a seventeen year old boy shot and killed a German embassy officer in revenge for the cruel punishment his Jewish parents had received from the Nazis. This event, titled the Night of Broken Glass, commenced Hitler’s large scale ambition to exterminate the Jewish race from Europe. In the summer of 1942, Hitler ordered “The final solution of the Jewish question,” and from that point on, Jews were mercilessly killed by the thousands. The Nazis had concentration camps all over the country to “store” their Jewish prisoners, often shooting them or gassing them to death in massive numbers. Shortly after the Furher’s orders had been given, nearly two million Jews were transported to camps in Poland to be gassed. The Nazis often lied to their prisoners, sometimes telling them that their clothes were being sanitized when they were being stripped naked, only to march them into life-ending gas chambers. On July 30, 1942, The New York Times by way of the London Daily Telegraph reported that one million Jews had been slaughtered. This leaked information gave anti-Germany countries like the United States incentives to take action against this mass manslaughter and put an end to it. In January of 1944, U. S. President Franklin Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, in an attempt to help other countries in the saving of Jews. The WRB, with the aid of determined individuals from allied countries, was able to save 200,000 Jews from being sent to their deaths.
There were a few incidents when Jewish prisoners banded together to attempt resistances against their adversaries. The most remarkable of these efforts was when seven hundred and fifty Jews armed with smuggled weapons overtook two thousand Nazis, and forced them to flee.
By 1944, the war tide had turned on the Germans, but still Hitler surged on until his last breath. Eventually the Allied forces overtook Germany and Hitler. Seeing that he was surrounded, he committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in Berlin. But Hitler had not failed in his warped attempt to “settle the Jewish question.” By this time, over four million Jews had been gassed and two million shot, exterminating almost all of Europe’s Jews.
These two catastrophes are similar in some ways, yet contrast sharply in others. They were each attempts to expire a human race – the Tutsis in Rwanda and the Jews in Europe. However, Rwanda was an underdog effort to dethrone an overbearing power, whereas in the Holocaust the powerful oppressed the weak to further promote their own power. The Hutus in Rwanda essentially created a rebellion that answered a natural call to defense, but they went to unnecessary and horrific extremes in their aggression. On the other hand, Hitler had other motives than just to annihilate a race he hated. He believed that the issue of race fit into Darwin’s well-known concept of “survival of the fittest.” Hitler thought he was improving the human gene pool by ridding it of weak links when he killed six million Jews all in an effort to make way for the superior Germans to rise in their human ascendancy.