Reply #70: On the PBS show "Frontline" about Rwanda, the U.N. General Dallaire used that same word: Evil

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Listen to what he said when he met with the leaders of the Rwandan genocide:

So Bagosora established a couple of these meetings, but the first one was in the Diplomat Hotel that had been partially bombed out, that was used as the extremist headquarters in Kigali. … Bagosora brought me and there were these three guys, three Rwandans, one tall, one medium and one smaller who stood up when I entered. Bagosora introduced them and as I was looking at them and shaking their hands I noticed some blood spots still on them. And all of a sudden they disappeared from being human. All of a sudden something happened that turned them into non-human things.

I was not talking with humans, I literally was talking with evil, personified, maybe in those bodies and in those eyes. But they weren't human. And what was coming out of their mouths wasn't human. They were so proud of now being into discussions with the general from the U.N., and that gave them great personal prestige, and they were this situation that they found themselves in. But everything that was coming out was not words of a human negotiating or discussing, it was evil blurting out their positions and their arguments. I didn't see humans anymore, I was totally overcome by the evil. These three guys just brought it into reality, brought evil into reality and by my religious background, the only way I could qualify that was being the devil. That son of a bitch had come on earth, in that paradise, and literally taken over. And these three guys were the right hand people of Lucifer himself, Bagosora. And I couldn't shake that.

… My instinctive reaction had me starting to pull my pistol, because I was facing evil. I wasn't facing humans I was facing something that had to be destroyed. … It even became a very difficult ethical problem. Do I actually negotiate with the devil to save people? Or do I wipe it out, shoot the bastards right there? I haven't answered that question yet. What if I'd killed them? Objectively their structure was such that if I'd wiped out these three guys the structure would have sustained itself and then I would have put the whole lot of us in guaranteed danger of being wiped out. But for a long time I felt that I wouldn't have been killing humans, I would have been actually destroying the devil.

( read more here...)

After reading this latest MSNBC article, it gives me a very CREEPY feeling where one of the young rape victims says:

"When we got there," Masoro recalls, "they said, 'This is a horrible place where girls and women suffer, and you will suffer also'." They were kept tied to trees except when they were doing domestic chores or being raped. Their mothers were raped in front of the girls. Benga bursts into tears recalling the experience. "Their purpose is simply to ruin people, to rape people," she says. "I don't know why."

I'm starting to wonder if something else is going on there in Central Africa. Could this all be explained away as a cycle of human violence motivated by desperation? Or is the motivation coming from somewhere else, somewhere, dare I say, "evil"?

I don't know, but if there is such a thing as the devil, it seems that he'd feel right at home in Central Africa these last 12 years.