Hotel Rwanda

Steyn Online ^ | 13 Jan 2018 | Mark Steyn

[Rummyfan]

Given the ongoing furor over President Trump's executive order commanding the State Department cartographer to mark the map of the world with "Here be sh***holes", I thought for our Saturday movie date we should have a film about just how bad it can get. Twenty-four years ago, the Rwandan genocide was just about to get under way: In a hundred days, a million people were murdered - with machetes, all very low-tech. Since then, as I noted only the other day, the machete has been introduced to such boring white-bread places as Shelburne, Vermont, and Dundalk, Ireland, and Gothenburg, Sweden, and Kandel, Germany. But back then you had to go to what the President calls the s***hole countries to be on the receiving end of such vibrant diversity.

How compassionate was pre-Trump America to Sh*tholia? There being no hashtags in those days, President Clinton, the Pain-Feeler-in-Chief, had to slough off the victims with a brusque soundbite nixing international intervention: "The UN has to learn how to say no," he declared. And so 20 per cent of the population of Rwanda was slaughtered, a number so huge that the world chose to hold it at a big, woozy, blurry distance. To mark the tenth anniversary, the editors of the Economist asked, 'How many people can name any of the perpetrators?' I'd say it's more basic than that. How many could tell you whether it was the Hutu killing the Tutsi or the Tutsi killing the Hutu? C'mon, take a guess, without looking it up.

[Albion Wilde]

Too bad Don Cheadle is such a moonbat.

I agree; but his depiction of Paul Rusesabagina was incredible and he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for it. The only excuse I can think of for his since-intensified moonbattery is that his loss of the Award for this performance to a much worse moonbat (Jamie Fox for Ray, the biopic about Ray Charles) may have subconsciously inspired him to go further left.