We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

by Philip Gourevitch

They were being killed for so long that they were already dead.”

That legitimate grievances lie behind a revolution does not, however, ensure that the revolutionary order will be just.

“It will not be a democracy if it is not equally successful in respecting the rights of minorities … . A country in which justice loses this fundamental quality prepares the worst disorders and its own collapse.”

The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual—always an annoyance to totality—ceases to exist.

denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

The aesthetic assault of the macabre creates excitement and emotion, but does the spectacle really serve our understanding of the wrong?

You hold us to a standard that has never existed on this earth.

Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same tiny communities, as one cohesive national society.