The Politics of Denialism: The Strange Case of Rwanda
Gerald Caplan

Issue 9, Winter 2012

Excerpts from a review of Edward S. Herman and David Peterson’s, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2010.

The 1994 genocide of the Rwandan Tutsi never happened. This is the unfounded and disturbing allegation at the heart of a new book by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson. Instead the authors claim that that it was part of an elaborate US conspiracy to “gain a strong military presence in Central Africa, a diminution of its European rivals' influence, proxy armies to serve its interests, and access to the raw material-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

Why they want to create such gratuitous hurt for the survivors of the genocide in Rwanda is impossible to fathom, but their egregious views relegate them squarely to the lunatic fringe.

Edward Herman is a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and David Peterson is described as a Chicago-based journalist and researcher. Those who have read Herman's work, some of it in collaboration with Noam Chomsky, will only partly know what to expect from his latest book. Herman and Peterson argue that in a world controlled by the American empire and its media and intellectual lackeys, genocide has become a political construct largely manipulated by Washington and its allies. The claim of genocide becomes an excuse for so-called humanitarian intervention that disguises malevolent imperial motives: "The Western establishment rushed to proclaim 'genocide' in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Darfur…In contrast, its silence over the crimes committed by its own regimes against the peoples of Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa is deafening. This is the 'politics of genocide'".

in order to blame the US empire for every ill on earth, Herman and Peterson, two dedicated anti-imperialists, have sunk to the level of genocide deniers. And the ‘evidence’ they adduce to back up their delusional tale rests solidly on a foundation of other deniers, statements by genocidaires, fabrications, distortions, innuendo and gross ignorance. In this Grimm fairy tale, everyone who contradicts their fantasies is an American/RPF pawn – Paul Kagame, human rights investigator Alison des Forges, the head of the UN military mission in Rwanda during the genocide General Romeo Dallaire, and entire human rights organisations.

The main authorities on whom the authors rest their fabrications are a tiny number of long-time American and Canadian genocide deniers, who gleefully drink each other's putrid bath water. Each solemnly cites the others' works to document his fabrications – Robin Philpot, Christopher Black, Christian Davenport, Allan Stam, Peter Erlinder. It's as if a Holocaust denier cited as supporting evidence the testimonies of David Irving, David Duke, Robert Faurisson or Ernest Zundel. Be confident Herman and Peterson are now being quoted as authoritative sources on the genocide by Robin Philpot, Christopher Black, Davenport and Stam, Peter Erlinder.

Nor is a single mention made of the testimonies of the few outsiders who remained in Rwanda through all or much of the 100 days:

    Romeo Dallaire (UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda–UNAMIR)

    James Orbinski (Medici'ns Sans Frontie're`s)

    Phillippe Gaillard (International Committee of the Red Cross)

    Carl Wilkens (Adventist Development and Relief Agency International)

    Henry Anyidoho (UNAMIR)

As it happens, I know all of the above and none has the slightest doubt, having lived through it, that a genocide organised against the Tutsi took place. Three of them – Dallaire, Orbinski and Anyidoho – have written about their experiences. Of course, some of Herman and Peterson's most treasured sources like Robin Philpot insist that General Dallaire was also a US puppet. So we can obviously ignore Dallaire's views completely.

As for Alison Des Forges, until her untimely death perhaps the most prominent scholar and activist on the Rwanda file, she is dismissed as following: [Prior to 1993], des Forges had worked for the US Department of State and National Security Council. "Nothing more is said to disqualify des Forges, so we must conclude that simply working for these bodies demonstrates the unreliability of her views on the genocide. That her MA and Ph.D. theses were on Rwandan history, that she knew the country for 30 years before the genocide, that she was among a tiny number of outsiders who spoke Kinyarwanda, that she spent five years after 1994 researching the crisis, that her ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’ is a highly-respected encyclopaedic history of the genocide – all this is irrelevant to Herman and Peterson. In their obsessive anti-Americanism, they blithely smear des Forges entire life: "Alison Des Forge's career is best understood in terms of the services she performed on behalf of US power-projection in Central Africa, with this policy-oriented work couched in the rhetoric of 'human rights'. In the process, Des Forges badly misinformed a whole generation of scholars, activists, and the cause of peace and justice."

The work of the 1993 International Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Abuses in Rwanda is similarly dismissed. The Inquiry brought together four well-known human rights organisations whose investigation led them to conclude that the Habyarimana government was deliberately targeting Tutsi for massacre, that extremists anti-Tutsi rhetoric was growing and that anti-Tutsi militia were being formed. Yet none of this needs to be taken seriously. Why? Because the Commission was little more than an RPF front, ‘either directly funded by the RPF or infiltrated by it’. The sole source for this very serious accusation – made by no others of whom I'm aware – is Robin Philpot, Canada's preeminent denier of the genocide.

Edward Herman and David Peterson have written a very short book that's not nearly short enough. It should never have seen the light of day. It brings shame to its two American authors, its publisher Monthly Review, and all those who have provided enthusiastic jacket blurbs, many of them prominent in progressive circles – Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Norman Solomon, David Barsamian. If this is what Anglo-American Marxism, or socialism, or anti-imperialism has degenerated into, we can hang our heads in shame for the future of the left.

Why the deniers are so determined, so passionate, so intransigent, so absolutely certain, so satisfied to remain part of a tiny minority of cranks, is completely unknown to me. Why they want to create such gratuitous, almost sadistic hurt for the survivors of the genocide in Rwanda is impossible to fathom. But in the end, it's irrelevant what furies drive their obsessions. It's their egregious views – not their motives – that matter. And their views relegate them squarely to the lunatic fringe.

Excerpted from Comments on the Article
Herman and Peterson have been engaged almost full-time in the most savage genocide-denial over the events in the Balkans in the 1990s for years. Their crowning "achievement" to date was their work of perfidy called "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre," where Herman and sidekick go out of their way to reference whatever ultra-rightist creep they can find, alongside some spurious "research" that would bore an amoeba, to claim that this extremely well-documented massacre of over 8000 defenceless Bosnian Muslims by the Bosnian Serb Chetnik army in July 1995 - termed even by the lame International Court of Justice a genocide - never really happened.

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I feel vindicated that people like Herman, Peterson and Black are also deniers of the Rwandan genocide, because it may help some still confused over Balkan events to understand where the Balkan genocide deniers are coming from, they are made of the same cloth, when they are not the same people, as those who deny much bigger genocides. I would hope that people read Herman and Peterson on the Balkans (that is, if they must read their trash at all) with this fact in mind. I am also very pleased that such a useful deconstruction has been done of their garbage on Rwanda.

Source: This article is excerpted with permission of the author from a much longer article: Caplan, Gerald (2010). The politics of denialism: The strange case of Rwanda. Reviewed by Pambazuka News: Pan-African Voices for Freedom and Justice, June 17, Issue 486. http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/65265

The author, Gerald Caplan, has added at GPN's request, a biographical note and photo.

Gerald Caplan has an MA in Canadian history and a Ph.D. in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He is an author, teacher, media commentator, columnist and social and political activist with a lifelong commitment to African development. He recently published The Betrayal of Africa.

He has spent much of the past dozen years immersed in writing and speaking about the Rwanda genocide and other genocides. He returns to Rwanda annually, frequently to speak at the conferences commemorating either the start or the end of the genocide. He was the author of the report Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide (2000) issued by the International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the genocide. He has also lectured widely and written about Darfur, genocide denial, post-conflict justice, Hotel Rwanda, the international community and genocide, and the lessons (not) learned from Rwanda, among other topics.

Tags: Denial of genocide | Rwandan genocide

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The Politics of Denialism: The Strange Case of RwandaGerald Caplan

The Politics of Denialism: The Strange Case of Rwanda
Gerald Caplan