The places that scare you / Pema Chodron

[Arcadia]

The best book about warriors I read until now.

[Arcadia]

(I'm re/reading it)

[stilltrucking]

If I read anything more about warriors I hope it will be Shake Hands With The Devil The book knip was posting about.

But I doubt if I will read anymore books about war. I pick them up once in a while read a few pages and then put them down. Achilles In Viet Nam.

[stilltrucking]

I was a fraid to find out what it was about Arcadia. No place scares me more than Rwanda.

I would like to read it too.. She sounds like my kind of warrior.

[Artguy]

We have that in our library at the Shambhala Centre where I practice, I must pick it up....I have seen a couple of her videos, she really is quite remarkable.......

[Arcadia]

st: Rwanda?? Have you some reasons for that or it's just that way??(optional answer).

artguy: great!.

[stilltrucking]

I suppose Rwanda is my favorite Holocaust. So very human. Such glorious stone age violence. So many killed with shovels, pick axes, machettes, baseball bats. It was such a quaint low tech genocide. And nobody cared.

When one looks back at Rwanda or now at the Congo – still on and still the terrible pestilence and destruction of human life – our enormous concentration on Iraq, we want to ponder that question: are all humans human, or are some more human than others?

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
Lt. Gen. Roméo A. Dallaire

In January 1994, General Dallaire sent out the alarm with credible information of an impending catastrophe. The United Nations and the membership of the Security Council failed General Dallaire, it failed the people of Rwanda, and it failed humanity. “Never again” was what we had all said. General Dallaire told us that “never again” was happening again, and the Security Council played word games with the Genocide Treaty. It was one of the darker moments of history.

http://www.cceia.org/viewMedia.php/prmID/848

Amid escalating violence, Dallaire faced a nearly impossible situation. The United Nations repeatedly refused to send him reinforcements, and his force shrunk from 2,600 soldiers to 800 as nations withdrew their troops in the first days of the slaughter. Dallaire and his remaining forces stayed, trying to save as many people as they could while the killing continued, witnessing acts so inhuman that the general later suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Almost fifty years to the day that my father and father-in-law helped to liberate Europe -- when the extermination camps were uncovered and when, in one voice, humanity said, ‘Never again,’ -- we once again sat back and permitted this unspeakable horror to occur,” Dallaire writes in the introduction to his recent book Shake Hands With the Devil, in which he chronicles the brutality he witnessed as the world simply stood by.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005 ... laire.html

Rwanda scares me, like looking into a mirror or into my own heart.

[Arcadia]

I have to say that I'm totally ignorant about Rwanda except for something like gorillas in the mist...

[stilltrucking]

Nobody cares about Africa
Eight hundred thousand people killed in 100 days (some estimates range as high a million people)
But they were all niggers, so no big deal
Much more important to look after the white folks in Bosnia.



I watched Pema Chodron the other day on tv
I liked the bit that just before she dies she expects a little plaque will pop up saying "everything you believed was wrong." I know that feeling well.