Hotel Rwanda

After watching the movie Hotel Rwanda, I was very surprised by how much damage was done in such a short period of time. The massacre only took place over the course of three and a half months. That’s a million deaths in a quarter of a year. I was so shocked that I had never heard of this happening before I saw the movie. If you think about it, the holocaust of WWII was six million people, but that was over many years. What happened in Rwanda also seemed much more conspicuous than what happened in the holocaust. They did not even try to disguise what they were doing. Something that both disasters had in common was they both had some kind of ring leader that made the people want to wipe out an entire race—Hitler for the nazis and the man on the radio for the Hutus. Another connection between the graphic novel Maus and the movie Hotel Rwanda was demonstrated in Maus II. There is a scene where Art is being questioned by some reporters about the publication of Maus I. One reporter asks why Art would even tell the story and asks why he is still trying to make the Germans feel bad about what happened so many years before. If I were Art, I would have responded to that question by saying that the book was not meant to make Germans feel bad for what their relatives did, but rather to inform all people of the events that took place. Like the quote that Matt put up (“Those that do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.”) I think that everyone should know what happened in the Holocaust and how horrible it was so that future generations may be spared from making the same mistake. The same idea goes for the movie Hotel Rwanda.