Learning from the Past

After watching Hotel Rwanda, two things really stuck with me. One was the voice of the U.S. State Department official and her dismissal of a reporter’s questions regarding the events in Rwanda. Secondly, despite learning about the Rwandan Genocide prior to the movie, I had keep reminding myself that everything in the movie happened. In Hannah Arendt’s “Total Domination,” she references Hitler’s “Big Lie,” and applies it to the concentration camps, meaning that if a crime is extremely vicious, people will not believe it. In our class discussions, we have talked about why the Jews submitted to the Nazis without really fighting. When looking at Arendt’s points, it appears that atrocities committed at the camps, may have been too incredulous for the Jews to believe. Even in the concentration camps, the Nazis continued to employ the principle of the “Big Lie,” and tricked the Jews into thinking everything would be okay. At the end of Maus I, the sign above the entrance to Auschwitz (p.157) reads “Arbeit macht frei,” which translates to “Work makes free,” essentially meaning that the prisoners had a chance to be set free by working. In Maus II, Vladek explores the principle of the “Big Lie,” when describing how the Nazis tricked the prisoners into thinking that they were getting sanitary showers but actually ended going into the gas chambers (p. 70).

From the lies told in Nazi Germany, to watching Hotel Rwanda, where the entire world community abandoned the people of Rwanda, because it seemed unreal, I contend that the world has not learned from the lessons of the Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide. Oftentimes people use the quote:

Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it

Hotel Rwanda, described a story that has been told before, the Holocaust, and is happening again in Darfur. The hotel in the movie, Hotel Des Mille Collines, is actually still in operation and after visiting their web site, the only reference to events that occurred there, is a picture of the pool, described as, “The world famous swimming pool.” If nothing is documented about the past, then we begin to forget it and move on with our lives. Hence the reasoning behind graphic novels such as Maus and movies like Hotel Rwanda; to keep the events described from happening again. While the use of pictures and film to tell hard stories has been criticized as “oversimplification,” the media used in Maus and Hotel Rwanda keep the stories alive and relatable, so we do not stop learning from them.