Hotel Rwanda

After our lecture on Tuesday when Dr. Coyne recommended Hotel Rwanda, I went home and watched this movie. I read a book once when I was younger a true story about the Rwandan genocide and it was so heart-wrenching to read a true story of what a survivor who had to experience such trauma, but at the same time it was so engaging. My experience watching Hotel Rwanda had a similar effect on me. I just could hardly even understand how a society could get to a point where they honestly thought they needed to kill off a group of people like the Hutus did to the Tutsis, killing around 800,000 men, women and children total. Like Dr. Coyne talked about in class, media did play a role in the genocide.

I wanted to learn more about this role that media had, and so I googled it and found the below link that explains more about the potential role the radio(RTLM), newspaper, etc. propaganda, "played in both inciting and prolonging the violence"(The Conversation US, Inc). One interesting fact from this article is that those who had killed in this genocide attributed killing more to the fear of the victims and the conversations they had than they did to the radio... 

Thinking about the movie and if I were a Tutsi or a righteous Hutu trying to save my Tutsi friends, I can not imagine the fear that I would feel if I had turned on the radio inside the hotel to only hear evil people encouraging the genocide. 

http://theconversation.com/debate-continues-about-the-medias-role-in-driving-rwandas-genocide-114512