Machete Season Sparknotes

In Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season, he interviewed perpetrators from the Rwandan genocide, where the Hutus tried to exterminate the Tutsis. The Tutsis were the minority and had always been higher in social class compared to the Hutus. The Hutus were not fond of this. The Rwandan genocide was one of the most unorganized genocides where instead of designated killing squads like the Einsatzgruppen in the holocaust, it was all of the Tutsi’s neighbors that were coming to kill them. Although, every mass killing needs some form of infrastructure. No two perpetrators in the genocide had felt the same about what they had done. They all had mixed emotions and different feelings about the acts that they committed. Some felt like cowards for not murdering enough Tutsis that day, while others felt cowardly for being forced to kill. Some were afraid to be killed …show more content…
They were more afraid of authorities than they were to kill. For example, Ignace, one of the men interviewed in the book, had always felt hatred toward the Tutsis and jumped at the idea of killing them, while Pancrace, another perpetrator, said that he had to obey the orders from the authorities. But, what motivated these men to commit these acts against humanity in the first place? There was a revolution in 1959 where the Hutus overthrew the Tutsis, which caused the Tutsis to become known as parasites instead of the elite. There had sprung a hatred for the Tutsis that spread from generation to generation. The genocide began during a time of war, and “War is a dreadful disorder in which the culprits of genocide can plan incognito” (Hatzfeld 55). When the president Habyarimana’s plane was shot down it was the final nudge for the beginning of all the chaos. The Tutsis were blamed even though they did not have the weapons