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Herman is mentioned in the article and clearly referred to when the author notes (too gently): "Versions of Rever’s story have been told by others. While all contain convincing evidence against the RPF, some are marred by a tendency to understate the crimes of the Hutu *génocidaires *or overstate the RPF’s crimes." The article is hardly a vindication of Herman's "analysis" as such, since his claims go far beyond just pointing to the role of the RPF. Martin Shaw's review of one of his books is worth quoting at length here: their position on Rwanda is even more outrageous. The Western establishment has “swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside-down” (p 51). The RPF not only killed Hutus, but were the “prime genocidaires” (p 54), their “large-scale killing and ethnic cleansing of Hutus by the RPF long before the April-July 1994 period” (p 53) contributing to a result in which “the majority of victims were likely Hutu and not Tutsi” (quoted with approval, p 58). Indeed, “a number of observers as well as participants in the events of 1994 claim that the great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million” (p 58). When we check the reference for this shocking statement, it turns on no more than a letter from a former RPF military officer and personal communications from a former defence counsel before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda – both participants (n 127, p 132). It does not seem to have occurred to the authors that if “theaters where the killing was greatest correlated with spikes in RPF activity” (p 58), killing could just as easily have been committed by the threatened Rwandan regime (as Scott Straus argues in The Order of Genocide) as by the RPF themselves. But Herman and Peterson do not engage with Straus, or with much at all of the now very considerable literature on Rwanda. Certainly the “established narrative” needs to be questioned, the RPF’s own violence acknowledged, and the ICTR’s inability to deal with the latter (in contrast to the ICTY’s prosecution of perpetrators from many sides, which of course our authors could never credit) criticized. But this is hardly a licence to dismiss the idea of “800,000 or more largely Tutsi deaths” as RPF and Western propaganda, and the authors’ keenness to do so does as much as anything to utterly discredit this study. --from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hy9PJMj4h3PVkRaLsQKjWzfBmDxx0NOSf23ysYPG6hY/edit?hl=en_US&pli=1 There's plenty more material to examine here: http://balkanwitness.glypx.com/herman.htm. None of which requires ignoring the crimes of Kagame. In my opinion, in the response of Herman and others to the Balkans and Rwanda, we see the same fake "anti-imperialism" which substitutes myth-making for examining reality and showing human solidarity that we see today with what you call the "Baathist amen corner". It'd be like saying a report on FSA war crimes vindicated Ben Norton's analysis. -Jason Hicks On Sun, May 27, 2018 at 10:20 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > ***************************************************************** > > So Edward Herman's analysis was correct, even though he is not mentioned > in this article (as you might expect.) > > http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/07/rwanda-mass- > murder-we-dont-talk-about/ > _________________________________________________________ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/opt > ions/marxism/jasonh99%40gmail.com > _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
