Genocide and a Summer’s Day

Genocide is such an odd subject for a discussion between friends.

One summer, I stopped in to visit my friend Jane for a lovely afternoon in her charming screened-in Connecticut porch.

We spent the whole afternoon talking about genocide.

That had not been the plan when I arranged to visit, but when I walked into the porch, I stopped beside a stack of books. I knew the titles, books like these:

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

Machete Season: The Killers of Rwanda Speak

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will Be Killed With Our

Genocide Books?

Why are you reading these?” I asked, explaining what I’d thought of each of them.

Jane fell into her porch chair. “You’re the only person I know who would have read all those books.”

I shrugged. “I just couldn’t get my head wrapped around why someone would suddenly decide to kill a neighbor. Books helped me try to find out why.” Click to Tweet

“Did you find out?” she asked.

“No.”

Jane is a professor of education.

She’d been approached by several students and asked if she’d teach a course about genocide. She thought about it and said yes. That summer she was preparing to teach.

“What else do you know about genocide?” she asked as she poured iced tea.

Surprisingly, I knew a great deal.

We discussed it all afternoon.

She even took notes.

A history of genocide

As it happened, I’d been challenged to read a thick book called Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan,  a few months earlier by a man I knew only as

“Random Name,” on World Magazine‘s then-blog.

Another writer and I took up the opportunity to read through this dense history of genocide. I’m not sure how Wendy managed, but I only got half way through.

Who knew a million people living in the Mekong delta of Vietnam in 1000 had spent a summer killing each other?

Not me.

As Kiernan relayed story after story of people deliberately choosing to terminate someone’s life, I felt overwhelmed by man’s inhumanity to man. The fact no one, seemingly, ever got along in the history of the world astonished me.

Nothing seemed to satiated the drive to kill those who had something someone else wanted. Click to Tweet

Here in the Christian end of things, we call that sin.

Sin, of course, always equals death.

Holocaust, Comanches, Khmer Rouge

Jane and I  talked about the Holocaust; Armenia; the extermination of the native Americans in north America by means of smallpox-infested blankets; the Comanches (Empire of the Summer Moon explains quite well the dastardly role of the Texas Rangers in that slaughter) and several areas she had a particular interest in: Darfur, Kosovo, and Cambodia.

(Did you know the first thing the Khmer Rouge did when they took power in Cambodia was to kill everyone who wore glasses?

(They figured if you wore glasses, you could read; and if you could read you could think and therefore would be a threat to them. See the film, The Killing Fields.)

Jane’s area of expertise is children’s literature. She wrote a book providing educators with bibliographies about genocide in children’s books–books intended to help children understand what to make of the world, particularly if they’ve been the victims of terror.

It’s called Genocide in Contemporary Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Cambodia to Darfur (Children’s Literature and Culture) by Dr. Jane M. Gangi.

This is a college text book  Jane wrote for educators trying to make sense of the world.

She used a multi-dimensional approach, and we talked about ways genocide can be reflected in art: paintings, music, sculpture, poetry, film.

Gorecki

I told her the story of Goreki’s Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, written to commemorate the Holocaust–as an example of music used to respond to horror.

I first heard of it through Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey‘s book How Now Should We Then Live.

You can listen to the music here.

I bought the CD on Colson’s recommendation and the first time I listened to it, turned on the stereo and returned to my email.

I was writing away, when my mind wandered to my grandmother, recently deceased, and then my mother. Before I knew it, I put my head down on the computer and sobbed.

Gorecki’s music touched a part of my sorrowing heart I didn’t even know needed lancing.

A constant theme

We live in a time of what feels like unprecedented killing.

But that summer, I remembered murder and death–sin–have been going on since Cain and Able. Click to Tweet

As a Christian, I know of only one way to mitigate the power of sin’s horror to destroy: that’s knowing Jesus Christ died on behalf of all sinners.

It doesn’t take away the grotesque nature of genocide; it merely gives me one way to cope with the knowledge that men and women have always killed others.

Literature can tell us what, but not explain; films can show us how, but not explain; music can help us grieve, but not explain.

I come back to Jesus, always, and remember his words: “weep with those who weep.”

When I left Jane that beautiful afternoon, we hugged each other, thankful for what we shared and for what Jane went on to teach.

Genocide on a summer’s day. Click to Tweet