Machete Season

“If you want to see what it’s like when things go about as wrong as they can go, read “Machete Season,” which is a short book about the Rwandan genocide that is, if I recall correctly, entirely borne of interviews with some of the main perpetrators of this genocide. So not merely the people who were swinging the machetes, but the people who were running those gangs and enforcing people’s membership therein.They invite you in there and they give you the full tour. It is uncanny that circumstances can come together culturally, neurophysiologically and otherwise so as to produce this kind of behaviour again with a clear conscience. So it is a short book and a very sobering one worth reading, if you can stomach that sort of thing.”