Bill Clinton Excuses Rwandan Human Rights Abuses Because It’s ‘Productive’
In a recent interview with the BBC, former president Bill Clinton made some remarkable statements about what the Arab Spring taught us about politics, why he doesn’t feel guilty over letting the Rwandan massacre continue, and how countries should be allowed to skirt human rights as long as they are productive.
Yeah, seriously!
What have we learned from all these experiments since the Arab Spring? Politics is a lot more than majority rule, it’s minority rights, it’s individual rights, human rights, shared decision making. And so I think we need to help other countries and empower people around the world because it’s the right thing to do.
Should we be more concerned that it took 12 years for Bubba to figure out that politics includes minority rights, individual rights and shared decision-making, or that it was the failed “Arab Spring” that taught him these basic concepts of democracy?
The interviewer asks him directly about one of the biggest stains on his presidency, the lack of intervention in the Rwandan massacre.
Bill Clinton was the most powerful man in the world. There was no intervention from America, or anyone else. Over a million people were slaughtered.
The interviewer asks:
Is it that sense of responsibility, at the time it happened, you were president, that connects, or drives the position that you have. Guilt?
Clinton:
No, not guilt, because whatever guilt I had went away when I took responsibility for not helping ‘em.
Whatever one might think about our non-intervention in Rwanda, it’s telling that Clinton believes merely by apologizing that he’s absolved of guilt. He continued to explain why he carried no guilt by telling a story about a taxi driver who was asked if he blamed Clinton for not intervening. The taxi driver was surprisingly forgiving, at least in Bubba’s account:
First, he didn’t make us kill each other, we were all adults and we did it. And we gotta stop blaming outsiders for what we did to ourself. And secondly, he said, at least he said I’m sorry, nobody else apologized.
But being a human rights abuse apologist isn’t in Clinton’s past, it continues to this day!
Much of the Clinton Foundation acts in Rwanda, a country that has been accused of funding rebels in the Congo, a neighbor, and aiding human rights abuses there. Here was Clinton’s defense:
I don’t think human rights should be violated in the Congo to protect the territorial integrity of Rwanda. I suppose I do make allowances for a government that has produced as much progress as that one has. And is well-organized and has had the rule of law.
I wonder if the liberals who adore Clinton so much, and who are clamoring for his wife to take the reins of our Republic in 2016 would agree with the Clinton doctrine. That is, a country can be excused for human rights abuses if it produces progress, is well-organized, and has the rule of law.
That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
So that’s the way it is. There are few situations that are perfect.
You said it, Bubba.
