How unique was the Rwandan genocide?
Mark Lawson has just described it as “one of the most immoderate conflicts in history.” Haven’t _all_ wars involved massacres? Of course Rwanda was unique: but historically, not in some kind of transcendental way. Badiou criticises the idea of radical evil precisely because it _fails_ to understand the specificity of holocausts (and isn’t it terrible that that word is now inescapably plural?):
> In fact, to think the singularity of the extermination is to think, first of all, the singularity of
> Nazism as a political sequence … The defenders of ethical ideology are so determined to locate
> the singularity of the extermination directly in Evil that they generally deny, categorically, that
> Nazism was a political sequence. This position is both cowardly and feeble.
>
Ethics, p. 64f
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