The Expanded Self: Society as Self 289“9x6” b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanityand slaughtered men, women, and children on the basis of their ethnic-
ity. Radios incited ordinary Hutu to kill Tutsi, giving them directions as
to where to find them and where they were hiding, and promising them
the land of the Tutsi they killed. Many took up machetes and joined in
the massacre. “Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes,
and colleagues hacked colleagues to death in their workplaces. Doctors
killed their patients, and school teachers killed their pupils.”^49 On 11 April
alone, thousands of Tutsi met their deaths under the machetes of Hutu.
By the end of June, when the bloodbath was halted, one out of eight
people in Rwanda perished. Fearing retribution, Hutu militia fled to
neighboring Zaire, taking with them 2 million Hutu refugees, many of
whom participated in the slaughter.
What led to the ethnic feud over generations between Hutu and
Tutsi, which culminated in the 1994 genocide? According to one anal-
ysis, the root of the trouble was that Rwanda is the most densely popu-
lated nation in Africa (eight million crowded into a small land), and the
per capita tillable land has been strained to the limit. The fighting was
really over who should have better control of land resources.
12.13.4 Nanjing massacre
One of the most horrific human intra-species conflict and atrocity hap-
pened in the year 1937 during the Japanese invasion of China. The inci-
dent was unmatched in history in the monstrosity of cruelty as well as
in scale and duration. On 13 December of that year, the Japanese army
marched into Nanjing (formerly known as Nanking), then the capital of
China. In the ensuing six weeks, the Japanese soldiers, by order from
their superior, systematically terrorized the city by engaging in intended
mass torture and massacre of helpless civilians, and in collective rap-
ing of women, an incident later known as “The Rape of Nanking.” The
orgy of violence included large scale beheading of city dwellers in an
assembly line manner. The captives were lined up in rows, and those
in one row dug the mass grave for the next. Those still breathing were