Marigolds, Chapter 41

 41

            There are patterns in History.

The genocide that excised nearly one million Rwandans in the 1990s was as embarrassing as it was tragic. Whether they hacked each other to chards or shot Chinese, Eastern European and North American bullets into one another’s skulls, the blood-simple did so based on a manipulation courtesy of a long-dead king of Belgium.  Though one group was the clear aggressor, had the two groups’ roles been reversed, it still would have happened.

 King Leopold had created two classes in his central African private preserve: the haves and the want-to-haves. The enlightened Roman Catholic Europeans encouraged the Africans to hate and hurt one another to redirect their focus as the Belgians raped and plundered the land and the people who populated it.  It was tried and true: the Persians had done it, the Greeks, the Romans, the British, the French, the Italians and the Americans, too.  It’s just that in Rwanda the differences between the two groups of Africans were so artificial and so arbitrary that they fooled no one.  No one except the Hutus and the Tutsis, that is. And maybe the Irish and the component ethnic groups once known as Yugoslavs.

           

A North American tourist of Irish descent is visiting Belfast. In a pub one evening a local sidles up and asks his origins.

            “Well, I live in Chicago but my great grandfather got there through Montreal from Ireland.”

            “Aahh,” says his new companion. “So you’re Irish then are ye?”

            “I am. Both sides. One-hundred per cent.”

            “Well, then are you Irish Protestant or Irish Catholic?”

            “Um, well, I’m neither.  I happen to be an atheist.”

            “Ah, I see, then.”  The man squinted over the rim as he sipped his stout. “But are ye a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?”