Could you, under any circumstance, be a merciless torturer, a serial rapist, a mass murderer? This month, which marks the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda and the 99th anniversary of the genocide of the Armenians, is as good a time to ask as any.
Each year, my graduate seminar on Rwanda learns that hundreds of thousands of perfectly ordinary Rwandan Hutu -- peasants, farmers, teachers -- were mobilized by their leaders to carry out the genocide of the country's Tutsi minority. I challenge students to consider this question: Had they been a Hutu in Rwanda at that time, would they have joined the systematic slaughter of some three-quarters of all the Tutsi in the country, perhaps as many as a million souls?
