Darwinism and the Rwandan Genocide

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Imagine if you will that you had a good relationship with a neighboring group of people, and things were fine for many years. Some people from your group even married people from their group. Things changed. They are now considered inferior and should be killed. Folks in your group accepted those racist views and the reasoning behind them.

Obviously, this describes Nazi Germany. It also describes other places. A common factor is evolutionary thinking, which influences many areas in societies, such as law. It may be surprising to learn that Darwinism was instrumental in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.

It is not just a biological theory, Darwinism is a worldview. It influences many evils, such as racism and the Rwandan Genocide.
Ntrama church altar, site of one massacre, Flickr / Scott Chacon (CC BY 2.0)
German colonists, and then later the Dutch, brought their Darwinist views and imposed them on Rwandan tribes. This Victorian myth of origins elevates white people to the pinnacle of evolution. By presupposing evolution and racism, colonists infected the people with the view that one tribe (race) was superior because they had some physical resemblances to the superior white race. The colonists were long gone, but the genocide happened. Evolution is not just a biological theory, but a fundamentally flawed worldview. Things would have been far different if the people had learned that there is only one race, and we all descended from Adam and Eve.
The Rwandan genocide of April–July 1994 shows how a single group of people living next door to each other, speaking one language and sharing the same culture, even often intermarrying, were artificially divided into two races by colonial rulers infused with Darwinism. The race judged superior was the Tutsi race, and that judged inferior was the Hutu race. In the end, in one of the worst genocides of the last century, over 800,000 Rwandans were murdered, mostly the Tutsi murdered by the Hutus.

Continue reading at "The Rwandan Genocide Inspired by Darwinism: Another Tragic Result Due to Belief in Darwinism." You may also be interested in "Evolutionism and the Vietnam War."