Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Ugandan children

Christopher Hitchens writes about the tragedy and evil befalling Uganada in Vanity Fair this week. The story is not one I had heard as-of-yet, but it demonstrates that there is much evil in the world, and it is often directed at one’s own people.

Most of the “night commuters,” as they are known locally, are children. They leave their outlying villages and walk as many as eight kilometers to huddle for safety in the towns. And then, in the morning, often without breakfast and often without shoes, they walk all the way back again to get to their schools and their families. That’s if the former have not been burned and the latter have not been butchered. These children are not running toward Jordan and the Lord; they are running for their lives from the “Lord’s Resistance Army” (L.R.A.). This grotesque, zombie-like militia, which has abducted, enslaved, and brainwashed more than 20,000 children, is a kind of Christian Khmer Rouge and has for the past 19 years set a standard of cruelty and ruthlessness that—even in a region with a living memory of Idi Amin—has the power to strike the most vivid terror right into the heart and the other viscera.

Read it, and ask yourself why nobody intervenes in Uganda, in Dafur or Rwanda? We have nothing to gain but our souls.