Philip Gourevitch
Philip Gourevitch
Philip Gourevitch, an American author and journalist, is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a former editor of The Paris Review. His most recent book is The Ballad of Abu Ghraib, an account of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison under the American occupation. He became widely known for his first book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide...
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He's a villain who doesn't need to be vilified. He does it himself, ... He wanted to be a very good bad guy.
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Look around. It's harder and harder to find good fiction in mainstream magazines. I want this magazine to appeal to people interested in longform writing. This is anti-blog. It's writing worth the investment of time.
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I can't imagine trying to second guess what George Plimpton would do, ... The magazine has this tremendous tailwind moving it along, but there also has to be room to reconnect to a new time. These new articles will have a distinctive flavor and will address themselves to the world at large.
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Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.
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What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime.
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In 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue ‘ethnic’ identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) of Tutsi (14%) or Twa (1%). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority… Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence.
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The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killings since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.