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Learn From History or Repeat It? A big rap from the few mainstream writers critical of Hotel Rwanda, intimated again today in the New York Times, is that it was not graphic enough in depicting the scenes of genocide in Rwanda. Huh??? How pathetic an attitude is that?? And what does it say about us as a society?? Do we really need to see gruesome machete cuts close up to understand the genocidal horror of Rwanda in 1994?? But this is a review, not the late Susan Sontag on the state of American culture as reflected by its writing critics. And for this reviewer, Hotel Rwanda must be seen for its depiction of one man's desperate and resourceful efforts to save lives in the eye of homicidal insanity. Paul Rusesabagina did what he had to do, flattering and making deals with human vermin, and as a result more than 1000 people alive who otherwise would be dead. He is a hero and this movie makes that correct judgment unequivocal. But if the personal story of this one man is clear, Hotel Rwanda, through the character of Nick Nolte, makes no less clear the complicity of the world for its refusal to intervene in a timely way to mitigate the slaughter. Nolte portrays the UN peacekeeper colonel who is revulsed by what he is seeing, by the limited mandate -- not to mention manpower -- he has to oppose it, and by the developed world's interest in saving its own white-skinned citizens, period. Rwanda was 1994; a decade later we get this film made in the U.S. and continued silence from the European countries most responsible -- by their colonial-era policies -- for contributing to the horror. Now it's 2005 and there is a place called Darfur and a sad new chance for the world to make history, or, in a decade's time, another movie.