Haunting

The PBS documentary, Ghosts of Rwanda, depicts a series of events that philosopher/sociologist Jurgen Habermas might call a ‘failure of the public sphere’. The film recounts the events of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which was mostly ignored/misconstrued internationally, and whose own media systems were used to fuel internal hatreds. Because the significance of the struggle was both local and global, Rwanda can be said to have been operating in two public spheres; the first of the bourgeois within the country, and the second of the worldwide community.

The sphere within the country was likely a pre-modern (or even post-modern) public sphere. That is, the dominant class of the Hutu had control media to such an extent they were nearly like princes of the past – who could distribute information that controlled both private and public lives – or corporations, which monopolize public opinion with their own views and pay only token respect to the private concerns of the unified state. The ‘sphere’ then failed in its duty of having “access guaranteed to all citizens” (Habermas); it was allowed to be used entirely as a political tool. Print Media (subsidized by government controlled papers) began the hate speech, which later monopolized all corners of the public sphere, especially radio. In such ways, was the public sphere subverted from a tool to “transmit the needs of …society to the state, in order…to transform political into "rational" authority” (Habermas), into a tool for mass murder.

The failure of the international community’s public sphere was subtler. Since the United Nations/Global leadership might be thought of as a “Social Welfare State Mass Democracy” it suffered the “refeudalization of the public sphere” which goes along with that. That is, since the world wide community is so large, and the private interests within it so massive (in this case, various countries/organizations), they overpower the smaller and more personal public sphere of individuals and small interest groups. Because a worldwide public sphere is therefore bureaucratic and unwieldy, it was able to ignore the genocide or misrepresent it because that is what its most prevalent ‘private’ groups wanted. The media outlets were censored or in the dark, because at that scale, they naturally “strive for political compromise with the state and each other, excluding the public sphere whenever possible” (Habermas). Therefore, the failure here was of the public sphere exceeding the size where a public sphere is ‘public’ at all.

Ghosts of Rwanda, then, is an attempt to reopen conversation about the public sphere and its necessity in our time. It seeks to make viewers question “why didn’t we know/do?” The curiosity of it, however, is that it too is a product of a mainstream media whose nature does not allow it to be entirely ‘public’, and so even its truths must be analyzed for hidden facts.