Murray N. Rothbard, “Hutus vs. Tutsis” (1994) — Summary

This short June 1994 polemic responds to the Rwandan genocide by turning it into an argument against U.S./UN interventionism, liberal universalism, imposed democracy, and multiethnic state-building. Rothbard is less concerned with reconstructing the genocide than with extracting lessons for Americans about the futility of the “New World Order.” Rwanda, for him, reveals that outside powers cannot manufacture peaceful pluralism where colonial borders and entrenched group antagonisms have produced an explosive political order.

The mass butchery in Rwanda provides several important and instructive lessons to the American people, lessons which—surprise, surprise!—are emphatically not being pointed out by our beloved media.

The essay’s first target is humanitarian internationalism. UN troops, especially French and Belgian forces, appear as symbols of imperial residue and practical helplessness, while proposed American remedies—air strikes, troops, elections, and rights enforcement—are treated as absurd extensions of the same fantasy. Rothbard’s sarcasm is central to the piece: he casts intervention not merely as mistaken policy but as ideological hubris, the presumption that liberal democratic institutions can be exported into radically different social conditions.

In the first place, we see starkly revealed the idiocy of the New World Order and the attempt of our global social democrats to impose “democracy,” multiculturalism and multiethnicity on the entire world.

Rothbard then reframes the genocide through the language of “root causes.” Borrowing from domestic crime debates, he argues that liberals ask causal questions but identify the wrong causes; in Rwanda, they allegedly avoid the decisive fact of antagonistic collective identities within a confined territorial state. This move gives the essay its explanatory core: political violence is interpreted less through institutions, leadership, war, propaganda, or state collapse than through incompatible groups trapped inside an artificial polity.

In the Rwanda massacres, liberals are again unwilling to face the root causes: clashing tribes in a fairly small territorial area.

The middle of the essay expands this claim into an anti-imperial critique of European border-making. Rothbard argues that colonial powers created “phony” states by joining hostile peoples and dividing contiguous ones, a pattern he associates not only with Rwanda and Burundi but also with the Balkans and Caucasus. In this respect, the essay’s anti-interventionism is also anti-centralist: violence is presented as the predictable result of forcing distinct peoples into common political containers and then demanding that they practice liberal democracy.

Yet Rothbard’s account also moves beyond a critique of colonial boundaries into essentializing ethnic explanation. He emphasizes Hutu-Tutsi population ratios, historical Tutsi domination, and the density of Rwanda and Burundi, then speculates about group differences in intelligence and character. The result is a revealing tension: a libertarian suspicion of imposed statehood is fused with deterministic claims about peoples. The essay’s most troubling feature is not simply its pessimism about intervention, but the way it converts political history into ethnic destiny.

Rothbard briefly qualifies this account by insisting that he does not endorse domination and by invoking the libertarian ideal of peaceful exchange. That ideal, however, functions less as a practical program than as a contrast with what he sees as the impossibility of externally engineered coexistence.

I would love to see them coexist peacefully, participating in a division of labor joined together by a free market.

The conclusion returns to anti-militarist satire. Rothbard comments on the rocket attack that killed the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, then uses it to mock the Pentagon’s failures in Serbia and Iraq and to ridicule American military competence. Atrocity thus becomes material for a broader attack on U.S. militarism and international management.

The essay’s significance lies in how starkly it displays Rothbard’s late political style: anti-UN, anti-imperial, anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian-interventionist, and deeply skeptical of centralized state projects. At the same time, it exposes the dangers of his explanatory frame. Its critique of artificial borders and imposed liberal universalism is inseparable from racialized and ethnonational generalization, so that “self-determination” becomes not only an argument against empire but a claim about the near impossibility of plural political life.