Most Canadians now know the answer to the question general Romeo Dallaire once asked thanks, unhappily, to one of history's great man-made tragedies. Yet for half a century before the 1994 genocide, some Canadians, especially Quebec Catholic missionaries and certain federal civil servants, were close to Rwanda, a country where the elite spoke French. It might have been better were they not, for many of these old Rwanda hands made themselves handmaidens of an ethnic Hutu dictatorship that ended up planning and executing the near-extermination of the country's Tutsi minority.

The basics of colonization:

To destroy a culture, you must destroy the children. You destroy the children by taking their mothers.

Women -- child-bearers, life-givers -- sit at the heart of the community. Indigenous culture is carried in the blood and breath of the mother who teaches the next generation. Two-legged and four-legged children alike are born falling to the ground and they fall down on the ground again to die.

To destroy a culture, you must destroy the mothers.

For 500 years on Turtle Island, colonization has threatened the culture, lives and land of Indigenous people.

I am moved to write this blog because of Minister Duncan's outrageous remarks that residential schools were NOT cultural genocide. This has led to discussions about whether or not the murder, torture and abuse of Indigenous peoples in this country "qualifies" as genocide, given the more recent, and much more distant atrocities committed in countries like Rwanda. Rwanda gained international attention because upwards of 800,000 people died in less than a year by brutal means. The Srebenica genocide resulted in the murder of approximately 8,000 Bosnian men and women in 1995. The holocaust of millions of Jewish people is likely the most famous of all.

As one of the few remaining earthlings to happily call himself a socialist, I have now decided that if anything (Stalin and Mao aside) were to drive me away from my lifelong ideology it's the way it's practiced in la belle France. If you jump to the conclusion that I'm referring to the squalid case of "DSK," you are not wrong but only one-third right. (An audience in Rwanda understood instinctively last week when I compared Dominique Strauss-Khan's alleged violation of an African maid to the way the International Monetary Fund has treated Africa for the past many decades.)

Beyond the DSK scandal, it so happens that I have had the great misfortune of running into socialism a la France on other piquant occasions.