THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE OF 1994 marked the first time that the United Nations reported an instance of such a crime since the day in 1948 that the Genocide Convention first came up with a law against it. Civil wars in Cambodia, Russia, China, and most recently the former Yugoslavia, as well as Rwanda, have tested the definitions of genocide and provided a plethora of writing about the self-destructive tendencies of humans and societies. The new language and laws surrounding genocide also have given rise to historical revision of such past atrocities as the near extermination of the Native American people, slavery, and the mid-19th century Irish famine. Genocide may be a new and useful tool for understanding the political landscape of countries both past and present, but invariably it leads to a questioning of people themselves. How could they?

The aftermath of a genocide is endless: lessons may be learned, causes picked apart, but nothing makes the deaths go away. Opinions regarding genocide, often understandably, infuriate, and it is tentatively that one says anything at all. And so the new movie, Life is Beautiful, directed by and starring Italian comic Roberto Benigni raises both ire and praise in its depiction of a family in a Nazi concentration camp, while the reissue of The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal collects disparate responses to the deceptively complicated notion of forgiving a Nazi. Philip Gourevitch reported on the revolution and genocide in Rwanda for The New Yorker, and he, too, in his We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, leaves many questions unanswered. Perhaps they will always be. Still, in looking at these works, certain threads emerge in the vast fabric of horror. One of these is the imagination, in both its creative and destructive modes. Another is envy, that most primordial of social problems.

When discussing genocide, it is impossible to avoid generalities; racism, pure evil, mass insanity, and the abuses of power are all common tropes. Recently, such arguments have come into the fore, as evidenced in Goldhagen's best-selling Hitler's Willing Executioners, which claimed that the intrinsic German-ness of the German people was responsible for the Holocaust. Psychologists and newspaper columnists have analyzed Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin, delving into their childhoods in order to better understand how they became so evil, how they could oversee so much senseless murder.

The upheavals and turmoil that lead to the implosion of entire nations can be understood from economic, social, and political viewpoints. And so genocide itself can be framed, understood to a point, but only to a point. In We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Philip Gourevitch emphasizes imagination, our need to imagine what is directly in front of us, whether good or evil, over all other contributing factors. Imagining, according to Gourevitch, is our only way of understanding the world. And while the notion of imagination and perception may not be new -- philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein wrote much about the role of imagination -- Gourevitch seems overwhelmed by the reality of what happened in Rwanda. And as The Sunflower is an exercise in imagination, so it seems that the extremity of genocide requires a person to think in fantastical proportions, even if the bodies lay directly in front of you.

One fact of the Rwandan genocide that may be hard to imagine is the one-for-one replacement of the massacred. Rwandan Tutsis from the Diaspora came rushing back to fill the empty houses of the killed, as well as the houses of the criminals who fled to avoid arrest or revenge. Gourevitch discusses the "straightforward profit motive" of many of the returnees. There was an extreme shortage of goods, and anyone with anything to sell could cross over the border to Rwanda and make enormous profits. It's somewhat reminiscent of recent media scandals about Swiss and Austrian concerns continuing to profit from the stolen gold and artwork of Western Europe's murdered Jews. Something besides the annihilation of a race happens when a race is in fact annihilated or is nearly so; other people get their stuff. It's been suggested by some that the pillagers think they deserve these goods, and that those from whom it is being stolen deserved to be robbed, destroyed, annihilated. Maybe this is a coping mechanism for the guilt-ridden. Nonetheless, the fact that the Nazis, for instance, could consider the belongings of their genocide victims the "spoils of war," reveals a cause -- sociological, psychological, and economic -- that cannot be explained away. One by-product of genocide, then, suggests new questions.

HELMUT SCHOECK, an obscure sociologist, thinks he knows the root of various societies' problems, both past and present. In his book Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior(1987), Schoeck argues that envy is the root of all social formation and explains that "'envy' has the advantage over other modern terms such as ambivalence, relative deprivation, frustration or class war, in that as a concept it has a pre-scientific origin." From an anthropological point of view, the concept and negotiation of envy exists in every known society, whereas "hope, love, justice, and progress," cannot be found in many cultures. He claims that "envy alone makes any kind of social coexistence possible" and he means that the rules surrounding envy, coined by Francis Bacon as "public envy," determine functions of a society. Also, while envy includes actual objects and money, vaguer concepts like social status, marital happiness, and health can be fiercely envied as well. Interestingly, Schoeck details how the envied need not always be aware of the envious. But the imminent conflict is there; in the minds of the envier, the tension exists. This is particularly useful in understanding genocide. The Jews, the Tutsis, the vast majority of the "middle-class" of Cambodia, did nothing to actively contribute to the feelings of hatred and loathing that presaged the conflict to come. Political conflict can be one-sided, but be conflict indeed, if understood as a result of envy.

Gourevitch makes references to the biblical story of Cain and Abel, referring obliquely to a familial jealousy. The Tutsis, like Abel, owned livestock. The Hutus are generally farmers, like Cain. Yet Gourevitch never explicitly names envy as a social force behind the Rwandan revolution. In critiquing any revolution, words such as "power" are tossed about; "class war" is popular as well. Envy is not a popular term, as Schoeck notes. It "embarrasses" people, and, perhaps like Arendt's offensive use of "banality" in regard to evil, seems to trivialize. But envy is present in all such conflicts, according to Schoeck, and "the very word or concept of 'conflict' partly conceals the phenomena of envy." He goes on to argue that "researchers eventually pay more attention to conflict than to the primary phenomena." Schoeck's book contains endless examples from the French Revolution to the most primitive of tribes, such as the Duboans of the West Pacific or the Tiv of Nigeria, revealing some truths about envy that may crush our understanding of social equalities. For instance, in societies where no one has much worth coveting, envy continues to be of extreme importance; it far from disappears.

Schoeck also answers questions brought up by Gourevitch like: "No doubt the promise of material gain and living space did move some killers. But why hasn't Bangladesh, or any other terribly poor and terribly crowded place of the many one might name, had a genocide?" Schoeck believes that societies where class and caste systems are strictly intact are less volatile, that envy is not so easily stirred up. People in Bangladesh, according to Schoeck's view, know their place in the world. While Muslim and Hindu class and ethnic conflict exists, no full scale war has broken out; the breakdown of the social hierarchies has not abruptly fallen apart, like in Rwanda. It is when these defining social structures fall apart entirely, egged on by revolutionaries, that violence and hatred ensue. While this is sensible enough, it doesn't explain the breakdown of certain social structures, nor how change could occur less hellishly, and how sometimes the envy unleashed is "justifiable," to use Schoeck's own words.

To further use Schoeck's theory, what happens when envy is not "justifiable," but purely "destructive"? In Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda, those who had, or more importantly, were perceived to have, were demonized and dehumanized by the supposed have-nots. With much help from the government and its propaganda, certain peoples were depicted as having social positions, objects,and money -- things they did not deserve. Indeed, in the classic definition of the envied person, they were considered not deserving of life itself: a call for their deaths spread throughout the lands. Perception is a deeply important aspect in this understanding of the workings of envy in a genocide. Clearly, the reality of the Tutsis, Cambodian middle class, and the European Jewish people differed greatly from the portrayal of them. Schoeck briefly mentions how the National Socialism in Germany prior to WWII, "very quickly abandoned its class-conscious, egalitarian tone, directing the abundantly available social envy against Jews and the 'colonial powers.'" It's true that Hitler began the "administrative massacres," as Hannah Arendt called them, with mercy deaths to the incurably ill, and intended to finish off his program with heart and lung patients, known as "genetically damaged" Germans. But Hitler believed that all resources belonged to the superior race, and the superior persons in the superior race, and while no one envies the ill, protesting their use of resources -- the envy of their free ride, so to speak -- is reminiscent of the American resentment of welfare recipients.