Hotel Rwanda: Real Life can be a real bummer

Hotel Rwanda is the story of Paul Rusesabagina, a Hotel manager living in Rwanda in 1994 during a political coup. In the movie, Paul saves his family as well as a hotel piled high with refugees from the murderous rebel forces outside the hotel gates. The plot follows these peoples' experience in a life threatening situation where the western world has abandoned them. These people are essentially stranded in a sea of racist killing. This was an incredibly emotional movie that left me as a viewer wondering why genocide is ever something that has to happen, why other countries don't step in to help?
In the article Film Fatigue, Manohla Dargis talks about how the "film about Africa" genre has started to lose its shock value in a sense. She talks about how the power of these narrative films about Africa have lost their power because it seems to be another story about African suffering made to make the viewer feel so bad about themselves that they are moved into action. The sad truth is that this is often not the case. Viewers will watch the film, think wow, that really sucks, and then continue on with their day. Even in real life media coverage of genocide in African countries like Sudan, the coverage somehow does not get a real shocking response from viewers, because as George Clooney says, we have "tragedy fatigue" on the television. In America for example, we are already bombarded with a million awful stories on the news every night, involving countries world wide, and the war that we are involved in currently, so when we see another awful story come up about Sudan, it's just like wow another horrible thing going on in the world. We are desensitized as a nation to the problems of our own, and other countries.
The article that caught my attention the most was the one describing Mr. Rusesabagina's life now, after his fame from the movie. It is interesting, but at the same time not very surprising to me that there is a lot of speculation about how much of this movie is true. The reason I think this is because in the movie he is made out to be such a good person. He seems unable to do anything wrong, and he saves all of the people in the hotel, risking his own life. I don't doubt that Mr. Rusesabagina is very brave and was willing to risk his life for these people, but it is unlikely that the movie is the exact story of what happened there. There are some people who say they want him to be put into trial for war crimes, according to the Wall Street Journal article by Christopher Rhoads. In such a chaotic situation over in Rwanda, it is hard to know exactly what the facts are, especially since there wasn't a bunch of reporters hanging around to record what was actually going on.
My opinion about all of this, is that it isn't any one country's fault that none of the western world has stepped in all that much to help these people. The problem is that there is a universal sense of 'us' and 'them' between the western world and Africa. It seems that western countries are too caught up in their own political agendas to actually help out people who really need it.
Possible Discussion Topics: If America stepped up and helped out in Africa do you think the rest of the western world would follow suit? Or would it be another Vietnam/Iraq? Everyone in the world seems to think that America steps in too much in other country's affairs, how involved should the U.S. be in this situation? Do you think that films like Hotel Rwanda help in educating the western world about African suffering, or do you think it is ineffective?

New Terminology: Trepidation:
trep·i·da·tion/ˌtrepiˈdāSHən/Noun
1. A feeling of fear or agitation about something that may happen.
2. Trembling motion.