The hate of the Hutu was not artificially created by some "extremists" with a radio station, but was and is instead the result of the long and bloody history between these two peoples where neither side can claim to be the innocent victim.
Where did you read this? I’ve seen many people make this claim but I’ve never seen any evidence that it’s true. The only source I have found for it is Philip Gourevitch’s book “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families”
I could not find the actual page where this claim is ostensibly made, just an unsourced claim that the identity cards made such mobility impossible. A similar claim is often made about the caste system in India (which gets attributed to the British), and the scholarship there is similarly very poor.
Quote “Tutsi and Hutu distinctions were more occupational than ethnic, with intermarriage and status change being fairly common.”
This conflation of group and individual responsibility is at the heart of pretty much every atrocity.
Even the trial against a musician who incited violence argues in that direction.
"In addition to other evidence, the prosecution cited a song celebrating the abolition of monarchy and the regaining of independence from 1959 to 1961: a Rwandan expert in the trial later expounded that the latter song could not have been addressed to the Rwandan nation as a whole, because the Tutsis were associated with the Rwandan monarchy and colonial regime, and that it was impossible to hate the monarchy without hating the Tutsis"
This is exactly the same story as why Croatians were trying to de-Serb their villages and vice versa. Fear of what the other would do made them do the same, first (or even worse). See also the comment about "Accusation in a mirror" further up.
People often have the idea that the Rwandan genocide was some people spontaneously rising up and killing their neighbours with farming equipment because someone on the radio told them to. You're right that it was more complicated than that.
Still doesn't mean murder victims aren't victims though. They totally are, and they can't be blamed for actions done by other people vaguely similar to them.
Fortunately, the conditions weren't present in the US to speedrun to civil war and genocide. Still, I grew up in Limbaugh-lovin' country during those years and was exposed to this... stuff... for more hours of the day than I care to think about. (In public school! Literally, teachers having Rush and assorted fellow-travellers on in the background while we did our classwork.)
I do not believe for a second that the fact it went different in the US wasn't for lack of trying. The trying hasn't even stopped.
Korzybski and Van Vogt warned us of "A=A" thinking but today I'm aghast at thinking that can best be described as ∀x,y: x=y. Back in the 1960s you'd expect an article in a Trotskyite newspaper to start with "The Red Sox beat the Yankees" and to end with "... therefore we need a socialist revolution." Today teen girls read Man's Search For Meaning because they think their school is like a concentration camp, politicians of all stripes [1] are accused of being fascists, and people delude themselves that adding a stripe to a flag will magically transform people into allies. Glomming together all social causes into one big ball has a devastating effect on popular support
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-social-issues-civil-rights-bac...
across all demographics.
I disagreed with Rush about most things and thought he had a harmful effect on the nation and the world but I'd never accuse him of advocating genocide. No, being against universal healthcare isn't the same thing as genocide and if you're interested in winning elections you'd be better off spraying random voters with pepper spray than talking this way.
[1] sci-fi writer Charlie Stross made the accusation against Keir Starmer
It’s the age-old populist / proto-fascist playbook. He didn’t attempt to convince on the merits, but on the argument that those who disagree aren’t real people.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/500290818/we-believe-yard-sign-...
? Complex issues get distilled into 3 or 4 word slogans with the total effect of suggesting that the person with this lawn sign is superior in every way to people who disagree with her, that there's one exact right way to think about every issue, people who disagree are evil, deluded, subhuman, affected by perverse psychology, etc. You can find people on Mastodon and Bluesky say the most terrible things about the 70% of people who have concerns about transgender athletes in women's sports.
I don't have the numbers to prove it but my belief is that kind of thinking is basically right wing and that putting one of those yard signs in your yard shifts the vote +0.05 R or something just as 15 minutes listening to Rush does. Advocating that 99.4% percent of people should just shut up and give 0.6% of people everything the want all the time is what I expect out of Peter Thiel, not the left.
> suggesting that the person with this lawn sign is superior in every way to people who disagree with her
Da fuq? No, it's a statement of beliefs (which I share). None of it is meant to belittle those that disagree, it's simply stating a belief system.
As opposed to calling Democrats DemonRats and implying that they're all evil and are destroying America?
If you thought "Science is Real" you might read something like
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/03/how-migration-...
and understand that the discourse of politically oriented folks about immigration is not at all evidence based. Tacking one cause to another cause tends to work terribly for progressive causes
The best critique of "Science is Real" is the Habermas classic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)
which points out a failure mode of our civilization in terms of reconciling expert knowledge, popular participation, and reality which remains unanswered.
Also, this is something you made up, not something anybody on the left has expressed, and especially not represented by that sign: “Advocating that 99.4% percent of people should just shut up and give 0.6% of people what they want is what I expect out of Peter Thiel, not the left.”
I very much agree with your larger point, but let's be real: Some do. There is a very small and vocal minority fascist-ish left, but this sign is in no way representative of it.
I think if this was just an isolated position or opinion it'd be easier to have some charity and understanding. That doesn't seem to be the case.
A good example of this is the international chess federation banning trans women from women's competition. [1] What advantage does higher testosterone offer for someone playing chess? That's where these concerns seem to be more "I just don't want to accommodate trans women" and less "I'm concerned about an unfair advantage".
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/18/1194593562/chess-transgender-...
How does it benefit women to allow men who say they have womanly feelings into such spaces? It doesn't - and that's why they are excluded, along with all other men.
Are you suggesting that men's competitions are protected?
In international chess there generally aren't any men's competitions. There are competitions that are restricted to women and competitions that have no sex or gender restriction.
None of the slogans in that sign should be remotely controversial. Where exactly is the "complex issue"? "Water is life"? "Science is real"? This sign is statement that some issues warrant absolutism - a line in the sand regarding fundamental values. Such a line is an unavoidable feature of any moral framework. The specific values in question are what count.
The real moral fight is "you should care about others" vs "fuck you I got mine", and this is what distinguishes left from right, rather than propensity to nuance.
I upvoted you because I think your comment, while wrong, contributes to the discussion.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7...
In "reality", the tradeoffs aren't so stark.. (e.g. procrastination & distractions whilst on the path of "wisdom" are worth ~50 miles)
(Got that meme from other upforum sophists)
(Plus a sizable cohort of the lawnowners have an unshakeable faith in the dominance of their sense of humor over "reality" )
The political situation in the Americas, is imho, "just" the Monroe Doctrine reaping it's mimetic oats: US WASPs making their ancestral values the fount of honor in W Hemi => LatAm its political arrangements viable in the US via guerilla psyops (pop culture, Catholicism, etc etc).
Caricature: Bezos vs Thiel (note the swap of cultural affiliations)
That's kind of his thing. He's complained about drug addicts and perverts, but yet he was a prescription junkie, and also got caught flying to the Dominican Republic with a bunch of Viagra and condoms in his suitcase.
Even if he was acutely aware of the connection between his rhetoric and Jan. 6 events, it would probably bother him not at all and he'd refuse to acknowledge it unless forced to face it (like with his drug woes).
I heard he celebrated AIDS deaths on air, which is disgusting behavior
I listened to rush a fair bit. It started because he was my father's favorite broadcaster when I was a child and it continued on into my early 20s.
One thing that rush did in an excellent way was making you feel like you were smart, special, and inherently in the right by listening to him and supporting him. It was much like listening to a preacher if you have any sort of religious upbringing (which I did).
And while rush did primarily work at demonizing people, he often demonized "the right people". Primarily democrats. He also knew his audience well and did a great job of hyping the "us v them" notions. He knew a lot of his audience was rural, for example, so he'd spend a good amount of time talking about how much more wise country folk and truck drivers were vs people that live and work in the cities. He had an answer for why things were bad, it's the unions, feminists, democrats, muslims, big government, clinton, obama, socialists, communists, etc. He could always give a reason why something was bad and would expressly tell his audience "You don't need to look into this, because listening to me will make you smarter than any college professor". He trained his audience to explicitly trust him.
And, frankly, he could be both funny and entertaining to listen to. He'd take in calls and had a good delay that allowed him to only air the dumbest liberals on the planet. He was further not afraid of simply hanging up on them and calling them morons if they ever started to get the upper hand in a conversation.
It also helped that in terms of broadcasting, he was infinitely accessible. I, in rural idaho, had really easy access to him because radio stations carried him. AFAIK, the most left wing broadcast in idaho in my youth was NPR. Which, today I find laughable that I thought of it as "leftist".
How popular is universal healthcare in America?
That said, the American political apparatus is designed such that the votes of rural conservatives (who tend to oppose it) count more than elsewhere, so that doesn't actually matter.
[0]https://news.gallup.com/poll/654101/health-coverage-governme...
Every Democrat policy standpoint would have to filter through the rural conservative polling in order to be vetted.
But I don’t see that. Democratic policy positions can be quite liberal and urban coded. The obfuscation comes in on issues which hurt their donors. Then the idealized rural voter is moved from being a backwards hick to a precious Bipartisanship partner.
The Democrats moving towards a universal healthcare standpoint when 90% of Democrats and 65% of independents say “Yes, is the government's responsibility” would be a no-brainer for galvanizing their existing voters and gaining new ones if they cared about winning elections. dot dot dot
It doesn't make sense if you assume the system is intended to be fair and equitable, and represent the will of the people. If you realize the system was designed to keep slaveholding states in the union by biasing rural votes (more likely to be white and conservative) over urban votes (more likely to be non-white and progressive) despite city-dwellers being the majority per capita, it makes perfect sense.
You bring up Hillary Clinton who neglected to campaign enough in crucial swing states. And the strategy for successfully campaigning in those swing states (based on what people tell me) seem to be to appeal more to Rust Belt issues, not The South. She’s also from the same milieu as Trump, but somehow he managed to dissociate himself from being a New England liberal and managed to spin his relationship to her as “lock her up”. Meanwhile Clinton was busy calling Trump voters a basket of deplorables, getting celebrity endorsements, and then when she lost taking a self-indulgent yoga vacation or whatever.
So which is it? Basket of deplorables or appealing to the oh-so-unfairly powerful rural/Republican base? It’s fine to take some basket-of-deplorables stance but it seems to not harmonize with your premise.
Who was Clinton supposed to appeal to again? Not rural voters apparently, and not working class people. Certainly not on the issue of universal healthcare. And she spent more effort whining about leftists not supporting her than she did trying to appeal to them.
Maybe I would take your theory seriously if the Democrats were at all competent at counter-messaging. But the Republicans managed to assert that K. Harris and the rest were all-in on identity politics last election. Then Harris and the rest said no that’s not us and probably never even brought it up, but the imprint that they did still managed to linger. So what’s the lesson? That Americans can’t have <insert popular thing> because the Democrats are incapable of setting any kind of narrative themselves and instead have to merely react to what the Republicans say? It seems that way.
Well. A modified theory is that they have plenty of counter-messaging against the left. There are also plenty of things they are willing to “sacrifice” in order to have “bipartisanship” with the Right on—namely things that the Left want. Then things become structurally insormountable because of Founding Fathers etc. Funnily enough this defeatism is not followed up by courting the supposedly precious rural voters. It’s just to sigh and conclude that half the country (or half the voting population) are chronically racist. Oh well I guess a fascist dictatorship is inevitable, and [I would rather have that than compromise with leftists] | [there is nothing that any liberal or non-racist can do about it].
> It doesn't make sense if you assume the system is intended to be fair and equitable, and represent the will of the people.
I don’t assume that America, the Democrats, or you intend that.
Well there was the OKC Federal Building bombing. Timothy McVeigh was a dedicated dittohead.
It seems to be something humans do, a kind of tribal warfare or “raiding” program deep in the brain stem that can be activated. Nobody has a monopoly on it. It seems possible to activate these behaviors with any pattern of rhetoric that dehumanizes a group of people and creates a powerful in group out group schism. That can be framed in any way — right wing, left wing, anything.
And frankly - it’s deeply embedded in human nature because in a resource constrained environment, it’s what works.
The proto-genocidal rhetoric you are hearing in the US right now is probably linked to fear that in the near future nobody below, say, the top 10% of the ability curve, will have a job. So close the borders and kick out “outsiders” and go after minorities. Chimp behavior.
By that I don’t mean to say these people are uniquely dumb. My point is that this is brain stem encoded behavior that can be triggered in all humans.
And can you say they are for sure wrong?
In many cases the resources we spend hoarding and raiding and doing other chimp things could make us all 2X or more wealthier if we did not fight.
Right now the US is spending billions of debt financed dollars to rid itself of people who want to become tax paying citizens because they have brown skin. A beyond human intelligence would look at this the way we look at ant mills.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
“Just quit circling.” But I’m sure circling forever feels right and proper in the belly, or whatever the ant’s equivalent of deep feelings of rightness feel like.
Of course when people are confronted with the fact that the right-wing foment violence in order to protect their interests we’re right back to quasi-psychology about original sin à la some Canadian called Bernt. “It’s all the same man”
You can't ethically "net out" human deaths with economic gains. That treats lives as statistical noise in a profit-loss spreadsheet. It’s not just bad morality, it’s bad history too.
“Source?” Eh, I’m just telling you my perspective in the same vigorous way that you opened this thread.
> I think socialist revolutions have killed more "out group" members than any political/religious movement in human history
If you look at the income graph for this period you’ll see that the bottom part of the world did get more money. Meanwhile the working class and middle class (what’s the difference?) in the West got more money. And finally the wealthiest got a stupendous amount of more money. Now look at the US for example. GDP has grown at the same rate since the post-war period. The distribution is just more lopsided (neoliberalism). Thus it seems that the worldwide economic system could have “lifted people out of poverty” at a higher rate/given the former poor more money. But instead the vast amount of money went to the very rich.
The wealth/income/money distribution since the neoliberal period began demonstrates that it is really designed to lift millionaires into billionaires.
Finally one would have to look at what “extreme poverty” means in order to judge these percentages. I can easily define that term with the global living standards of the 1970’s in mind, put it slightly above that, then declare victory when the global population gets a slight improvement. I don’t recall any such discussions off the top of my head but apparently you can easily spend at least twenty minutes going through all the details. Meanwhile while the fact-checker puts on his shoes, claims about increasing or decreasing poverty are already half-way across the world.
I agree that liberalism has lifted many billions of people out of poverty, and that we could be doing more than we already have. I believe that turning around backwards toward socialism and centralized economic planning would be a grave mistake that would undo the gains made by liberalism since the 1970s
You’re the one who said “neoliberalism”. You weaken your claim now? Why am I asking.
> I agree that liberalism has lifted many billions of people out of poverty, and that we could be doing more than we already have.
Key word “I believe”. China has made their own progress and a look at worldwide poverty reduction would have to take that into account.
And thanks for collapsing my whole discussion of the poverty rate down to “I agree”. We could do the same for you by bringing up the fact that the Soviet Union economy grew a lot compared to Tsarist Russia—I guess you will have to concede to being a planned economy supporter as well.
> I believe that turning around backwards toward socialism and centralized economic planning would be a grave mistake that would undo the gains made by liberalism since the 1970s
Meaning lifting millionaires into billionaires.
If flat earthers can't talk about a flat earth then no one will dissuade them of the notion.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-...
That sort of show is still alive and well in the US, it's just moved from AM to podcasts.
This is the difference with Rwanda and Yugoslavia. The people you hate lived next door.
What I noticed what that there was a main story for the hour long program. But, it was pretty dull. Meanwhile, the host kept randomly going off into short non-sequitur diatribes. All of the non-sequiturs were depressing. They were about random stuff that made you feel just awful. Then he'd pop back to dull main story like nothing happened.
I realized the non-sequiturs were all designed to make you feel hate, fear and disgust towards liberals. The main story was just filler. The real product was a steady stream of emotional hits of hate, fear and disgust. Over and over forever. Just like puffing on her cigarettes.
That was decades ago. The hate, fear and disgust pipeline has refined a lot since then.
Decades later, the news got my father so deeply filled with hate, fear and disgust that he would randomly launch into hateful diatribes about the libs unprompted. It got bad enough that the kids had to tell Mom we weren't visiting until he got it under control. He wasn't like that at all until he retired and had more time to watch TV.
e.g. The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar was fuelled by Facebook's engagement algorithms[1].
In Rwanda, they had to create radio stations. Today, all you have to do is generate clicks for Meta.
[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
What statements did Rush Limbaugh make that could be construed as instigating a genocide?
There's a one-to-many and sort of fuzzy, conspiratorial and hearsay nature to radio, podcasting, preaching, that you don't have in a literary context. It's the ease of transmission and ephemerality of it that enables so much uncritical engagement.
Perhaps not foreign affairs so much, but I'd argue in the past politics was keenly important to a large percentage of the population in the past. Particularly local politics.
The reason for that was simple, politics was a form of entertainment and local politics was both fun to talk and gossip about, more so than national politics.
What I believe has changed is the internet and broadcasting in general has changed what's entertaining. People care less about the issues and more about the presenter. National broadcasting selected for the most entertaining presenters which have the opportunity to bend political opinions to their own. The internet has opened up access to presenters which has done the same thing as national broadcasting but allows for even more extreme positions. Interest in local politics died for pretty much the same reason why local theater is dead. It's simply not as entertaining as a large budget production (generally). Sure, someone could probably make local politics interesting, but that's inherently going to have a smaller audience draw. That's why national politics is easier to talk about.
One other thing that's changed, though, is the options for presenters is now humongous. It's simply unlikely that you or your coworkers will have similar enough media diets to discuss at the water cooler. That's made everything a lot more private and isolated.
It's hard to tease apart the differences between modalities. On Youtube today there are many "videos" that are good to play in the background, be it Technology Connections, Pod Save America, or Asmongold's show. Part of the experience of reading is that an individual can find things that are rare, obscure, that it doesn't have to be massy at all [1] -- in the past economics required television and radio to be massy but podcasts, in principle, are really cheap and could service obscure tastes. Another fraction is that reading itself is a filter: even in the core a lot of people like Asmongold are functionally illiterate, in a place like Rwanda you just can't reach most people through writing.
[1] read https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med..., read https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...
Accusation in a mirror:
Accusation in a mirror is a false claim that accuses the target of something that the perpetrator is doing or intends to do. The name was used by an anonymous Rwandan propagandist in Note Relative à la Propagande d'Expansion et de Recrutement ... he instructed colleagues to "impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do". By invoking collective self-defense, propaganda is used to justify genocide, just as self-defense is a defense for individual homicide. Susan Benesch remarked that while dehumanization "makes genocide seem acceptable", accusation in a mirror makes it seem necessary.
Double-genocide or at least mass war crimes against Hutu by the RPF:
Estimates of Hutu deaths from mass violence in the 1990s are much less precise than Tutsi death figures from the Rwandan genocide due to the greater timescale and geographic spread of the killings. Researcher Alison Des Forges estimated that the RPF killed 60,000 people in war crimes in 1994 and 1995. Historian Gérard Prunier estimated that 100,000 Hutu were killed by the RPF in 1994–1995. Historian Roland Tissot argued that there were around 400,000 Hutus killed by the RPF between 1994 and 1998 (excluding disease and excess mortality), while Omar Shahabudin McDoom estimated several hundred thousand Hutu victims during the 1990s. Demographer Marijke Verpoorten guesstimates 542,000 deaths of Rwandan Hutus (about 7.5 percent of the population), with "a very large uncertainty interval", from war-related causes in the 1990s, including battle deaths and excess mortality from poor conditions in refugee camps.
Kagame, the leader of the RPF, has also had an ... interesting tenure as president, in power 25 years and most recently winning 99% of the vote:
The highest-profile opposition figure for the 2017 election was local businesswoman Diane Rwigara. Although she acknowledged that "much has improved under Kagame", Rwigara was also critical of Kagame's government, saying that "people disappear, others get killed in unexplained circumstances and nobody speaks about this because of fear". Like Ingabire in 2010, Rwigara was barred from running in the election.
Throughout Kagame's tenure as vice president and president, he has been linked with murders and disappearances of political opponents, both in Rwanda and abroad. In a 2014 report titled "Repression Across Borders", Human Rights Watch documents at least 10 cases involving attacks or threats against critics outside Rwanda since the late 1990s, citing their criticism of the Rwandan government, the RPF or Kagame
My general impression is that Rwanda has been compressed down to a simplistic morality play when the reality seems a lot more complex and in many ways more unsettling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory_(Rwanda...
There aren’t any.
Then the Belgians came along, measured skulls, pronounced the Tutsis a separate (and superior) race, and the rest is… absolutely idiotic history.
But none of that is true.
https://web.archive.org/web/20111223184823/https://blogs.dis...
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/hutus-and-tutsis-and-geneti...
Christ, you could make the same argument about the U.K. - the aristocratic classes tend to have more Norman blood. Are they a superior race?
That will be news to Razib. You could more accurately describe him as "Aryan".
> Christ, you could make the same argument about the U.K. - the aristocratic classes tend to have more Norman blood.
Well, on the assumption that it's extremely easy to distinguish the British aristocracy from the peasantry by a blood test - what would that do to support the idea that people frequently switch between the categories?
> Are they a superior race?
Hm. Perhaps you yourself should be more concerned with facts? Are you saying that the Tutsis and the Hutus aren't different because you think that's true, or because you think it's important for people to believe it whether or not it's true?
Suppose that the Tutsis and the Hutus were longstanding ethnic groups both basically closed to outsiders, such as the other group. What would that look like?
Visiting the Genocide Memorial in Rwanda compresses the event into a simple morality play by displaying a wall of personal pictures of the dead. Snapshots of random people at a happy moment in time, but they're all violently dead now for absolutely no reason.
Really nice description of the Trump era, where accusations fly at the strawman in the mirror, prioritizing psychological reality over facts, (let's continue the tangent here) accepting to speak in a woke echo chamber, as a victim, while secretly being an ultradem in need of love, and having found a way of just taking it, like a man standing in the tradition where he culturally submits the woman because he can. Not love, just satisfaction of self-assertion, at the expense of the woman. She exists to make a man feel good. The Taco Man creates the banana republic in his own image. Muscle brain, a dick. A reversal of civilization.
But the accusations in the mirror also happen to precede violence. The fire only needs oxygen. The Taco Wars. F*ck.
(Rhythm of the night plays)
This is tossed in as if to imply that shutting down the radio station would have saved lives and that the US was therefore complicit in those deaths.
I am never swayed by arguments like this. A culture that produces that kind of hatred will not be stopped by losing a channel to express it. Word of mouth spreads quickly, and actions speak even louder.
Not to mention, per the sidebar, the radio hosts were already disguising their meaning in places despite not experiencing a threat of censorship. "Talking in code" for something that has already become socially acceptable, has its own social purposes - it allows for the hateful to bond over their hatred more strongly than if they were explicit, because the "shared language" is a strong signal of in-group belonging.
> A culture that produces that kind of hatred will not be stopped by losing
> a channel to express it. Word of mouth spreads quickly,
> and actions speak even louder.
Every society have some people without a mic that are blatantly inhuman. A society becomes it when you give them a mic.
Most people aren't "given the mic" by some benevolent all-powerful force, they just grab a mic and use it.
Then the 80s came and you had cable TV which didn’t require a broadcast license, you had video tape, and you had the repeal of the fairness doctrine.
Prior to all that the only way you’d get your weird message out was through print, which reqires someone to pay for the printing and distribution, so it’s slower and more limited, and print doesn’t have the same emotional punch of TV or radio.
Obviously the Internet has turbocharged this transition. If it were the 80s someone like Andrew Tate would have a very hard time getting an audience. He’d have to use print, and probably a lot of his material would be age restricted. The closest analogue I can think of is Hugh Hefner, and to read his stuff you had to be over 18, although obviously a lot of boys got their hands on a Playboy or two.
This makes so much sense, that what seeks to destroy freedoms felt compelled to warp the notion of free speech. Now look how much those free speech absolutists actually care about free speech. A classic case of the Paradox of Tolerance.
> by some benevolent all-powerful force, they just grab a mic and use it.
> Do you mean disallowing people who make nasty radio broadcasts?
you either respect the sovereignty of an individual and they are responsible for their actions, or not and if you dont then follow that to its logical conclusion. which would be that all people are not responsible for anything ever, because even the broadcaster was told to by his own life and culture, and so on and so forth until your litigating the first living goo on the planet.
> "kill your own baby"
> you either respect the sovereignty of an individual and
> they are responsible for their actions,
An individual lives in a society. Waiting for some other country to sacrifice their 18 years old to clean up your mess because you insisted that you couldn't possibly know what happens when you normalize intolerance is not so nice. And maybe there is no country who could possibly help your compatriots to get rid of their autocrats, so be careful if you try.
____
So with regard to the paradox of tolerance, I would say one needs to establish that their opponent's views are actually sufficiently intolerant to intrinsically be harmful - and this is not something one can always trust to be done without exaggeration.
but property crime and assault are not their right. and those are illegal. so we are already covered there.
Try stopping Hitler from rounding up Jews. Or try to stop Trump's unlawfulness. You are invariably too late by then.
the broadcaster doesnt control my body. i can listen to a broadcast, respect the persons right to assert that we should "get rid of browns", and then simply disagree and think that person is at best ignorant and at worst evil. my capacity to do so is a fundamental requirement for humans to be sentient and participate in a democracy.
if listeners really are the brainless zombies some of the people here advocate for 'protecting' weve got a bigger problem.
if someone broadcasts "kill ur bb" then we should punish those went and killed a bb. the broadcaster has not damaged property or person.
my freedom of speech, whether serious or satire, should not be limited just because there are evil people in the world.
It is about intolerants demanding that their intolerance and inhumane views will be normalized. By the time enough regular people have shifted towards normalizing it, you are too late to come in action. Because you don't have the minds for stopping that.
That is how you burn Jews in concentration camps. That is how you deport Untermensche without due process. Regular people consent to it, and with that they block the anti-dote.
Autocracy is war for the mind. Because to few stand to benefit from it, you have to be lured in via moral degradation.
I disagree with blaming the genocide on "culture". It seems clear that this event like many others came from a nexus of interests, money, ideology and, sure, culture.
And btw, if you blame massacres on culture, you have a whole lot of cultures you can blame, given the history of mass murder and genocide around the world.
That said, I think your take is also empirically supported. There is this [1] very interesting study which comes to the same conclusion. It uses broadcast range of radio towers to do a quantitative analysis on the potential effects and finds few. Interestingly enough, I have seen other studies with similar designs that do show persistent effects of exposure to broadcasts, so I’m favorable to the idea that this one really is a valid null finding.
[1] https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20100423-atrauss-rtlm-radio-hat...
Also, the past isn't just defined by slavery. There are plenty of examples we can learn from the people before us.
According to other pages on this same site, the primary motivation for the people behind RTLM (rich powerful people, incl the presidential family) to spread said hate, was fears that Tutsis would sabotage their own country in support of the invading RPF.
This is the exact same fear that made Americans put their Japanese-American countrymen into concentration camps during WWII. So to me, either you're saying that Rwandan culture in the early 90s was pretty much the same as US culture in the 1940s, or something else than culture is to blame.
Obviously the Japanese-Americans weren't mass-murdered, so it's not a fair comparison, but I'm not immediately convinced things would've been super mega different if the Japanese army had already conquered the entire US west coast and was quickly moving eastward. People would be very afraid.
thomassmith65•8mo ago
dav_Oz•8mo ago
https://archive.ph/fy9SC