Part Two: Ancient Genocide and the War on Carthage

So UM, if you want to help, you can go to bTB fundraiser for pd X Diaper Bank at go fund me. Just type and go fund me b TB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank. Again, that's go fund Me bTB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank, or find the link in the show notes. Thank you all. Oh what's shitting Orange my Joe? That's hell yeah, just for for for us, for nobody else a time. How you doing, Joe for

part two of our genocide Spectacular? I'm good. UM, you know I I often um and like my people that listen to my show often joke that I surprise my guests with the genocide. Uh. And this time it gets to happen to me and it's it's quite nice. You know. I did almost open this episode with what's eliminating ethnic groups? My every people in the history of the human race, But that wouldn't I just didn't want to see Sophie's disappointed face one more time. I can feel her shaking

her head. No, across the internet, she always is somewhere. Probert, you could never disappoint me. I often have. So Part two, everybody's good to go. This is behind the bastards, by the way, you're Joka Sabian, co hosted the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, asked, let's get back to some genocide, so as I'm sure everyone listening to this show is aware of. The United States is currently in a bit

of a moral panic over the fact that transgender people exist. Uh. The groomer discourse, which has arisen on the right wing um in which trans and now increasingly all queer people are accused of being child molesters. Are one of the child molesters because they like write books that tell kids that people who aren't aren't this gender exist. Um, yeah, the folks have been accusing this. Are folks like on the left and queer people have been pointing out that

this is eliminationist rhetoric. Right this is potentially the kind of rhetoric that can lead to a genocide. Um. And the basic fear is that right wing thought leaders are trying to convince their followers that transgender people are pedophilic monsters because you can do anything to pedophiles, right, Like it is exactly so if you can like lump a group of people and is being that it doesn't matter

what you do to them. Um. Now, I've seen a number of number of posts in this line on on the int our webs that have brought Dr Gregory Stanton's ten stages of genocide, which he laid out in nineteen eight six and were revamped in UM. Step one is classification e g. Splitting society into us in them rather than using mixed categories. This is not always done intentionally. This often just kind of happens, but it can feed and do what later becomes a genocide. Next is symbolization,

which gives names or symbols to the classification. The most obvious example of this from history would be the yellow star that Jewish people were forced to wear a Nazi Germany or indeed the purple triangle that that that homosexual people were made to wear. Um. Next comes discrimination on a legal basis, and then to humanization, which is comparison of members of the target group to insects or vermin um. This is also this is not in his list, but

plague bacillus is a really common one, particularly by the Nazis. Um. I think that had something to do with the fact that there had been a plague not that long before the rise of the Nazis, famously in Rwanda. Yes, cockroaches. Uh. We will chat about a little bit more later. Um. And then there's organization, which is the forming of militias and other not crucially nonstate groups geared towards the elimination

of targeted people. Polarization is number six, in which extremists drive groups apart and broadcast propaganda in the mass media to indoctrinate people with hate. Now, most of the time when I see people bringing up stantons tend stages of genocide to talk about how that's where the rights trying to push people. Uh, they will least the United States at either step four or step six. And you can

certainly make a strong case for either. UM. But while doctor Stanton scale has has its uses, I'm not like shipping on it or anything. I think the way in which people are interpreting it leads to some inaccurate beliefs about how genocide tends to proceed um. And it overall pushes people towards a more mechanistic and centralized view of

how genocides occur. UM. And while this discan't this does describe some historic genocides well, because he's looking back at genocides and trying to describe them in stages, I don't know that it's super used in predicting them um. Which right, UM, I would argue that it's not UM simply, I mean, I'm not, of course, I'm not hating in its research, as research is great. It's just um, I think it takes a lot of agency from the perpetrators of genocides themselves. UM.

I think it's very good. UM. And I mean even Strauss sometimes does this as well. It's very good to everyone does when you're doing this kind of history right

to right stint. Yeah, it's it's something. It's very very good to understand the organization of the radical core that makes all genocides possible, but isn't inevitable radical cores conform and there can still not be a genocide, yes, um And I also like the kind of the fact that we're sort of critiquing this doesn't mean we're not saying, like, for example, trans people should not be concerned about the rhetoric coming up the right as elimination is not saying

that at all. Just I think focusing on the stages in the way that people do kind of leads people to inaccurate that expectations about how things proceed and have proceeded historically. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Um So in order to get into that, let's start with another example from ancient history. This is one that you brought up to me, Joe, when I mentioned that I wanted to do this episode. The Asian Vespers of eight eight b C. The Asiatic vespers. Romans got the

hit with the reverse card. Yes, exactly, Yeah, this is the uno reverse of the of the genocide that they did in Carthage. Um. So, starting in like ninety one b C, Romans had what they called the social War, which was social because the people they lived next to Italians were not Roman citizens, but they had to submit

to some Roman policies. They couldn't vote, they weren't like, I don't know, as a general rule, when people have to submit to policies by a government but have no say in that government, they can get unhappy with that. This is not a thing Americans would be familiar with, right, nothing like that has ever happened here. Um, That never never occurred in this part of the world. So eventually

the Italians go to war with the Romans. I'm not going to get into detail about that, but they call it the social War, which is funny because it is unbelievably brutal. And this is also this is a pattern in Roman history where like a group of people who are close to the imperial corps will have an uprising because their rights are being denied, and they will make demands which will be denied, and then they'll fight a war. The Romans will crush them brutally and then grant most

of the demands later. That's what happens here because like, the Italians get everything they want after the Romans wipe out like a generation of them. Yeah, there's few of your rights to so exactly for us, um, so yeah, the Rome is at war with Italy uh in this period. And while this is all going down, um there's a you know this place called Pontus, which is in the

modern day Black Sea region of Turkey. Um and the guy who runs it is a king named mithradit s mythri Dates uh whatever you want to call him, the six and he starts like rubbing his hands together like that guy in that meme, you know, the me the guy rubbing his hands together. It wasn't a birdman's doing this, That's exactly mithraddyes is like that's what he's doing, looking at Rome fighting Italy, like oh yeah, I'm gonna get

some ship. So famously, uh Mithradates uh was also related and again this is something that goes back through histories. It's related into the neighboring kingdom of Armenia and the partness as well they share to um so Rome and the people's and like that whole region of the world, you know, the code which generally like they'll call these guys like uh, Persians a lot of the time, like it's all like it's this, you know, it's Asia, right,

Like that's what the to the ROMs. This is just Asia um and they fought a while, and they would fight many more wars in the future. Um. So old Mithraddys decides that, like, while the Republic's got his back turned, he's going to annex to neighboring kingdoms that have like tight relationships with Rome, primarily like trading based. So because Rome has so much economic interest in the area. They

have a Roman commission to Asia. Um and the guy who's running it, basically the guy who's running the Roman Commission to Asia is like, hey, methradityas you can't annex these places. You have to give them back to their kings. You have to restore their sovereignty. And the head of the Roman commission doesn't do this because he's a cool dude, but because he's been bribed, right, like these guys paid

him to do it. Um. Because you know, stuff can't come back, Like it's not like Rome is centralized for the day. But it's not like he can radio back home and be like what do you want me to do? Like that takes like six months to get anything back, right. Um. So, the two countries that Methraddys had annexed, Cappadocia and Bithnia get freed because Methradityas doesn't really want a straight up

fight with the Romans at this date. But they now owe the chief Roman dude in the area a lot of money because they promised to pay him for this. Now this guy, this dude who like makes Mathradityas leave and gets bribed, is Mannius Aquillus Aquilius. We don't actually know how any of these names were pronounced, because here's the fun thing. As a guy who took three years of Latin, nobody in knows how ancient Latin was pronounced.

We know how people have said like ecclesiastic Latin, but it is different, like nobody actually understands exactly how Romans would have said everything. Um So Mannius Aquilius, head of the Roman delegation, tells the king of I think Cappadocia and Nikomedes that a good way to get money that he owes Mannius might be by invading Pontus and taking

their stuff. Now, the fact that they had just been annexed by Pontas, if you're a smart person, you may be like, well, maybe these guys can't beat Pontus in a war. If this just happened right, like, maybe their invasion won't go well, maybe this is a stupid idea. You might think Mannius Aquillis would have would think that, but he does not. So Nikamedes tries to invade Pontus, and they just ta get curb stomped by mithradityas um

just just absolutely pounded. So next, I'm gonna quote from a write up for the University of Chicago's Encyclopedia Romana quote mathread. Methraditys retook Cappadocia in Bitthania, defeating Ni comedies at the river Amnius, fighting against chariots armed with sides on the wheels. The army was terrified at seeing men cutting halves and still breathing or mingled in fragments or hanging on the sides, Overcome rather by the hideousness of the spectacle, but then by loss of the fight. Fear

disordered their ranks. Methradity Is then swept into fr Gia and the Roman province of Asia. Aquilius, who so ill advisedly had precipitated the war without ratification from the Senate, fled the mainland, but was given up by the citizens of Madeleine. Ridiculed and paraded on an ass. He eventually was executed, relates Appian when Methradates poured golden molten gold down his throat, thus rebuking the Romans for their bribe taking. And this is a cool and good way of executing

like powerful rich people. That happens a bunch of times to Romans in it Like this is not the last time a Roman will be force fed molten gold in this part of the world. It's pretty cool. It's objective, like Methradity is. I'm not calling him a great guy, but like, it's pretty cool to do this to guys like that. I want to say, this happens as someone Methradity. I mean, um, it happens to um. Happen to these um uh relatives later on, but I can't remember. Cool.

That's good. You know it famously happens, so you know later during the time of like Caesar, and you've got like Caesar, Pompey and crasses Um and Crosses is like the richest guy in the world at the time. Some people will argue he's the richest dude there ever was.

He made like a big chunk of his fortune by when there would be fires in Rome, he owned a fire department and would go to people and he would be like, you want me to save your house, you gotta like give me your house, like sell me your house and then you'll be able to get your ship out at least. And like that's so big asshole. He like goes to war in kind of this vague region of the world against like Parthia because he's a dick

uh and his army gets its ass. Again. This is one of those times where like the Romans lose like a whole generation of young men. Um. And yeah, all according to legend, he gets killed by having gold poured down his throat to the richest man in history, which is neat army through the mountains of Parthia and getting wrecked. It was like kind of an origin story for a lot of important people in Roman Mark. Antony did that too. Yeah, it's like getting chicken pox for Roman military leaders. She's

just gotta go get your ass wrecked in Asia. Um. So again, obviously, so far this is broadly speaking morally unproblematic um within the context of ancient history. Um. But if you know your Roman history, you know that, like and maybe if this hadn't happened, if he'd gotten back to Rome, there's a decent chance they would have like executed Marcus, like thrown him off the Tarpeian rock or something for for fucking around. Um they did that sometimes.

But now a Roman elected leader has been executed by a foreign king, and Rome does not take kindly to that ship. Um. So things start churning up for a war, and Methreadityase or mithrid Dates whatever decides his first step should be to cleanse his new territory of all Roman citizens. And this is where things get genociety. Quote A eight b c. And a measure of the hatred felt for

the Romans in Asia. Methredites wrote secretly to all his sat traps and city governors that on the thirtieth day thereafter they should set up on all Romans and Italians in their towns, and upon their wives and children and their freedmen of Italian birth, kill them and throw their bodies out unburied, and share their goodsmith with King Mithraddys. Tens of thousands were massacred. Valarious Maximus records eighty thousand deaths, Plutarch A hundred and fifty thousand, and what has been

called the Asian or Ephesian vespers um. So yeah, this this is a definitely genocide. Um, pretty pretty clear example of a genocide, and one that happens very rapidly. It might be most common, it might be most reasonable to dry compare it to Rwanda, where there were there were pre existing tensions because the Romans had kind of come into this area with all the money. They were backed

by this state that had bossed people around. They were like landlords and they were bankers, and they were like seen as kind of economically oppressing people in the regions, seen as arrogant, seen as like backed by this outside state that was unfairly exerting power in the area. And so people had been pissed for a while. And when Methredys takes over and says like, hey, it's time to get rid of these motherfucker's, there's a lot of folks who are like willing to do it because of these

pre existing ethnic tensions. Um. Yeah, obviously with the main difference of these ethnic tensions or actually different ethnicities and not invented, yes, and not invented because these look like dudes from Italy showing up in fucking Turkey, um, which is actually again like with Garthiage, not all that far um. But yeah, so um this upsets Rome. The whole story ends after two more wars with Roman victory and the death of Methred Eyes and the rise of a guy

named Sola who sucks ass. But that's a story for another day. Um. Definitely an active historical gin side. It does not. However, again, if we're talking about Dr Stanton scale, it doesn't correspond directly to that. Now, there is an us versus them component to the massacre right that exists well prior to Methreadity is giving the order right, the fact that there are these divisions that Romans are kind of seen as other. But there's no build up to this. Really,

there's no propaganda arm to to humanize them. There's no gradual stage of separating Romans from other people in their community. Um. He issues secret orders that local officials and their levies fulfill. Um, and as an incentive, he divides the property of the dead Romans between himself and the inhabitants of the city

that they're killed in. There. Yes, that's why, right, And this is this is the thing I think scholars obviously, because we're quoting a bunch of scholars talk about this a lot, but is a general rule when people popularly discussed genocide, they almost never talked about how fucking much of it is about money. Yeah. Uh, it's starting to

become more accepted now. Um. Like, like we talked about I think in the very beginning of the last episode, is that people really wanted to believe that every perpetrator of a genocide is a dead eyed psycho who's a dead set racial baganda. Yeah. I mean that's pretty pretty solidly thrown out the window by Christopher Brownings were um and ordinary men, which then spawned one of the worst books on the Holocaust I think I've ever read, called

Hitler's Willing Executioners. Yeah, but um, yeah, it's um, there's a lot that's problematic about that. Make a long story short for people who don't want to read it. Uh. He hits the Nazis with their own race sides. Yeah, which you don't need to do. You do need to do. The only thing that could stop a bad guy with race science is a good guy with race science. And not to mention like the Rwanda genocide umps to mind immediately. With some of the new scholarships, we'll be talking about

this quite a bit. But yeah, I mean this is actually literally what we're leading into. Um. But yeah, I mean it's it's worth noting that, like, yeah, the king uh incentivizes people who inform on hidden Romans and he promises slaves freedom. He again, the genocide occurs there. There is an aspect of it as people have been pisted Romans in this region for a long time. But they have incentives, right, They don't just suddenly get let off the leash and do a genocide because they're angry at Romans.

There's it's worth it. The balance sheet makes it worth it, you know. Um. And this is an important truth about why people do do genocides because it pays. Um. Racism and nationalism are always major causes, sided along with kind of vague and constantly frustrating claims of brainwashing by propaganda. But as we'll cover, focusing on those things leads to a really myopic view about why mass killings occur. Our

earliest two genocides. We have no context about it, right, we have no We have no idea why the omnia, how the omnia justified like what they did, or how the people who killed that the people in Nata ruck justified what they did. But it seems safe to conclude that the folks carrying out the violence and uh their civilians, the civilians back home, whatever that was, probably saw there being some sort of a resource gain in killing those people.

That is very likely. Um. Popular scholarship of the Holocaust tends to focus on the Yellow stars and arson attacks on synagogues, and of course the camps, and obviously all of that's very important, but many Americans have never even heard of arianization. And in order to explain what that is,

I'm going to quote from the Holocaust Encyclopedia. Under voluntary arianization, the Nazi German state encouraged Jewish businessmen, who were already facing economic and social discrimination, to sell their businesses in Germany at radically reduced prices. In early nineteen thirty three, there were about one hundred thousand Jewish owned businesses in Germany. About half of those were small retail stores dealing mostly

in clothing or footwear. The rest were factories or workshops of varying sizes, or professional offices for lawyers, physicians, and other independent professionals. By nineteen thirty eight, the combination of Nazi terror propaganda, boycott and legislation was so effective that some two thirds of these Jewish owned enterprises were out

of business or sold to non Jews. Jewish owners, often desperate to immigrate or to sell a failing business, accepted a selling price that was only twenty or thirty percent

of the actual value of each business. And I think it's important to highlight this because you can draw a real direct line between what Mathradates is doing what the Nazis are doing here, right, Oh, yeah, absolutely, especially yeah, especially when arianization became forced, which I mean, of course you could argue that it already is forced, but when it when it becomes you know, there they go from voluntary to force, and the Nazis sense of the word

when they start deportations all their property outside of like precious metals and things, which end up vanishing into Swiss bank accounts and are you still there to this day they get auctioned off at drastically reduced prices to German civilians. Yes, um, and yeah it's um. Obviously, like one of the things to notice that what Mathradity does is faster, because like it's years between arianization and the actual physical elimination of

Jewish human beings. In Europe on a mass scale. Um, there's a good Again, this is not something that gets talked about, especially in our popular retellings of the Holocaust. It tends to get glossed over. There's one very good movie that is like focused on arianization, although it's arianization on the Eastern Front during the invasion of Russia by

the Nazis. It's called The Shop on Main Street. Uh. It one of foreign oscars made in the USSR in like the sixties, um, and it is all about a local dude named Tono who's like just like a Russian dude who's like brother collaborates. I think it's his brother collaborates with the Nazis, and because his brother is working with them, this like kind of he's the town drunk basically gets given a Jewish woman's business and he like

tries to hide her and stuff. It's it's a very bleak movie, um, but it's a good movie about that aspect of the genocide that I don't think I've ever seen anything else tie into it maybe. And one of the things that's really interesting about The Shop on Main Street I recommend watching it is that this is again

filmed in the US. Are in like the sixties, So all of the people acting in the movie had lived through this, Like the actors in this movie had either participated in or watched their neighbors give up their Jews when they were kids, like during the Nazi advance. So it's they're not so much acting as like remembering and it's. Um, it is a potent film, Like you should watch The

Shop on Main Street. It's a very good movie. Just like have something like the new Nicholas Cage movie to put on afterwards that will be less sad um because holy sh it isn't bleak World War two movie about Yeah, I can't believe it's depressing anyway, I'm gonna go have a nice palate Come and See. Yeah, I would say it's on the level of Come and See in terms of bleakness, not in terms of like how intense the imagery of Come and See is, which is like nothing else. Um. Yeah,

Russian movies about the World War Two. Uh yeah, it's it's interesting because like when you think about the fact that um Mathraditis and the Nazis had the same basic idea, but he immediately proceeded to genocide and it took them years. You might conclude. One of the things you might conclude from this is that a benefit from modern civilization, and that is that in order to get a population to buy into a genocide, you have to separate the killing

from the financial gain by a couple of years, um. Everybody. I'm not sure if that does speak well of civilization, Like, I know, you can try and you can interpret that however you would like. If that's what you choose to take out of this lesson, I would argue that it does not, especially because it seems like the most genocide is not all, but most in the modern era, Like the vast majority of work that has done is done to make it palatable, um, not only to lay people

in civilization, but also to the perpetrators. Yeah. And it's because this might shuck some people. Ideology isn't all that important for people doing the killing. It's important for people doing the organizing. Yeah, and that's what we're we're this is I mean, this is all what we're talking thinking about. But first, you know, who doesn't organize people to participate in an ethnic cleansing in order to make financial benefits

for a specific class of people. We actually don't know that. Well, Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it could be and they are certain have. Um, the Ford Motor Company when abducts children for their child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia, they abduct children from all socioeconomic classes, all major religious and racial groups, all kinds of kids on the child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. That's the guarantee, the the guarantee

of of equality. Freely sourced children. Yeah, are kidnapping gangs, do not see race. Ah, we're back. So we've discussed a shortcoming I think of Dr Stanton scale, and again we're not trying to show them like his research or anything. This is primarily even not really an issue with this scale, but with like the way it is popularly interpreted, like it's a like genocide is a thermometer, right um, gonn to dial up the genocide? Yeah, yeah, temperature. Um, that's

not quite how it works. And I'd like to present folks with another rubric that they might find more useful for determining how people and specifically individual people, this does, you know, kind of work on communities get to tip to the point where they are willing to participate in genocide. Right, Um, This is another way of looking at it that I find more useful. We can talk about like the shortcomings of this way as well, if um and I'm sure

we will. Genocide historian Irvin Staub, who, by the way, was only alive to do his research because Raoul Wallenberg saved his life. He's one of the he's one of the kids that Wallenberg hid in like a house during the genocide in Hungary. Um Staub was a pioneer in understanding, specifically the temporal procession of motivations in individuals who consent to take part in genocide. That was like a thing he was really interested in, is what is happening in

the head? Like are the different things that have to happen for someone to be like willing to do this? You know um up until his and he's obviously he's he's very much working off of the work that Limcoln pioneer. He quotes Limpton Limpcoln constantly in his book. You know, none of these people are like doing anything entirely like

this is scholarship, right, everybody's like participating and building and understanding. UM. Up until his book was published in nineteen eighty nine, there was fairly little organized scholarship concerned with how individuals changed over time to support genocide. Staub focused on what he called a continuum of destruction, which other scholars have

empirically documented in studies of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia. The findings of all of this research on motivation were aptly described by one of the scholars who followed Staub, Scott Strauss, who wrote a Rwanda quote. Rwandans killed for multiple reasons. Others joined in the attacks for one reason, but then continued for other reasons. Their motivations changed over time. Um Now.

I found a good article published in twenty by Jan Reinerman and Smothey Williams in the incredibly named International Journal of Violence. I think it's actually called Violence and International Journal, but either way, it's a pretty pretty cool title for

a thing. Um now. Based on the research of guys like stalbin Strass going all the way back to Limpkeoln, they propose a sort of hierarchy of needs in list ways in which different motivations can influence those needs to make people capable of like directly carrying out mass murder quote. To understand why individuals engage in violent action, we need to understand both their motivations and inhibitions, both of which stem from certain needs, inhibitions conceptually being motivations for not

engaging in violent action. As such, we can identify individual hierarchies of needs, and only when the most salient one is a motivation for action will an individual participate. Now to explain why they present a chart listing the needs of an individual and specific moment, which can generally be categorized as security, moral integrity, social belonging, and a desire

for better life conditions. So, for security, if persons to I are to keep themselves safe, might lead them to participate in a genocide to avoid coercion, violence, or the threat of violence from the state or another group. A person's moral integrity might keep them from killing if they

believe that murdering people is always wrong. A person's need for social belonging might convince them to kill if doing so will keep them in good with the group, and likewise, they might not be willing to kill if that will ostracize them from the from the people around them, and they need to improve their own Individual circumstances might of course lead a person to support genocide for economic gain.

Quote This can be illustrated through the actions of a Rwandan Hutu who might have faced strong pressure from other hohotoos to participate. As Strauss argues, this was the most common motivation for people to participate in the killings and rendered the need for security a most salient and the hierarchy of needs and motivations at this time in a similar vein, an example of coercion can be found in Cambodia, where coercion caused a diffuse feeling of anxiety in which

everyone feared becoming a victim themselves, making fear endemic. Furthermore, coercion in this case provoked strict obedient to the orders of their superiors for the fear of life threatening consequences. Some former cadres of the Khmer Rouge claimed that if people did not kill and follow the rules, they would be killed, or stated they were fearful for their security. A statement of a former camer Rouge illustrated this as follows, But it was the order from higher and if they

did not do it, they were also killed. Therefore, whether they wanted to do it or not, they had to do it. They just followed the order. Now, yeah, yeah, that that tracks, especially m Rwanda. I mean, the vast majority of the genocide wasn't committed by arms of the state, though the Rwandan military did help. Most of us done by Hutu power militias in the inter homeway, and uh like a huge number of the victims of that genocide

are also moderate Hutus who refused the tip part. And yeah, people, you can actually go on the Rwanda Genocide Museum's website and and watch a ton of perpetrator uh like interviews and virtually all of them will point out that the community was doing it. Um. I was worried that if I didn't take part, I too would be killed. And also I stole their stuff. It's like the three things. Yeah, and that I think that's what's so important, is that, like it is all it's not just fear of coercion.

It's not just that someone is ordering them um. And it's not just that they have an economic benefit. It is a continuum of things that kind of you know, and again you could get overly mechanistic with this in views like flipping switches. It's not quite. It's just it's the same way that like, you know, people in any circumstance can do things they would not expect of themselves because things change that like alter the calculus they're making in the moment about like what is what is the

thing to do? Um? And it's I think that's much more useful than just being like, well, if you brainwash certain people, you can get them to commit genocide. Um. It's more like if if you can provide the proper incentives in the proper away at the right time, people can are willing to engage in horrific things that they would consider impossible of themselves in a different situation. Right.

I mean, that's one of the main reasons why the Holocausts switch from being mass shootings to death camps, because human beings cannot continuously do that forever. No, no, and they will break they as they did. And we can talk about like the rates of alcoholism among the SS or like just like the fact that um uh, like so many of those guys killed themselves, right, which you

shouldn't you shouldn't feel bad for them. But it's just like there's a certain there's a certain subset of the human population who could who could shoot, you know, unarmed people all day long and not have any effect, but it's not a lot of them, and it's not most of the people who do that kind of thing. Um. So the need for social belonging is also a well documented and powerful motivation for many participants in genocide. Obviously, a lot of Germans why their neighbors be led away

and avoided speaking up. And this is an area where like the popular view was often because like, well, if they had said something, they would have gotten in trouble. Um. And we just talked about how coercion is a factor, especially in Rwanda, but it's also not as much of a factor in a lot of genocides as you think, for example, in Germany. Um. One thing that is worth noting is that soldiers in Germany were not punished or executed for refusing to participate in genocide. They were ostracized

by their fellows sometimes. I'm sure some dudes got like beat up or whatever by their buddies, like if you're talking about like individual coercion, but the state did not execute German soldiers for refusing to kill Jewish people, of course,

now and or and um, ordinary men. Christopher Browning points out before every mass killing, to include the largest mass killing of beings, yeah, which the Russians are shelling or we're shelling yes, yeaheah, the Holocaust Royal specifically good stuff like the it's noted that I mean this is a reserve police battalion. I believe reserve police telling a one oh one or something. Um, yeah, we're like given explicit permission, like you don't have to do this if you don't

want to, like you can request to transfer. Has had an out. So again, it's not just any of these factors, because social coercion can be totally absent in the way that it's like in the way that we were describing earlier, where it's a fear of your own physical security right for not participating, that is not a necessary precursor of genocide.

It can be um and it's it's it's interesting here because one of the things that is worth noting because I don't want to just be talking about why genocides happen. If you want to look at like how to prevent them or to mitigate them. One of the most successful things you can do is protest in the moment against it. And this is a thing that was successful in Nazi

Germany against the Nazis um. On a number of occasions, people who protested direct acts of deportation and killing did not tend to be imprisoned or harmed by the state. In fact, the state on a number of occasions backed off, and stal writes it lengths about the power of bystanders to influence, or, at least in specific limited instances, halt and and and slow down the process of genocide. And when talking about this, he points to a well documented

psychological phenomenon, the bystander effect. When a number of people are present in an emergency, significant number, somebody gets hit by a car or something, and there's a bunch of folks watching, responsibility is diffused, and each individual person on scene is less likely to help, right, because they assume someone else who knows better is going to get in there. Right. We could talk about the cops stacked up at Vivaldi refusing to like. That may be a different thing, but like,

I'm sure that was a factor in what was happening. Psychologically, UM, the same thing that causes most people in a room to ignore when like a dude slaps his girlfriend, UM is at play when agents of the state come to disappear people. Stout points out that even the Nazis backed

away repeatedly in the face of public resistance. Quote, they did not persist, for example, when Bulgaria, where people protested in the streets, refused to hand over its Jewish population, or when within Germany, relatives and some institutions protested the killing of the mentally retarded, mentally ill, and others regarded as genetically inferior um. Like there were cases in which and and there was a backlash after Christal Knock that

caused changes in Nazi policy. And this is against the Some of these scholars who are talking about it in the in the way that we've just been discussing, will say that what's happening here is that in that moment where like you're trying to round up people, and folks show up to protest your human need for moral integrity can kind of switch to make you incapable temporarily of at least like continuing to do the thing you had

come there to do. Right. You had come there morally willing to round up these people for genocide, but the the approbation of the community around you suddenly makes you unwilling to do that in that moment. Doesn't mean they weren't willing to do it later. Um, But it doesn't

mean that like they decide that it's morally wrong, you know. Um. A big factor in what may be happening is that when they are presented with a crowd of people protesting them, they suddenly think, why might get punished for this later? This might not be safe for me, Like, if this is pissing off this many people, I actually might like

have to like deal with consequences for participating in this, right. Um. So that may be part of what's going on, But it does point to and this is something STAB points out a lot. It's actually not useless to like, one of the most useful things you can do at every stage of like of of kind of building genocidal tensions is make it clear that like you hate what these people are doing and you oppose them, um, because that has a number of influences that can like at least

mitigate the harms that are being done. Um. And that's this is kind of gets to like the root of what the humanization dialogue is getting at. You know. The problem that most often when people talk about to humanizing in the context of genocide, they frame it as the use of specific language to deny people their humanity UM in order to prepare to execute a genocide UM. And that's not always how it goes, and in fact, there's

more evidence for it occurring the opposite way around. In Cambodia, for example, killers reported being disturbed by the acts of mass murder they committed it first, and then reported that it got easier with time, like killing ducks and chickens.

And part of this is that like the longer you do this without people stopping you, and the more the less like resistance you encounter to it, the more it just seems like if you're in a culture where people are doing this, you feel less like number one, you're gonna get punished for it, less like it's a problem.

It gets more like That's a big part of like what the humanization is not what happens before, but what happens like during UM And a lot of the participants in the Cambodian genocide will say that, like they hated what they were doing at first, and then with time they just came to regard it as like killing ducks and chickens, you know, the way they'd slaughtered animals as kids on the farm. UM. They integrated the execution of human beings in their lives into their lives in order

to like protect themselves right. Um and professor Eliza Luft has also written and researched this topic extensively, and she writes, quote, I find that the humanization is more often an outcome of participation in violence rather than a precursor. In other words, people make difficult decisions about whether or not to participate in genocide based on their access to financial resources, who they're being asked to kill, their proximity to extremists ordering

the violence, and signals sent by local elites. But the more they kill, the easier killing becomes, and this is partly due to shifts in social perception. Although a vincent genocide describe reactions that include vomiting, shaking, nightmares, and trauma the first few times they kill, over time their physical and emotional horror at killing subsides. My research suggests this cognitive adaptation of violence goes hand in hand with a

transformation and how ordinary killers perceive their victims. Dehumanizing propagandic and help with this process, but providing participants with cultural narratives that frame violence is the morally right thing to do. And this is when we talk about preventing genocide you mentioned earlier, like the racial motivations and stuff. That's key at like the core of people who are trying to

plan and organize this. One of the ways to disrupt it, you have to disrupt all of these potential incentives, right. It's about creating friction for the people who want to organize this. It's about making it difficult for folks to profit. It's about making it difficult for people to feel like

this is okay. It's about making them like see and encounter resistance constantly at every stage of this, because that's a big part of like stopping people from feeling stopping people from like stopping the people who will actually do most of the activity of genocide from getting from feeling like they this is a good thing for them to do. Um, it's disrupting like the signaling and the messaging that that that brings people in, you know, like that's the stage

at which you can stop this stuff. Yeah, I think that there's there's certainly a level of feeling of impunity, and most of the people that would end up doing these things, they'll they'll also, in my opinion, a lot of the people who would end up committing the violence

didn't actually ever see themselves doing it. Um Like the Reserve Italian that Christopher Browning writes about, those guys were all people who were um uh like discharge from military service or not allowed to have military service due to medical problems. So it's a job like they thought they were gonna like go be occupied territory cops and ship um. And as far as like uh the Rwandan Genna said, or even the Armenian gen I said, where a lot

of violence is communal. Uh, there's there's an intense um economic problem, economic friction and a history of conflict with these people between the two groups, and unfortunately just takes someone to harness it and allow them to be in a position to grant impunity. Um. But I think that the communities they are taking part in it, uh like you've pointed out, or only doing it because they're like, well, we're clearly going to get away with this, Like they're not,

They're not gonna live. Nobody starts off, you know, uh, starting a checkpoint with a a chetty outside of if they think like there's would be a trial in like six months exactly exactly and part of like, you know, one of the things that Left points out is that like a thing that can influence populations to participate is like their proper their proximity to extremists ordering the violence.

What stand them to point out is like these malicious, these nonstate groups, which is like one of the reasons why when anti fascists talk about the point the value of like confronting groups in the street at the early stages of this, that's part of the value of that. It's not just that like you'll stop them from coming out, because in a lot of ways it just makes them

want to come out. It's other people who might kind of passively go along with them when they start setting up checkpoints, seeing how much resistance there is to those groups and the things that they say, Right, it's about keeping Yeah, some of it is about because again there's a number of things that can like flip in a

person that can make them willing to participate this. It's it's about trying to make it so that people never feel like this is a thing they can participate in with impunity or without being ostracized from society, right, Like that's that's that's part of it. That's part of it, Like none of this there's no simple solution to stopping genesis. Oh, of course, that's part of something. It's something that we've been trying to figure out since Raphael Emkin first wrote

his insanely long book. But like a good example of this is like, oh, the water is getting too hot. Time to fucking bail. Is like the plots against Hitler during World War Two. I mean, yeah, there was several plots against him early on, but they really only picked up once it became pretty fucking clear that like, yeah, this this, this ship is coming down on us. Yeah, Like the famous Staufenberg plot was like not because Staufenberg hated the Nazis, it was because he didn't like that

they were losing. Yeah, i mean he was a Nazi and he was anti Semitic, and he was one of those guys. It's like, okay, so death camps a stepped too far, But even even that, it seemed like and then that seemed but even then him and most of the central organizers of that plot had all been on the Eastern Front at some point and they were like, we're gonna fucking lose. Yeah, we're going to We're gonna lose.

And also when you're at that level of command where you're like sitting with Hitler to bunker, you know, not only are we're gonna lose, but like, oh ship, there's going to be hell to pay, and this is coming down on us. There is going to be hell to pay. It isn't the consequences of my action. Yeah, speaking of the consequences of my actions. If you buy these products and services, the main consequence of your actions is that you'll finally be happy. All right, here's that. All right,

we are back. So you know, people, I think, as we're repeatedly getting onto here, are complicated and so our genocides and we're never talking about a single reason. You know, again, in every genocide, there's probably there's individual people whose motivations are very simple and can be as simple as like I'm just a piece of it. You know, those guys like Oscar Durro Linger, like these guys exist, right, there's people who just suck ass like comprehensively, and that's why

they're on board. But you you can't actually do a whole genocide with just those people. No, you need the they need the whole banality of evil to back you up exactly exactly. UM. And that's the thing like I think people UM misinterpret that sometimes is like being entirely focused on like guys like um Aikman, who are these like bureaucrats. But like part of it is that motivations

for genocide can be ben ow they're not. Everyone was radicalized to think that the Jews were this like Titanic threat. It's like, no, they were like they they participated in the Holocaust for pretty banal reasons in a lot of cases. Yeah, And there's a lot of attempting to make things palatable

for people. Like a good example like, um, the very beginning stages of the Holocaust is like, well, you know, before they started death campster killing the mentally ill, um, the disabled, And that was to you know that we don't hate these people, um, but you know they're you know, evolutionary dead ends. Um. They're hurting everybody, but this is

better for them, you know. UM. And you see a good parallel of that in my opinion and in the peak of the elimination eliminationist rhetoric that we're seeing in the United States right now is um, the framing of trans identity is mental illness. Yes, um, so you well, you want to cure mental illness, right, Like why wouldn't you want to do that? So you have states like Florida or I believe Texas and a few others who are forcing de transition on people, um in order to

cure them. And it's I think it's it's both that they are talking about forcing de transition because these people need to be cured, but they're also talking about um they're a belief that they're spreading it, right, which justifies could be used to justify elimination in the same way that like the Nazis talked about the Jews and how like you can't let people who are just like a quarter Jewish lib because they're spreading this like there's something

inherently you know. And again this is the high level justification for it. But like this is also that's part of why the individuals got on board, is like this this this rhetoric that was explained to them, like because you have to give people some kind of explanation, right, people feel a threat from the state or they feel like that they're going to be ostracized, and also the propaganda lets them feel that they're victims are somehow less

human and not just that but a threat to them, right. Um. And you you get some of this in like the correspondence of einstets group of talking about like what, we have to kill these babies because they'll grow up into Jews will like threaten our babies and stuff. Um. And so you know the killing is justified. But also it's not just that it's that I'm getting paid to do this.

This is my job. This is keeping me away from a more dangerous chunk of the front um or maybe I'll get a promotion from the party if I'm like doing it, you know, this other role in like the Holocaust or something. If I can effectively move all these people on these trains, you know, it's it's almost best to look at the willingness of members of a population to participate or allow genocide to occur with their consent,

as like the weakening of an immune system. Like there's certain individual barriers and people that make them unwilling to support something like this. And you don't just like flip a switch over time, but you you weaken barriers and you get them to like, well, you know, you're not saying yes to massacre in all these people, but like, let's get them out of our community. Um, let's get them out of our schools, let's shut down their ability

to operate clinics. Let's do And like the every kind of new incentive weakens more barriers, and again things get you know, It's like we just talked about Staffenberg, high level Nazi UM and he was deeply anti Semitic. He believed in the Nuremberg Laws and see anything wrong with them. His main problem is he didn't he thought killing them was too far. But once you've gotten to that point,

what what barrier is? They're like, you've already you've already acquiesced to camps, to arianization, to force deportation, Like, really, how far of a jump is it? For most people? And for him, I mean, he didn't attempt to kill

Hitler because of the Holocaust. So for for people like him, who I fully believe would be and are generally the vast majority of people that are the you know, the state actors of any kind of genocidal powder, whether it be the Empire, Nazi, Germany, UH, the United States, uss R, whoever, UM, the vast majority of people will talk themselves into accepting a certain amount of this um that they directly have their hands in, or they can directly see, and whatever

happens beyond what they see, and that somebody else's problem, I can't speak of it. They'll they'll talk themselves into becoming palatable because much like you reserved police Batalion one oh one, this is this is a salary, this is the pension I can take care of my family. So I mean, you know, people are able to compartmentalize of why they need to be this, you know, horribly murderous bureaucrat,

because well, I'm just filing papers. My hands aren't bloody. Yeah, And this is I think why I have been as I think most people who participated in a lot of protests very critical about the value of protests in a lot of situations. But when it comes to stuff like they don't say gay Bill, when it comes to stuff like like okay, folks are saying some really sketchy elimination of stuff about trans people, we should get as many

fucking people out in the street. And a part of the value of that is making not the most You're

not going to change anybody's mind. I'd like the fucking Rhonda Santis level, But there's a lot of people who are more on the edge, and you're not going to make them into suddenly nicer, woke people, but you can convince them as like, oh, if things get worse and more is demanded of me against this population, there's a lot of folks who are gonna want my fucking head, you know, And there's a value you and I mean you're know, like it's like Paul Gossar as a fucking

white nationalists. You're never going to change it. And we do the psychoever, yeah, and you know, we both have in the past and will in the future, have laughed at things like polite society and things like that. But when you make a guy like that feel so deeply unwelcome and any open space because if his his rhetoric

is obscene, it simply won't happen that much anymore. Like these ideas are allowed to propagate, like you've shown and talked about before on your show, Um, where they use the guy as a freedom of speech to spread hate. They don't care about freedom of speech, they care about

spreading hate. That's it. Yeah, Um, so yeah, And I think what's important about looking at it all this way and the way that we've been talking about is that when you think about when you think about kind of getting people able to commit to participate, to allow genocide as as in this more fluid way, it frames the willingness to engage in mass killing as more fragile than people tend to think it is, which is important. This is why strident's sudden opposition in the moment can delay

or prevent acts of genocide. Is Wallen. Wallenberg stopped a shipload of people from getting deported from Budapest on fucking trains because he would wave papers in their face and yell bureaucratically at Nazi soldiers, and it made them think they'd get in trouble, right, and that saved thousands of lives.

Look at the safety community in Nan king exactly, headed by a literal Nazi who pointed out that, like all fucking contact the Counselate of of Nazi Germany, if you hurt anybody under my command, like anybody under my protection, and that that wall of like I might get in trouble is what stopped Japanese soldiers from like they They possibly saved over two or thousand people. Yeah, And the only thing that saved him was in force of arms. So that is important when a genocide is unfolding, because

once it started, you can't prevent it. You have to stop it. But in the prevention stage, the thing that stops people from the murder is this smite blow up in my face exactly exactly um. And And again that's the uplifting part of this is that like, you can,

you can, you can stop this. And and it's about like what we're talking about when a guy like Wallenberg shows up or that fucking Nazi and Nan King, they are disrupting and reordering the higher like the hierarchy of kind of needs and fears and the head of the individuals who were previously willing to undergo genocide, and they're deciding in that moment, this is not safe, this is

not a good idea, this is not beneficial in this moment. Again, you're not de radicalizing them, but you don't always need

to write um and yeah. It's honestly, I think a lot about like the way doctors can talk about suicide sometimes where it's like, well, there are and this is not everyone who participates in a genocide, but like there are moments where they're willing to especially in the case like Rwanda and other moments where they wouldn't be willing to and if you can disrupt someone in them and what they're willing to, they won't do it again necessarily. Um,

that's maybe worth thinking about. Um yeah, prevention. Prevention is real tricky. Um. I mean it's something that even people in the field of genocide studies still don't completely agree on what should do. Like famously, the guy one of the people that runs Doctors Without Borders said like, you can't stop a fucking genocide with doctors, yeah, effectively saying that once it begins, the only thing you can do is kill the perpetrators until it stops, which I don't

disagree with. I don't, I'm not I'm not going to argue with that statement. No, but obviously, like, of course, the prevention, like the key is prevention, Like, yeah, it's great that you can, you know, the collective forces of the Allies stop the Holocaust from happening or from being complete, but the goal is to stop it from getting that fun boy, it got pretty far. Yeah, um yeah, it was not not a not a speedy uh, not a speedy intervention, And they certainly didn't even intervene to stop

the Holocaust. Honestly, it was the fucking international equivalent of stacking dudes outside the door in a fucking classroom. While there's like it took way longer than it should have.

We can talk about boatloads of Jewish people being sent away from the shores of the United States during the Holocaust because the administration didn't want to seem sympathetic towards the Jews as they were trying to get support built up to enter the war, like all sorts of ship I mean, and really even the successful genocides that have been ended via military action were never that military action

the end. Then we're never initiated, with the exception of very very few, to actually stop a genocide like obviously World War two comes to mind, world War One and the Eastern Front, And I would add, what the what the YPG did in northern Iraq, Vietnam invading Cambodia, they stumbled into a genocide, saying what the funk is going on here? You know? I would I would argue that the YPG and coalition forces stopping the genocide. This Yas is one of the one of the times that I

was done on purpose and in a relatively timely manner. Yeah, Um, the same with you know, Yugoslavia. Yeah, less timely, significantly less, significantly less timely. Unfortunately, once you pull the military card, things get even worse because you have to kill people.

That's why prevention is so freaking important and it's so widely overlooked, and it's one of the things like I I think I already said that, it's very, very hard two champion genocide prevention because you're proving that something did not happen, uh, and people and what if you It's a lot like how we all would really like to um envision convincing really weird right wingers at climate change is real, because like, what's the worst thing that happens

if I'm right? The air is cleaner, Yeah, it's nicer outside. Yeah, well you're gonna crash the economy. Yeah, what's the worst thing that happens if we are worried about elimination? Elimination is rhetoric whenever it pops up, whether it be trans or gay people or um uh you know, uh rohingia or weagers, like, what's the worst that happens if we're wrong?

There wasn't a genocide? No, sorry, people were less shitty to teenagers who were dealing with one of the things that is most difficult to deal with in our society. It's it's literally something that own the group of kids had a better childhood. That's the downside. Fuck, you can't have that. It's one of the things that literally only

has upside. No, and it's it's I mean, it comes down to because again, as you said, there's not broad agreement on how to prevent genocides because spoilers, we have not figured out conclusively how to stop genocide from happening.

There's several going on right now, but one thing is making the people at the at the the central top level of the genocide hierarchy, the folks pushing all of the things the kind of genocide elites, making them scared to say ship that's a part of it, and making the people who are potentially lower on that totem pole, who might listen to those militias or whatnot in the moment, realize that they they they will be wrecked if they take part in that. That there's more people who don't

like that sort of ship. So they get scared and they shut the funk up, make racists afraid again, not that it's always about racism, but like you know, you get what I'm saying, Like, make bigots worried about their actions, Like that's why would people complain, Like what's the worst thing that are What could you possibly be doing uh to to change anything? If you're outing members of far

right militias at protests, That's why they're covering. They're high seeing themselves for a reason, because they're worried about what's going to happen to them when people realize they're marching around where wearing a short says six million wasn't enough. Yeah, yeah, make them yeah exactly. And it's one of those things to get back to the script a little bit um when we talk about how like much you can disrupt someone's motivational hierarchy and the way in which like that

can actually stop actions. There's there's a Robert J. Lifton cites a case of an inmate in a concentration camp who put in a request with a Nazi doctor who had a I mean, who was a Nazi doctor in a concentration right, um, yeah, and he he puts in this like weird request in the doctor grants it and it winds up saving this guy's life and and referencing the situation, Staub argues, apparently the inmates unusual behavior activated

some motivation low in the hierarchy, politeness, correctness, and responding to a request, perhaps even compassion um, and this allowed him to like grant this guy's exception requests that got him out of like the uh you know, the kind of hopper to get fed into the genocide machine. And it's like it's in the same way that like what Wallenberg was doing with a lot of these Nazis who were trying to load Jews onto on two trains. He was disrupting what they were doing by activating something that

was deeper programmed in them. The idea that like, yeah, if a guy who claims to be a government official comes up to you and you're a state employee and tells you to stop what you're doing because it's illegal, you kind of stop, right, Yeah. And there there's a there's a book on rescuers during the Holocaust. I think it's called like the Psychology of Rescue. You can't I can't remember exactly what's called, but they point out that

one of the ways that many people rescued people. Wasn't because they had some deep seated revulsion of Um, of of Nazism, or even they maybe they didn't even like Jews all that much. But one of one of the things that stuck out, especially in the case of like that doctor, not that I'm called him a rescuer, he was a literal doctor at a concentration camp. But his psychology was like, well, he put in a request, as you should, I reproved it. Like I'm not saving this

man's life, I'm simply doing my job. Yeah. Like there there was like a bureaucratic shield in front of them where they didn't see what they're doing is necessarily good or bad. They're simply doing their job. And this is why, um,

oh God, I forget the name of the sky. The guy who wrote Blood Lands UM, which is a great book about the genocide in in primarily like East or in like Ukraine and Poland, will point out that the areas in which the Jewish communities were most thoroughly destroyed were places that had suffered what he called double state destruction UM, which is where like the government is destroyed, another government came in, and it was in this case

it's like the Soviets took over, they destroyed the existing government, and then the Soviets were destroyed and the government structure they took they had created, was destroyed, and you saw higher percentages of like the Jewish population wiped out in those areas. Then you didn't say France, where the Nazis just kind of took over and tweaked the existing state structure.

And part of it is because there was bureaucratic There were levels of bureaucracy that people could hide in and that provided like kind of excuses for folks to save their lives. Right. A lot of the Jews who were saved in Western Europe were saved because like some functionary was able to find a way that it wasn't technically

illegal to like protect them, you know. Um. Anyway, it's probably worth talking about propaganda at some point here because while we've been I think intel like rightfully cautioning people against over like amplify over amplifying the value of a elimination is propaganda and genocide because it's all the popular culture tends to focus on. Um. It is a factor, right, it's not a non fall corn genocide. UM. And in

the context of modern fears about a new genocide. A number of folks recently have made very direct comparisons between modern right wing media and radio um and radio stations in Rwanda during that genocide. This line of argument became particularly common in the wake of the Buffalo shooting, in which a teenaged white supremacist killed ten people at a

grocery store in a majority black area. Because the shooter espoused the great Replacement conspiracy theory, which Tucker Carlson also pushes, a lot of folks claimed to causitive link between the two. I will tell you right now, there was none, Tucker. The kid was radicalized elsewhere, right, Not that Tucker Carlson is not saying things that can that can influence people to participate in mass Kelly, I'm not saying that. But

this kid that that's not where this happened from. But and and similarly, like Scott's Scott Stross sort of research paper r TLM, which is the main uh compower radio station broadcasting at a Kigali And um, it didn't. I mean, I'm not saying it didn't have an effect. It did marginally. UM. I mean, and I think that shows um again, what we we talked about that while propaganda is real, it's not the magic bullet um. Sort of like people have this concept of r t l M as being machette.

Radio is like, it's a term commonly used for it, but it hardly broadcasted outside of the capital of Kegali due to geography. Rwanda has tons of mountains. Radio doesn't like contains um so and not to mention like, some of the worst killings took place in a southern commune which had no r TLM reception, so like, similarly, these people were influenced by other means to do mass killing, not this thing that makes it easier for us to understand.

Yeah yeah, um so, uh yeah, I think um when it comes to kind of the way in which this incorrect view of what happened in Rwanda is getting sort of like compared with things today. A good example would be NPR Steve inn Skype, who tweeted quote a fact about Rwanda's genocide has always struck with me. The ruling party caused much of the killing by going on the radio and telling ethnic Hutoos that ethnic tootsies must be killed. Along with Hutus, who disapproved, many people listened and dismembered

their neighbors. For a brief overview of the Rwanda We're we're getting in all of this, but let's let's get it overwhere. So Rwanda was a Belgian colony for a long time, and if you know the Belgians, they did

them some genocide in the regions that they were in. Things. Yeah, Now, the Tootsies were used as their model natives right and favored over the huto This is a thing that every colonizing power, it does absolutely everywhere UM and it's um caused a lot of anger between the Hutuos and the Tutsies, who previously had not really been all that separate right as they were, they weren't even an ethnic group. It

was a social class exactly. It was very fluid. A hut could become a Tootsie, Tutsi could become a hut the Because it's easier for them as the colonizers, they solidify this, and part of what they do is they put out a system of racial ideas which further informalize

this division. UM. Now, this does support one of Dr Stanton's ten stages of genocide, but it also interestingly makes the point that stages don't all need to be purposefully incited in order their drive people towards the genocide, because the Belgians are just doing this because they're lazy. Um in this makes it easier to run a colony. But it does help, and this is a big part of why the genocide happens, and it's part of why they're able to know who's whotu and who's a Tutsies because

we have fucking cards, you know. Um ye. Then they then that probably like you were just talking about propaganda, that propaganda takes over and then over generations it becomes real like that like Divide. It doesn't matter if it's real or fake. It's it's perceived as being real, therefore

it's real now in any case. In nineteen nine four, following the assassination of the president during a very ugly civil war, WHO to government and military officials, orchestrated a three month orgy of racial violence, culminating in the massacre

of more than five hundred thousand people. In the aftermath of the killings, a lot focused on the broadcasts of specific radio stations, notably r T l M, and how announcers referred to Tutsi as in yezi, which means cockroach, and advised listeners to hunt them down and massa here them. There were cases where violence was clearly caused by radio broadcasts. On April twelfth, the broadcaster claimed armed Tutsie were at an Islamic center in Kegali. A day later, a mob

stormed the mosque and killed hundreds of people. That same day, the announcer came back on the air and urged people to exterminate Tutsi and stopped them from taking power, so certainly not claiming that the radio had no influence on what was happening. Now there's a reason why they were all convicted of genocide. Yes, journalists and scholars seized on this as an explanation for the nightmarish slaughter, which seemed kind of inexplicable otherwise. Unfortunately, this led to descriptions of

events that sounded more than a little fucking racist. And I'm gonna quote Strauss here. Strauss isn't the one being the racist, but he's quoting other people's how they interpreted this. I believe Darrell Lee is who he's quoting. Parts, Yeah, I think one of them. But yeah. Writing in the preface to a siminal study. For example, a u An investigator claimed that Rwanda. In Rwanda, media were the vector

by which the poison of racist propaganda is spread. Similarly, Melverne claims, in order to commit genocide and is necessary to define the victim as being outside human existence, vermin and subhuman. In Rewanda, the propaganda campaign against the minority Tutsis was relentless and its incitement to ethnic hatred and violence. Another observer, a journalist, asserts, when the radio said it was time to kill the people opposed to the government, the mass has slid off a dark edge into insanity.

The UN investigator quoted above similarly concluded that the poison of radio propaganda is all the more effective because it is said the Rwandan peasant has a radio culture of holding a transistor up to his ear in one hand and holding a machette in the other, waiting for orders emitted by our TLM. That's pretty racist, right. It reduces

them to like murdering automaton exactly. And what a lot of people are missing when you like, when you read passages like that and that one about the machete in one hand radio, that's not Darely, that's someone else, but um One of the things that they're leaving out is our TLM only started about six months before the Genesis. Yeah we're we're yeah, well yeah, it's it was not this was not like deeply rooted into their coach radio. How of Wanda, I believe has no radio signal at all.

It is worth noting that, like this is a very centralized state. It had been centralized under the Belgians, or Wanda still quite centralized today, and like that's not a non factor in stuff. But like it is not this that people are not just like radio said to murder, time to go murder. I guess this is why I'm

doing it. It's very racist that it takes away everything, and it's even it's worse because it'll it also allows you to couch this and like, well they're illiterate, and you know they they did have a high illiterate population, but they're illiterate and therefore they're not as intelligent as I enlightened person from the outside. That's why this When this radio tells gonna go man a checkpoint with a machete and kill everybody, I'm simply going to do it.

There's this thing we had that we had these episodes on General Butt Naked and the Liberian Civil War recently, And you know, I had to make a point of because so much of what happens is so lurid, and it gets reported as like look at this, like these crazy like witch doctor like cannibals and stuff. That is, as someone accused me on Reddit of like trying to mitigate what he did by going into how it's not really any different from Western war crimes. And that's the

same thing with Rwanda. It's not like, yes, there are elements of Rwandan culture that made this are part of why this happened, right, and some of that is how centralized the state and government is. And you can say the same thing about Germany that had an impact on why things occurred the way that they did. There's nothing different about the centralization. They weren't like Rwandans weren't commanded by their radios to do a genocide anymore than Germans

were commanded by Hitler over the radio to do a genocide. Um, there was a continuum of things that we're going on that made people willing to participate in this, and it's a lot more complicated than they had a radio in their ears. I mean to mention that they check literally every block like Strauss's risk risk factor for genocide, like

they've had previous massacres. Paul Harbor and Mia who I believe his first name is Paul, who is president that was shot down, had since the civil war been eating more and more power to the Hutu power dynamic to rally power around himself because they were losing. Yeah, so he had seeded more and more power to the incredibly far radical extreme of the Hootu power So by the time he was dead, he had effectively already lost power.

That's why when the major overlying conspiracy theories is he was shot down by the Hootu power section, nobody's entirely sure, but they think he was. And that is like the inciting inside of the geness the president's plan get shot down. It's still a mystery as to exactly what happened anyway. Strauss goes on to note that quote most discussions of Rwandan media affects attribute little or no agency to listeners.

The Rwandan public is often characterized as hearing a drumbeat of racist messages and directly internalizing them, or as hearing orders to kill and heating the command. Those views are consistent with stereotypes about Rwandan's, namely that they obey orders blindly, that they are poorly educated and thus easily manipulated, and that they are immersed in the culture of prejudice. Now Strauss carried out an exhaustive analysis of massacres in Rwanda

where they occurred in relation to broadcast towers. In particular, he looked at the strength of those towers and where they could reach, and when massacres occurred in relation to specific broadcasts. His conclusion was that the vast majority of the violence could not be explained by urgents to kill from radio personalities, and then in fact, most of the broadcast people cited as inciting things happened after most of

the violence had occurred. UM. A follow up investigation from another group of academics used a village level data set from the genocide to estimate the impact of RTLM in encouraging genocide. The attributed roughly ten percent of the overall violence to the station, which is a lot. Don't get

me Rock. That's a lot for a radio station to incite UM and noted that these broadcasts had more of an influence on convincing militias who were organized and radicalized to kill ahead of time, to go after specific targets, and then those militias would rope in civilians rather than again people just like again, those folks prior to the

fucking radio being involved, were already ready to kill. They moved into an area because as a specific target was signed posted by the radio, and they would rope civilians in through coercion and a variety of other means that we've already talked about. Um so yeah. Radio in mass media Absolutely no, No reasonable scholar would argue does not play a significant role in genocide. Um But consistent with the research of guys like Stalbin Strauss, the willingness to

participate in such violence exists on a continuum. Even a most Rwandan radio inspired massacres were committed by dudes who joined militias. Um so yeah. The article by Reynerman and Wilson I cited earlier notes of Rwanda quote. A need for social belonging can result in a motivation for an individual to want to conform to his or her group, leading to participation in order not to stick out and to be able to remain part of the group. A

member of a group. Intervite interviewed by Hatsfield mentioned the strong bond to the group with whom he killed during the genocide. We liked being in our gang. We all agreed about the new activities, and we helped each other out like comrades. Um their need. And again, it's traumatic to partake in this kind of killing, and trauma bonds

people together, you know. Um. So even in those situations where killings can be tied to particular broadcasts, it's ignorant to blame the propaganda in a vacuum, just as it's kind of ignorant to blame the propaganda Tucker Carlson spits out for the Buffalo shooting. Tucker is allowed to do what he does because people listen, and those people were conditioned to listen by folks other than Tucker, generations of

right wing media and also family and friends. Right, the fact that he's able to get up there and spread great replacement bullshit is the end part of a continuation of propaganda and and hatred. Um that you could, you could, you could pull right back to the Civil War if you want to go back far enough, you know, um, Which doesn't mitigate Tucker's complicity in it at all. But it's not he's not generating it. You know, he's not generating it. He's he's Um, he's a stage in a

long procession. I'd like someone pointed out that he might be one of the first extremists that was radicalized by his own audience. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a big factor, because he's doing it in part because it gets him the views, because it gets people to us in right, And that's the same thing that happens with a lot

of people who get radicalized online. Right when we talk about the way like four chan and eight chan work, where like people come into it like joking about this stuff and over time radicalize each other and into supporting the literal actions because there's no racism. No, there's no ironic racism, and there's no iron there's no lone wolves. People are radicalized for violence in communities and by communities. Um, it's shared jokes, it's shared lingo, it's a desire for acceptance. UM.

It's a variety of different things that like push people here. UM. Now, of course again, obedience to authority can be one of these things. UM, but it's it's authority doesn't always mean like a fewer sometimess the authority of like the kind of group consensus about what's cool, you know, about what's funny,

about what's good. Um. Obviously like one of the things that gets talked about that got and this is something that like I think as maybe a little more debatable when we talk about like the role of authority in genocide. Um is the Milgram experiment, right, that's get This gets talked about a lot. And in short, the Milgram experiment consisted of I think he didn't want the seventies. It

may I think it's because these went on for a while. Um, But the experiment consisted of experiment ers because Milgram was trying to study like why do people like he was looking at the just following orders excuse that a lot of nazis made and being like, well is that the case?

And basically he would have a student deliver electric shocks to a patient who was actually an actor, but the student who was the test subject thought that they were really shocking the person, and like a dude with a clipboard would tell them to periodically increase the voltage until it got up to a level that was noted as being potentially lethal and the people who were delivering the shocks. Some of them would cry, a lot of them would argue.

They were generally all pretty unhappy, but most would deliver the shocks when ordered to do so by an authority. Figure Stalbrights quote. Milgram suggested that people can enter an agentic mode in which they relinquish individual responsibility and act as agents of authority. While obedience is an important force, it is not the true motive for mass killing your genocide. The motivation to obey comes from a desire to follow a leader, to be a good member of a group,

to show respect for authority. Those who willingly accept the authority of leaders are likely to have also accepted their views in ideology guided by shared cultural dispositions, the shared experience of difficult life conditions, shared motivations that result from them, and shared inclinations for ways to satisfy motives, people join

Rather than simply obey out of fear or respect. We must we must consider not only how those an authority gain obedience, but how the motivations of the whole group evolve. Miilgrim's dramatic demonstration of the power of authority, although of great importance, may have slowed the development of a psychology of genocide as others came to view obedience as the

main source of human destructiveness. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's it's always interested, especially because when the main points I believe of that experiment was that they were told repeatedly they could quit whenever they want, yes, and the person in the room with them, I believe, could only say you must continue the experiment. Yeah. Um, but like yeah, and that of course directly inspired the writing of Ordinary

Men and amongst other things. Yeah, and it it definitely allows the dispersion of personal responsibility if you believe of a bigger structure. And another thing I think is key is dispersion of your own personal responsibility into a structure you believe is impune, like you's not going to be held accountable for anything that it does. Yeah. Um. And it's it's again like so and and and stabs not saying like this isn't a factor or like the Pilgram

experience doesn't say anything useful about genocide. It's the it's the kind of boiling at all that people want to say, like one thing, right, um, and and it isn't And it's like and also just like the fact that people are like following authority isn't just as simple as like they're following orders. It means that like they are they are.

Their motivation is a desire to be in a power structure underneath an authority, and they accept the views and the values of that authority, right, which is more complicated than just thus, just I will follow orders, you know. Um, there's and and this is an an area in which, like the authoritarian culture of Germany prior to the Nazi rise of power, affected the willingness of people to participate in the the instrument of genocide. Um. Yeah, uh, it's cool,

and I think it is. It's important to have a more complicated understanding of like what can motivate people to this than just I do whatever the leader tells me. Um,

Because that's not where genocides start. All genocide starts with the willingness of human beings to partake in the act itself, right like that is or if if not start because it may be wrong to like prescribe it that way, but that you can't have a genocide without the willingness of the of the people of people to participate, not just to participate, but to welcome or at least not discourage the people doing the participation, right, Like folks like it.

It's it's never, it's never one thing, Like societies are are more complicated than that, And genocides are accomplished by societies, right, They're noted by dudes who suck. Yeah. And and to be completely clear, we're not saying that like genocides occur because of like the marginalized turned it out group is not resisting hard enough. It's lay people that could escape this. No problem, it's this. It's the slow incoming tide that you're fined with. Like we like to like stereotypically, there's

a famous poem about this. Um you know, um it's uh. It's one of like, well, you know there's lawn Florida isn't really a big deal. I don't live in Florida. Well millions of people do. Yeah. Yeah. The the idea that like ha ha, well this is what the right gets, you know, this bad thing happening in Florida because they wouldn't vote against It's like no, no, no, this is a problem. And it's the same people who are are dumb enough to believe that this isn't gonna go nationwide

after a while. Are the most naive motherfucker's have ever heard of. And this is a deeper naivety than just that. I would extend it to people who say, oh, well, it's not it's not our business, Like I don't like, I'm not gonna I can dismiss the mass killings of of protesters in Syria because that's over there, you know.

Um oh, Now suddenly millions of refugees have flooded Europe and it's reignited a far right and victor Orbon has seized and centralized and into democratic functional democracy and Hungary and now the Republicans are holding a sea pack. They're talking about how to do the same here, like but like every like I forgot that they had they did you you it's all like you. You can't. You can't abrogate your responsibility to to be a part of the

human race. And that includes being like, well this is like that, that's what actual like resistance to fascism is right, is like comprehensively calling out bad ship is bad, Like that's not not not being like, well it's in Florida, you know, Um, well it's until stupid South, stupid South, right like it's it's it's taking as much offense to like acts of evil that occur far away as the ones that happened like next door, because like everything like

eventually it will. It's the same as like climate change, right, it's it's like it's not being like oh well, fun California. I live up here in Washington State where climate change will never hit us, or like, um right, yeah, this is the difficult thing about it, um, and it's it's and I think it's even harder for people to grasp

um when it literally doesn't impact them at all. Yeah, they're I mean, the vast majority of people in any coming or future genocide like rarely are they going to be directly impacted if face if they don't want to be, unless you are, of course the out party. But like you know, a random guy in you know, Duluth, Minnesota,

like he's not going to be impacted by this. But the hard part and the the key for prevention is realizing that if you want to prevent this from happening, it needs to be made important to the point that people who literally cannot have no role in it can make a role in it by stopping it. Um. Because Obviously these things are going to impact outgroups minorities, racial, ethnic, religious, or otherwise. They're not They purposefully do not have a

voice that can stop this from happening. Nope, that's why they're being targeted. Yeah, so uh rowan egg, get Rhonda Santis. It's the conclusion we've made here. Um or or Abbott, Abbott could use use an egg. That fucking guy give him an all good egging egg it out? Um like that? Like that kid in Australia. Um oh, I forgot about that kid. Kids. It was a good kid because when we find out he did something terrible immediately afterwards. I think he raised a bunch of money for some nice

cause people were paying attention to him. I don't know. Hopefully someone's gonna be like, please don't milkshake duc that kid. Well, Joe, I don't know. How do you feel at the end of this genocide? Yeah? Your a I'm you know, I'm going to be a centrist on this one. No one can say some people like genocide, some people dislike some people comm Yeah, we're going to compromise to everything that

they've ever said. Um No, I mean I got into this field because it's very important to me both in my and in my history, and you know, in the future, it's it's something that's the history of These things are important. So we can stop revisionism from coming and taking place, and also so we can help prevent it in the future, and hopefully we can make prevention something that is not like a weird thing to bring up. No, so go out and don't commit genocide. That's that's the key here.

That is definitely there's a lot of debates as to how to prevent it, but don't do a genocide. We ask that. That's the baseline we ask of our listeners is please do not participate in an active genocide. Lower in the bar here, Yeah, the bar is through the floor. Unlike some of our sponsors, including the Washington State Highway Patrol and funk those guys I used to live in Washington,

hear the worst. We had a very funny one star review of someone being like I thought I was gonna love this podcast, but then they started talking about the Washington State Highway Patrol. I have to two relatives in the Highway Patrol, and they're both like wonderful men who are not violent at all. I would really like to believe that they listen to the Behind the Police series

like this sounds fun. Yeah, up until they were totally down with shooting on every other police department, and so we got some when their cousin was in Yeah, yeah, funk the St. Louis Cole. Wait a second, we're the good one. Yeah, bow t Highware and Fox. My my cousins in the Washington State Highway Patrol aren't violent at all. T shirt is bringing up a lot of questions answered by my I'm not a lot around their families anymore. They're not allowed outside their house. It's weird anyway, Joe,

you got any plug doubles? Have you ever done a podcast before this happened in the world. I'm the host of the Lines led by Donkeys podcast. We talked about uh funk ups in military history. We also talk extensively about genocide specifically. We talked about it. We've talked about Nan King, We've talked about the Namibian genocide. We've talked for seven hours about the cambody in genocide. Uh. I promise it's not all that heavy. We do other stuff too.

Now if you want that, then you're gonna have to go to the genocide cast, Uh With With with Rock and Robbie and Uh the Butt John Wilson, It's the drivetime radio show. I was doing a radio but I didn't think it out very well. A Morning Zoo crew Morning that's just about well. It's six in the morning. We got a lot of traffic blacked up on the I five. You know what else got backed up on a highway. Good stuff all right? Episodes over Go Home Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.

For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.