> David Rawson, the US ambassador, said that its euphemisms were open to interpretation. The US, he said, believed in freedom of speech.
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.
My experience is that it is always important to criticize free speech absolutism, especially when people behave as if it were an atemporal concept. In reality, most of the world for most of the time has had various compromises between protecting individuals and society on one hand and free speech on the other.
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.
> 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.
Culture... is the thing that prevents the enacting of our bestial urges.
This channel normalizes the bestiality, and so it becomes culture.
Every society have some people without a mic that are blatantly inhuman.
A society becomes it when you give them a mic.
I agree that simply stopping one propaganda outlet would have been insufficient to stem the tide of violence.
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.
Apparently the music of Simon Bikindi was a favorite of RTLMC. After the genocide, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda indicted him. His details also make interesting reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Bikindi
Some related topics I find interesting to ponder in relation to the Rwandan genocide and more broadly:
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.
> 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.
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.
I find the whole premise for the situation mind-boggling. Tutsi and Hutu were basically just categories for “someone who has cattle” and “someone who does not have cattle”. One could become the other quite readily.
Then the Belgians came along, measured skulls, pronounced the Tutsis a separate (and superior) race, and the rest is… absolutely idiotic history.
Major, minor or imagined differences between populations being exacerbated causing them to turn against each other wasn't a byproduct of some poorly conceived policy. It was the whole point and was (and continues to be) a keystone to colonial power over faraway lands.
> Tutsi and Hutu were basically just categories for “someone who has cattle” and “someone who does not have cattle”. One could become the other quite readily.
One thing that seems underdiscussed to me is that oral culture compared to literary culture seems to have a strong impact on dissemination of hate or mass messaging. My pet theory is that the resurgence of the medium, that so much content is now again visual and audio dominated compared to textual, is responsible for a good amount of the increase in hate in recent years.
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.
That's an interesting theory, but isn't it a different set of people consuming the audiovisual material? So, roughly speaking, in the past, an educated minority read The Times, while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs. Nowadays public opinion matters so various powers (often foreign powers not controlled by the local establishment) generate material designed to influence the general population, which isn't exactly literate, as you'll know if you've ever had to do jury service. Meanwhile, the educated minority continues to read The Economist or whatever (The Times is rubbish nowadays).
> while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs
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.
Marshall McLuhan thought that Adolf Hitler played really well on the radio but would not have played well on television, people would have seen his face turn red.
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.
Not constrained to Rwanda, the late '80s and early '90s saw the (re-)emergence of this flavor of broadcasting in many places around the world - especially in the US on the AM bands.
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.
What many in the US don't have conceptual familiarity with is pre-genocidal speech. Historically and empirically, the actual call to violence only happens at the end of a long period of collectivizing dehumanization via media, when people are already pliable for it. In my view, those causal antecedents to genocide should be illegal due to their historically proven connection to genocide. This speech is more dangerous and leads to more dead bodies than other types of speech which are already illegal, like isolated calls to individual violence or libel.
When I read about the leak of the new Meta internal guidance for content moderation[1], my first thought was that the only things they banned were likely things that they understood to be pre-genocidal speech (eg comparisons of a group to vermin). Rules that seem kind of arbitrary to a modern western audience but which click in place if you look at propaganda that was issued during historical genocides.
You make some good points but the problem is these efforts are usually bankrolled by well connected right wingers, so the state will not enforce the law unless there has effectively been a socialist revolution that deprives the right of power and money almost completely.
Historically, socialist governments such as the Soviet union or peoples Republic of China have behaved more similarly to religious movements than political movements. The cultural revolution has more in common with the Spanish inquisition than it does with the US labor movement.
Debatable. Capitalism has a kill count of 100 million and shows no signs of slowing down. Death counts linked to capitalism and neoliberalism are cumulative, indirect, and often undercounted because they manifest as "normal" outcomes of policy: poverty, malnutrition, or ecological collapse. Capitalism and neoliberalism externalize death ie: they make it appear as an individual or national failure, not a systemic one.
Source? Liberalization since the 1970s (so called "neoliberalism") has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system in human history. ~60% of all humans lived in extreme poverty in 1970, and less than 10% do today. This period coincided with the expansion of free trade, deregulation of markets, modernization of monetary policy, and, perhaps most notably, the downfall of communism. I'd say capitalism is a net positive compared to what we had before, and especially compared to the alternative
… because nominally socialist movements have never committed genocide? Go read Gulag Archipelago or listen to the recent Behind the Bastards podcast on Pol Pot.
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.
I used the term raiding because this is what it’s called in chimps, our closest genetic relatives. This is primate behavior.
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.
You could argue it's a maladaptation in a modern setting, now that many non-zero-sum games are available, and now that existential risks are a thing. It worked by many definitions of the word in ancestral environment which was very different to the modern environment. Our brains are now trying to apply those chimp heuristics in an environment that they're not designed for.
Look over the comment you replied to and you’ll see that they didn’t say that socialist movements have never been violent. Is a socialist revolution not violent?
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”
This is a good example of hate speech. You are dehumanizing people of the US saying they don't conceptual understand morality and can't decide for themselves what is morally wrong or right.
They can understand morality but have chosen not to. They can decide what is morally wrong and right and then have chosen wrong and have decided not to care about it.
I was being ironic, because their is an actual honest disagreement about morality but not being able to talk about it because it's considered by a some to be hate speech doesn't make it go away.
If flat earthers can't talk about a flat earth then no one will dissuade them of the notion.
Indeed! Okie here, Rush, Newt and Rove absolutely destroyed the Republican party. With their lies and hatred of anyone not like them, they duped an entire generation.
I still remember from over 20 years ago I was sitting in the kitchen talking to my grandmother. She was smoking and had some Fox News talking head on in the background. Maybe Hannity?
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.
Yes. Even the solidly Blue or Red states tend to be 55-45 in elections. A few extreme states might be 60-40. It really is more of an urban-rural divide with the suburbs deciding which way the state leans overall.
I never was a regular listener to Rush but if I were driving from Pt A to Pt B in rural America I might find the only thing Icould find reliably from noon to 2pm was an AM radio station that had The Rush Limbaugh Show. I tuned in deliberately on Jan 7, 2021, just a few days before Rush passed away, and found he was shocked and aghast at what had happened to the day before... but did not draw the connection to how the culture he created contributed to it.
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
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
> I tuned in deliberately on Jan 7, 2021, just a few days before Rush passed away, and found he was shocked and aghast at what had happened to the day before... but did not draw the connection to how the culture he created contributed to it.
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).
He may not have advocated for genocide, but he did a lot to create a polarized political environment where anyone to his left was at best ridiculed and more often demonized. His general rhetorical strategy was to find some extreme example of something on the left, exaggerate it and then attribute his distorted version to everyone to his left. It made him a lot of money and led the way to Fox News which took it to even greater extremes.
> 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.
According to the latest poll data I was able to find on Google (from 2024), about 2/3rds of Americans support universal healthcare[0]. At the very least, one can confidently say a majority of Americans per capita support it.
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.
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".
It’s going too far to say Rush advocated genocide, but he absolutely preached that all who opposed him were not just wrong but evil, that ends justify means, that people with different views are subhuman.
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.
? 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.
Pre-2016, I might have agreed with you. We shouldn't be so strident. We should be more accepting. Today, yeah, fuck that. You take your +0.05 R and you reconsider your position. I'm fine with mine.
It sounds like you think that any statement of values expresses superiority. Is that correct?
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.
> 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 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".
Chess is male-dominated from childhood onwards, and the women who do play are highly outnumbered by men. So women-only chess clubs and tournaments are a way to try to redress the balance by encouraging women and girls to play.
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.
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)
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
which points out a failure mode of our civilization in terms of reconciling expert knowledge, popular participation, and reality which remains unanswered.
I see what you're saying but the issues matter, as well as the delivery.
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.
I wouldn’t even say it went differently, yet. So far it has only gone slower. A big chunk of the population now believes that “liberals” are Satan-worshipping baby killers thanks to decades of this propaganda.
That said, it is quite bizzare that people paid more attention to a small number of Middle Eastern people advocating violence against the West vs the large number of Middle Eastern people actually subjected to violence by the West.
When evaluating these sorts of things you need to pair (a) whether you actually understand what was being claimed and (b) capability. The middle east has no capability to “destroy the west” so you can’t take it seriously in that sense, but it does seem like the west does want to control and dominate the middle east and has destroyed and toppled the governments of many middle eastern countries.
Really? Reference 9/11, Bataclan, Ariana Grande concert, various car ramming episodes, and - at minimum - they have destroyed our spirit as a stable society.
Curious about your response to the other dude's reply. It is irrefutable that over 10k children (lowest estimate) have been killed by the IDF. Btw I am very much western in my values and morals, but I think it would be foolish to state that the war in Iraq, which we know for a fact was based on lies, or Israel's occupation and genocide, constitute our western spirit. They are stains on every moral (western, religious, or ethical), and hate begets hate. Ghaza is very interesting as far as I am concerned. There is no world where the occupation and settlements imposed by Israel are aligned with our morals, but it is interesting how a diaspora of religious individuals, who ascribe to a devoted loyalty to a fictional nation (Israel, based on the Jewish Bible), can excuse genocides, curtailing the first amendment and free speech, and every western value you speak of, for its sake. This is but case A. Iraq is currently a mess (and for the last decade, was worse because of our invasion), while Afghanistan fell under an oppressive regime the moment we left. But I must come back to Ghaza. I think it is an abomination on every western society, and I am amazed at the stronghold Israel has over us. Western figures (like Ben Shapiro) call for wars against half of our country (leftists), and have no issue bullying refugees, LGBT members that are American, or preventing Americans from marrying who they wish or being themselves. Yet, any critique of Israel, and de facto our foreign policy, is a red line. I view these people, and those comments in the spirit of yours, as treacherous. Being critical of one's country is what makes America great, for if we do not hold ourselves accountable, then we might fall victims to those oppressions that made America a haven in the days of yore.
I don’t care about Gaza. I care that a theater full of kids going to a concert don’t deserve to be shot up because their politicians made some decisions.
Middle eastern media is a fart in the wind compared to western media. Except in the latter case it is phrasing is along the lines of "spreading freedom and democracy" or similar.
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"
The dynamic here is the Tutsi were considered superior (taller, thinner noses, lighter skin) by the colonizers and made up most of the ruling class during and after colonialism. Pre-colonization these groups were genuinely fluid. The genocide was essentially an uprising.
> Pre-colonization these groups were genuinely fluid.
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.
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.
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