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
You're shifting the frame. The original question was about cumulative deaths, direct or indirect, linked to systems like socialism or capitalism, not about which one produced more GDP growth. Pointing to poverty reduction doesn't erase the structural harms capitalism has caused or the millions who've died from preventable conditions under regimes that prioritized market logic over human need.
You can't ethically "net out" human deaths with economic gains. That treats lives as statistical noise in a profit-loss spreadsheet. It’s not just bad morality, it’s bad history too.
… 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.
That’s exactly what I would argue, and in addition to the X-risks (global thermonuclear war etc.) it’s also a giant source of unnecessary human misery and massive waste of resources.
In many cases the resources we spend hoarding and raiding and doing other chimp things could make us all 2X or more wealthier if we did not fight.
Right now the US is spending billions of debt financed dollars to rid itself of people who want to become tax paying citizens because they have brown skin. A beyond human intelligence would look at this the way we look at ant mills.
“Just quit circling.” But I’m sure circling forever feels right and proper in the belly, or whatever the ant’s equivalent of deep feelings of rightness feel like.
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.
Women's chess is a protected category. On that basis, FIDE are stating that women who don't want to be women can opt out of that category if they so wish, but men who say they are women cannot opt into it.
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.
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.