> 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.
According to other pages on this same site, the primary motivation for the people behind RTLM (rich powerful people, incl the presidential family) to spread said hate, was fears that Tutsis would sabotage their own country in support of the invading RPF.
This is the exact same fear that made Americans put their Japanese-American countrymen into concentration camps during WWII. So to me, either you're saying that Rwandan culture in the early 90s was pretty much the same as US culture in the 1940s, or something else than culture is to blame.
Obviously the Japanese-Americans weren't mass-murdered, so it's not a fair comparison, but I'm not immediately convinced things would've been super mega different if the Japanese army had already conquered the entire US west coast and was quickly moving eastward. People would be very afraid.
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.
Today's world have people working for 8 hours a day (minimum) / 5 days a week while making little to no progress on their overall livelihood, and at the same time people (read - the privileged) have more "consumables" yet no one is ever truly happy anymore, resulting in insane concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
Also, the past isn't just defined by slavery. There are plenty of examples we can learn from the people before us.
> 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.
What does it mean to "give them the mic"? I feel like your comment makes sense in the abstract but when it gets more concrete it gets a lot fussy. Do you mean disallowing people who make nasty radio broadcasts? Jailing people who send nasty tweets to all their 10 followers?
Most people aren't "given the mic" by some benevolent all-powerful force, they just grab a mic and use it.
Prior to the eighties, if you put out something sufficiently noxious or unbalanced on broadcast media, you could have the FCC come visit you and threaten to revoke your broadcast license. The broadcast license was required to be used in the public interest.
Then the 80s came and you had cable TV which didn’t require a broadcast license, you had video tape, and you had the repeal of the fairness doctrine.
Prior to all that the only way you’d get your weird message out was through print, which reqires someone to pay for the printing and distribution, so it’s slower and more limited, and print doesn’t have the same emotional punch of TV or radio.
Obviously the Internet has turbocharged this transition. If it were the 80s someone like Andrew Tate would have a very hard time getting an audience. He’d have to use print, and probably a lot of his material would be age restricted. The closest analogue I can think of is Hugh Hefner, and to read his stuff you had to be over 18, although obviously a lot of boys got their hands on a Playboy or two.
enforcing this would require building a panopticon world of brains in jars. no thank you. ill hold individuals responsible for their own actions and keep my freedom of speech thanks
> by some benevolent all-powerful force, they just grab a mic and use it.
You are a bit optimistic. It is way worse. What happens is: your media mogul more often than not lives in an environment where people's belief systems and preferences vary from oligarchy, tech-fascism, corporatism, cultism, gilded-age etc. I.e. the cult of wealth problem. Then that media mogul buys a platform, and installs a certain kind of people. Double profit: more engagement, belief systems of regular people getting anti-social. The fear, hate and disgust for their compatriots make way for sado-populism. Regular, normal people are getting so mindfucked that instead of seeking the common good they they give autocracy consent to purify society from their imaginative enemies.
> Do you mean disallowing people who make nasty radio broadcasts?
Yes, the paradox of tolerance is a paradox. The only way to keep a tolerant society is to not tolerate the intolerants.
no it doesnt. you could blast "kill your own baby" on radio but 99% of people wouldnt do it. and if they did its their own fault.
you either respect the sovereignty of an individual and they are responsible for their actions, or not and if you dont then follow that to its logical conclusion. which would be that all people are not responsible for anything ever, because even the broadcaster was told to by his own life and culture, and so on and so forth until your litigating the first living goo on the planet.
We are talking about instigating intolerance, with material consequences. Think genocides, like in the OP and Germany in the 30's.
> you either respect the sovereignty of an individual and
> they are responsible for their actions,
Paradox of Tolerance. [0]
An individual lives in a society. Waiting for some other country to sacrifice their 18 years old to clean up your mess because you insisted that you couldn't possibly know what happens when you normalize intolerance is not so nice. And maybe there is no country who could possibly help your compatriots to get rid of their autocrats, so be careful if you try.
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.
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.