Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and for the last two years,
Speaker 1: behind the Bastards listeners have funded the Portland Diaper Bank,
Speaker 1: which provides diapers for low income families. Uh. Last year
Speaker 1: y'all raised more than twenty one thousand dollars, which was
Speaker 1: able to purchase one point one million diapers for children
Speaker 1: and families in need in one um. And this year
Speaker 1: we're trying to get dollars raised for the Portland Diaper Bank,
Speaker 1: which is going to allow us to help even more kids.
Speaker 1: So UM, if you want to help, you can go
Speaker 1: to bTB fundraiser for pd X Diaper Bank at go
Speaker 1: fund me. Just type and go fund me b TB
Speaker 1: Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank. Again, that's go fund Me
Speaker 1: bTB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank, or find the link
Speaker 1: in the show notes. Thank you all. Oh what's shitting
Speaker 1: Orange my Joe? That's hell yeah, just for for for us,
Speaker 1: for nobody else a time. How you doing, Joe for
Speaker 1: part two of our genocide Spectacular? I'm good. UM, you
Speaker 1: know I I often um and like my people that
Speaker 1: listen to my show often joke that I surprise my
Speaker 1: guests with the genocide. Uh. And this time it gets
Speaker 1: to happen to me and it's it's quite nice. You know.
Speaker 1: I did almost open this episode with what's eliminating ethnic groups?
Speaker 1: My every people in the history of the human race,
Speaker 1: But that wouldn't I just didn't want to see Sophie's
Speaker 1: disappointed face one more time. I can feel her shaking
Speaker 1: her head. No, across the internet, she always is somewhere. Probert,
Speaker 1: you could never disappoint me. I often have. So Part two,
Speaker 1: everybody's good to go. This is behind the bastards, by
Speaker 1: the way, you're Joka Sabian, co hosted the Lions Led
Speaker 1: by Donkeys podcast, asked, let's get back to some genocide,
Speaker 1: so as I'm sure everyone listening to this show is
Speaker 1: aware of. The United States is currently in a bit
Speaker 1: of a moral panic over the fact that transgender people exist. Uh.
Speaker 1: The groomer discourse, which has arisen on the right wing
Speaker 1: um in which trans and now increasingly all queer people
Speaker 1: are accused of being child molesters. Are one of the
Speaker 1: child molesters because they like write books that tell kids
Speaker 1: that people who aren't aren't this gender exist. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: the folks have been accusing this. Are folks like on
Speaker 1: the left and queer people have been pointing out that
Speaker 1: this is eliminationist rhetoric. Right this is potentially the kind
Speaker 1: of rhetoric that can lead to a genocide. Um. And
Speaker 1: the basic fear is that right wing thought leaders are
Speaker 1: trying to convince their followers that transgender people are pedophilic
Speaker 1: monsters because you can do anything to pedophiles, right, Like
Speaker 1: it is exactly so if you can like lump a
Speaker 1: group of people and is being that it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: what you do to them. Um. Now, I've seen a
Speaker 1: number of number of posts in this line on on
Speaker 1: the int our webs that have brought Dr Gregory Stanton's
Speaker 1: ten stages of genocide, which he laid out in nineteen
Speaker 1: eight six and were revamped in UM. Step one is
Speaker 1: classification e g. Splitting society into us in them rather
Speaker 1: than using mixed categories. This is not always done intentionally.
Speaker 1: This often just kind of happens, but it can feed
Speaker 1: and do what later becomes a genocide. Next is symbolization,
Speaker 1: which gives names or symbols to the classification. The most
Speaker 1: obvious example of this from history would be the yellow
Speaker 1: star that Jewish people were forced to wear a Nazi
Speaker 1: Germany or indeed the purple triangle that that that homosexual
Speaker 1: people were made to wear. Um. Next comes discrimination on
Speaker 1: a legal basis, and then to humanization, which is comparison
Speaker 1: of members of the target group to insects or vermin um.
Speaker 1: This is also this is not in his list, but
Speaker 1: plague bacillus is a really common one, particularly by the Nazis. Um.
Speaker 1: I think that had something to do with the fact
Speaker 1: that there had been a plague not that long before
Speaker 1: the rise of the Nazis, famously in Rwanda. Yes, cockroaches. Uh.
Speaker 1: We will chat about a little bit more later. Um.
Speaker 1: And then there's organization, which is the forming of militias
Speaker 1: and other not crucially nonstate groups geared towards the elimination
Speaker 1: of targeted people. Polarization is number six, in which extremists
Speaker 1: drive groups apart and broadcast propaganda in the mass media
Speaker 1: to indoctrinate people with hate. Now, most of the time
Speaker 1: when I see people bringing up stantons tend stages of
Speaker 1: genocide to talk about how that's where the rights trying
Speaker 1: to push people. Uh, they will least the United States
Speaker 1: at either step four or step six. And you can
Speaker 1: certainly make a strong case for either. UM. But while
Speaker 1: doctor Stanton scale has has its uses, I'm not like
Speaker 1: shipping on it or anything. I think the way in
Speaker 1: which people are interpreting it leads to some inaccurate beliefs
Speaker 1: about how genocide tends to proceed um. And it overall
Speaker 1: pushes people towards a more mechanistic and centralized view of
Speaker 1: how genocides occur. UM. And while this discan't this does
Speaker 1: describe some historic genocides well, because he's looking back at
Speaker 1: genocides and trying to describe them in stages, I don't
Speaker 1: know that it's super used in predicting them um. Which right, UM,
Speaker 1: I would argue that it's not UM simply, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not, of course, I'm not hating in its research,
Speaker 1: as research is great. It's just um, I think it
Speaker 1: takes a lot of agency from the perpetrators of genocides themselves. UM.
Speaker 1: I think it's very good. UM. And I mean even
Speaker 1: Strauss sometimes does this as well. It's very good to
Speaker 1: everyone does when you're doing this kind of history right
Speaker 1: to right stint. Yeah, it's it's something. It's very very
Speaker 1: good to understand the organization of the radical core that
Speaker 1: makes all genocides possible, but isn't inevitable radical cores conform
Speaker 1: and there can still not be a genocide, yes, um
Speaker 1: And I also like the kind of the fact that
Speaker 1: we're sort of critiquing this doesn't mean we're not saying, like,
Speaker 1: for example, trans people should not be concerned about the
Speaker 1: rhetoric coming up the right as elimination is not saying
Speaker 1: that at all. Just I think focusing on the stages
Speaker 1: in the way that people do kind of leads people
Speaker 1: to inaccurate that expectations about how things proceed and have
Speaker 1: proceeded historically. And that's what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 1: Um So in order to get into that, let's start
Speaker 1: with another example from ancient history. This is one that
Speaker 1: you brought up to me, Joe, when I mentioned that
Speaker 1: I wanted to do this episode. The Asian Vespers of
Speaker 1: eight eight b C. The Asiatic vespers. Romans got the
Speaker 1: hit with the reverse card. Yes, exactly, Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the uno reverse of the of the genocide that they
Speaker 1: did in Carthage. Um. So, starting in like ninety one
Speaker 1: b C, Romans had what they called the social War,
Speaker 1: which was social because the people they lived next to
Speaker 1: Italians were not Roman citizens, but they had to submit
Speaker 1: to some Roman policies. They couldn't vote, they weren't like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, as a general rule, when people have
Speaker 1: to submit to policies by a government but have no
Speaker 1: say in that government, they can get unhappy with that.
Speaker 1: This is not a thing Americans would be familiar with, right,
Speaker 1: nothing like that has ever happened here. Um, That never
Speaker 1: never occurred in this part of the world. So eventually
Speaker 1: the Italians go to war with the Romans. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to get into detail about that, but they call
Speaker 1: it the social War, which is funny because it is
Speaker 1: unbelievably brutal. And this is also this is a pattern
Speaker 1: in Roman history where like a group of people who
Speaker 1: are close to the imperial corps will have an uprising
Speaker 1: because their rights are being denied, and they will make
Speaker 1: demands which will be denied, and then they'll fight a war.
Speaker 1: The Romans will crush them brutally and then grant most
Speaker 1: of the demands later. That's what happens here because like,
Speaker 1: the Italians get everything they want after the Romans wipe
Speaker 1: out like a generation of them. Yeah, there's few of
Speaker 1: your rights to so exactly for us, um, so yeah,
Speaker 1: the Rome is at war with Italy uh in this period.
Speaker 1: And while this is all going down, um there's a
Speaker 1: you know this place called Pontus, which is in the
Speaker 1: modern day Black Sea region of Turkey. Um and the
Speaker 1: guy who runs it is a king named mithradit s
Speaker 1: mythri Dates uh whatever you want to call him, the
Speaker 1: six and he starts like rubbing his hands together like
Speaker 1: that guy in that meme, you know, the me the
Speaker 1: guy rubbing his hands together. It wasn't a birdman's doing this,
Speaker 1: That's exactly mithraddyes is like that's what he's doing, looking
Speaker 1: at Rome fighting Italy, like oh yeah, I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: some ship. So famously, uh Mithradates uh was also related
Speaker 1: and again this is something that goes back through histories.
Speaker 1: It's related into the neighboring kingdom of Armenia and the
Speaker 1: partness as well they share to um so Rome and
Speaker 1: the people's and like that whole region of the world,
Speaker 1: you know, the code which generally like they'll call these
Speaker 1: guys like uh, Persians a lot of the time, like
Speaker 1: it's all like it's this, you know, it's Asia, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's what the to the ROMs. This is just
Speaker 1: Asia um and they fought a while, and they would
Speaker 1: fight many more wars in the future. Um. So old
Speaker 1: Mithraddys decides that, like, while the Republic's got his back turned,
Speaker 1: he's going to annex to neighboring kingdoms that have like
Speaker 1: tight relationships with Rome, primarily like trading based. So because
Speaker 1: Rome has so much economic interest in the area. They
Speaker 1: have a Roman commission to Asia. Um and the guy
Speaker 1: who's running it, basically the guy who's running the Roman
Speaker 1: Commission to Asia is like, hey, methradityas you can't annex
Speaker 1: these places. You have to give them back to their kings.
Speaker 1: You have to restore their sovereignty. And the head of
Speaker 1: the Roman commission doesn't do this because he's a cool dude,
Speaker 1: but because he's been bribed, right, like these guys paid
Speaker 1: him to do it. Um. Because you know, stuff can't
Speaker 1: come back, Like it's not like Rome is centralized for
Speaker 1: the day. But it's not like he can radio back
Speaker 1: home and be like what do you want me to do?
Speaker 1: Like that takes like six months to get anything back, right. Um. So,
Speaker 1: the two countries that Methraddys had annexed, Cappadocia and Bithnia
Speaker 1: get freed because Methradityas doesn't really want a straight up
Speaker 1: fight with the Romans at this date. But they now
Speaker 1: owe the chief Roman dude in the area a lot
Speaker 1: of money because they promised to pay him for this.
Speaker 1: Now this guy, this dude who like makes Mathradityas leave
Speaker 1: and gets bribed, is Mannius Aquillus Aquilius. We don't actually
Speaker 1: know how any of these names were pronounced, because here's
Speaker 1: the fun thing. As a guy who took three years
Speaker 1: of Latin, nobody in knows how ancient Latin was pronounced.
Speaker 1: We know how people have said like ecclesiastic Latin, but
Speaker 1: it is different, like nobody actually understands exactly how Romans
Speaker 1: would have said everything. Um So Mannius Aquilius, head of
Speaker 1: the Roman delegation, tells the king of I think Cappadocia
Speaker 1: and Nikomedes that a good way to get money that
Speaker 1: he owes Mannius might be by invading Pontus and taking
Speaker 1: their stuff. Now, the fact that they had just been
Speaker 1: annexed by Pontas, if you're a smart person, you may
Speaker 1: be like, well, maybe these guys can't beat Pontus in
Speaker 1: a war. If this just happened right, like, maybe their
Speaker 1: invasion won't go well, maybe this is a stupid idea.
Speaker 1: You might think Mannius Aquillis would have would think that,
Speaker 1: but he does not. So Nikamedes tries to invade Pontus,
Speaker 1: and they just ta get curb stomped by mithradityas um
Speaker 1: just just absolutely pounded. So next, I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: a write up for the University of Chicago's Encyclopedia Romana
Speaker 1: quote mathread. Methraditys retook Cappadocia in Bitthania, defeating Ni comedies
Speaker 1: at the river Amnius, fighting against chariots armed with sides
Speaker 1: on the wheels. The army was terrified at seeing men
Speaker 1: cutting halves and still breathing or mingled in fragments or
Speaker 1: hanging on the sides, Overcome rather by the hideousness of
Speaker 1: the spectacle, but then by loss of the fight. Fear
Speaker 1: disordered their ranks. Methradity Is then swept into fr Gia
Speaker 1: and the Roman province of Asia. Aquilius, who so ill
Speaker 1: advisedly had precipitated the war without ratification from the Senate,
Speaker 1: fled the mainland, but was given up by the citizens
Speaker 1: of Madeleine. Ridiculed and paraded on an ass. He eventually
Speaker 1: was executed, relates Appian when Methradates poured golden molten gold
Speaker 1: down his throat, thus rebuking the Romans for their bribe taking.
Speaker 1: And this is a cool and good way of executing
Speaker 1: like powerful rich people. That happens a bunch of times
Speaker 1: to Romans in it Like this is not the last
Speaker 1: time a Roman will be force fed molten gold in
Speaker 1: this part of the world. It's pretty cool. It's objective,
Speaker 1: like Methradity is. I'm not calling him a great guy,
Speaker 1: but like, it's pretty cool to do this to guys
Speaker 1: like that. I want to say, this happens as someone Methradity.
Speaker 1: I mean, um, it happens to um. Happen to these
Speaker 1: um uh relatives later on, but I can't remember. Cool.
Speaker 1: That's good. You know it famously happens, so you know
Speaker 1: later during the time of like Caesar, and you've got
Speaker 1: like Caesar, Pompey and crasses Um and Crosses is like
Speaker 1: the richest guy in the world at the time. Some
Speaker 1: people will argue he's the richest dude there ever was.
Speaker 1: He made like a big chunk of his fortune by
Speaker 1: when there would be fires in Rome, he owned a
Speaker 1: fire department and would go to people and he would
Speaker 1: be like, you want me to save your house, you
Speaker 1: gotta like give me your house, like sell me your
Speaker 1: house and then you'll be able to get your ship
Speaker 1: out at least. And like that's so big asshole. He
Speaker 1: like goes to war in kind of this vague region
Speaker 1: of the world against like Parthia because he's a dick
Speaker 1: uh and his army gets its ass. Again. This is
Speaker 1: one of those times where like the Romans lose like
Speaker 1: a whole generation of young men. Um. And yeah, all
Speaker 1: according to legend, he gets killed by having gold poured
Speaker 1: down his throat to the richest man in history, which
Speaker 1: is neat army through the mountains of Parthia and getting wrecked.
Speaker 1: It was like kind of an origin story for a
Speaker 1: lot of important people in Roman Mark. Antony did that too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like getting chicken pox for Roman military leaders. She's
Speaker 1: just gotta go get your ass wrecked in Asia. Um.
Speaker 1: So again, obviously, so far this is broadly speaking morally
Speaker 1: unproblematic um within the context of ancient history. Um. But
Speaker 1: if you know your Roman history, you know that, like
Speaker 1: and maybe if this hadn't happened, if he'd gotten back
Speaker 1: to Rome, there's a decent chance they would have like
Speaker 1: executed Marcus, like thrown him off the Tarpeian rock or
Speaker 1: something for for fucking around. Um they did that sometimes.
Speaker 1: But now a Roman elected leader has been executed by
Speaker 1: a foreign king, and Rome does not take kindly to
Speaker 1: that ship. Um. So things start churning up for a war,
Speaker 1: and Methreadityase or mithrid Dates whatever decides his first step
Speaker 1: should be to cleanse his new territory of all Roman citizens.
Speaker 1: And this is where things get genociety. Quote A eight
Speaker 1: b c. And a measure of the hatred felt for
Speaker 1: the Romans in Asia. Methredites wrote secretly to all his
Speaker 1: sat traps and city governors that on the thirtieth day
Speaker 1: thereafter they should set up on all Romans and Italians
Speaker 1: in their towns, and upon their wives and children and
Speaker 1: their freedmen of Italian birth, kill them and throw their
Speaker 1: bodies out unburied, and share their goodsmith with King Mithraddys.
Speaker 1: Tens of thousands were massacred. Valarious Maximus records eighty thousand deaths,
Speaker 1: Plutarch A hundred and fifty thousand, and what has been
Speaker 1: called the Asian or Ephesian vespers um. So yeah, this
Speaker 1: this is a definitely genocide. Um, pretty pretty clear example
Speaker 1: of a genocide, and one that happens very rapidly. It
Speaker 1: might be most common, it might be most reasonable to
Speaker 1: dry compare it to Rwanda, where there were there were
Speaker 1: pre existing tensions because the Romans had kind of come
Speaker 1: into this area with all the money. They were backed
Speaker 1: by this state that had bossed people around. They were
Speaker 1: like landlords and they were bankers, and they were like
Speaker 1: seen as kind of economically oppressing people in the regions,
Speaker 1: seen as arrogant, seen as like backed by this outside
Speaker 1: state that was unfairly exerting power in the area. And
Speaker 1: so people had been pissed for a while. And when
Speaker 1: Methredys takes over and says like, hey, it's time to
Speaker 1: get rid of these motherfucker's, there's a lot of folks
Speaker 1: who are like willing to do it because of these
Speaker 1: pre existing ethnic tensions. Um. Yeah, obviously with the main
Speaker 1: difference of these ethnic tensions or actually different ethnicities and
Speaker 1: not invented, yes, and not invented because these look like
Speaker 1: dudes from Italy showing up in fucking Turkey, um, which
Speaker 1: is actually again like with Garthiage, not all that far um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so um this upsets Rome. The whole story
Speaker 1: ends after two more wars with Roman victory and the
Speaker 1: death of Methred Eyes and the rise of a guy
Speaker 1: named Sola who sucks ass. But that's a story for
Speaker 1: another day. Um. Definitely an active historical gin side. It
Speaker 1: does not. However, again, if we're talking about Dr Stanton scale,
Speaker 1: it doesn't correspond directly to that. Now, there is an
Speaker 1: us versus them component to the massacre right that exists
Speaker 1: well prior to Methreadity is giving the order right, the
Speaker 1: fact that there are these divisions that Romans are kind
Speaker 1: of seen as other. But there's no build up to this. Really,
Speaker 1: there's no propaganda arm to to humanize them. There's no
Speaker 1: gradual stage of separating Romans from other people in their community. Um.
Speaker 1: He issues secret orders that local officials and their levies fulfill. Um,
Speaker 1: and as an incentive, he divides the property of the
Speaker 1: dead Romans between himself and the inhabitants of the city
Speaker 1: that they're killed in. There. Yes, that's why, right, And
Speaker 1: this is this is the thing I think scholars obviously,
Speaker 1: because we're quoting a bunch of scholars talk about this
Speaker 1: a lot, but is a general rule when people popularly
Speaker 1: discussed genocide, they almost never talked about how fucking much
Speaker 1: of it is about money. Yeah. Uh, it's starting to
Speaker 1: become more accepted now. Um. Like, like we talked about
Speaker 1: I think in the very beginning of the last episode,
Speaker 1: is that people really wanted to believe that every perpetrator
Speaker 1: of a genocide is a dead eyed psycho who's a
Speaker 1: dead set racial baganda. Yeah. I mean that's pretty pretty
Speaker 1: solidly thrown out the window by Christopher Brownings were um
Speaker 1: and ordinary men, which then spawned one of the worst
Speaker 1: books on the Holocaust I think I've ever read, called
Speaker 1: Hitler's Willing Executioners. Yeah, but um, yeah, it's um, there's
Speaker 1: a lot that's problematic about that. Make a long story
Speaker 1: short for people who don't want to read it. Uh.
Speaker 1: He hits the Nazis with their own race sides. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which you don't need to do. You do need to do.
Speaker 1: The only thing that could stop a bad guy with
Speaker 1: race science is a good guy with race science. And
Speaker 1: not to mention like the Rwanda genocide umps to mind immediately.
Speaker 1: With some of the new scholarships, we'll be talking about
Speaker 1: this quite a bit. But yeah, I mean this is
Speaker 1: actually literally what we're leading into. Um. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's worth noting that, like, yeah, the king
Speaker 1: uh incentivizes people who inform on hidden Romans and he
Speaker 1: promises slaves freedom. He again, the genocide occurs there. There
Speaker 1: is an aspect of it as people have been pisted
Speaker 1: Romans in this region for a long time. But they
Speaker 1: have incentives, right, They don't just suddenly get let off
Speaker 1: the leash and do a genocide because they're angry at Romans.
Speaker 1: There's it's worth it. The balance sheet makes it worth it,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. And this is an important truth about
Speaker 1: why people do do genocides because it pays. Um. Racism
Speaker 1: and nationalism are always major causes, sided along with kind
Speaker 1: of vague and constantly frustrating claims of brainwashing by propaganda.
Speaker 1: But as we'll cover, focusing on those things leads to
Speaker 1: a really myopic view about why mass killings occur. Our
Speaker 1: earliest two genocides. We have no context about it, right,
Speaker 1: we have no We have no idea why the omnia,
Speaker 1: how the omnia justified like what they did, or how
Speaker 1: the people who killed that the people in Nata ruck
Speaker 1: justified what they did. But it seems safe to conclude
Speaker 1: that the folks carrying out the violence and uh their civilians,
Speaker 1: the civilians back home, whatever that was, probably saw there
Speaker 1: being some sort of a resource gain in killing those people.
Speaker 1: That is very likely. Um. Popular scholarship of the Holocaust
Speaker 1: tends to focus on the Yellow stars and arson attacks
Speaker 1: on synagogues, and of course the camps, and obviously all
Speaker 1: of that's very important, but many Americans have never even
Speaker 1: heard of arianization. And in order to explain what that is,
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from the Holocaust Encyclopedia. Under voluntary arianization,
Speaker 1: the Nazi German state encouraged Jewish businessmen, who were already
Speaker 1: facing economic and social discrimination, to sell their businesses in
Speaker 1: Germany at radically reduced prices. In early nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: there were about one hundred thousand Jewish owned businesses in Germany.
Speaker 1: About half of those were small retail stores dealing mostly
Speaker 1: in clothing or footwear. The rest were factories or workshops
Speaker 1: of varying sizes, or professional offices for lawyers, physicians, and
Speaker 1: other independent professionals. By nineteen thirty eight, the combination of
Speaker 1: Nazi terror propaganda, boycott and legislation was so effective that
Speaker 1: some two thirds of these Jewish owned enterprises were out
Speaker 1: of business or sold to non Jews. Jewish owners, often
Speaker 1: desperate to immigrate or to sell a failing business, accepted
Speaker 1: a selling price that was only twenty or thirty percent
Speaker 1: of the actual value of each business. And I think
Speaker 1: it's important to highlight this because you can draw a
Speaker 1: real direct line between what Mathradates is doing what the
Speaker 1: Nazis are doing here, right, Oh, yeah, absolutely, especially yeah,
Speaker 1: especially when arianization became forced, which I mean, of course
Speaker 1: you could argue that it already is forced, but when
Speaker 1: it when it becomes you know, there they go from
Speaker 1: voluntary to force, and the Nazis sense of the word
Speaker 1: when they start deportations all their property outside of like
Speaker 1: precious metals and things, which end up vanishing into Swiss
Speaker 1: bank accounts and are you still there to this day
Speaker 1: they get auctioned off at drastically reduced prices to German civilians. Yes, um,
Speaker 1: and yeah it's um. Obviously, like one of the things
Speaker 1: to notice that what Mathradity does is faster, because like
Speaker 1: it's years between arianization and the actual physical elimination of
Speaker 1: Jewish human beings. In Europe on a mass scale. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a good Again, this is not something that gets
Speaker 1: talked about, especially in our popular retellings of the Holocaust.
Speaker 1: It tends to get glossed over. There's one very good
Speaker 1: movie that is like focused on arianization, although it's arianization
Speaker 1: on the Eastern Front during the invasion of Russia by
Speaker 1: the Nazis. It's called The Shop on Main Street. Uh.
Speaker 1: It one of foreign oscars made in the USSR in
Speaker 1: like the sixties, um, and it is all about a
Speaker 1: local dude named Tono who's like just like a Russian
Speaker 1: dude who's like brother collaborates. I think it's his brother
Speaker 1: collaborates with the Nazis, and because his brother is working
Speaker 1: with them, this like kind of he's the town drunk
Speaker 1: basically gets given a Jewish woman's business and he like
Speaker 1: tries to hide her and stuff. It's it's a very
Speaker 1: bleak movie, um, but it's a good movie about that
Speaker 1: aspect of the genocide that I don't think I've ever
Speaker 1: seen anything else tie into it maybe. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that's really interesting about The Shop on Main
Speaker 1: Street I recommend watching it is that this is again
Speaker 1: filmed in the US. Are in like the sixties, So
Speaker 1: all of the people acting in the movie had lived
Speaker 1: through this, Like the actors in this movie had either
Speaker 1: participated in or watched their neighbors give up their Jews
Speaker 1: when they were kids, like during the Nazi advance. So
Speaker 1: it's they're not so much acting as like remembering and it's. Um,
Speaker 1: it is a potent film, Like you should watch The
Speaker 1: Shop on Main Street. It's a very good movie. Just
Speaker 1: like have something like the new Nicholas Cage movie to
Speaker 1: put on afterwards that will be less sad um because
Speaker 1: holy sh it isn't bleak World War two movie about Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't believe it's depressing anyway, I'm gonna go have
Speaker 1: a nice palate Come and See. Yeah, I would say
Speaker 1: it's on the level of Come and See in terms
Speaker 1: of bleakness, not in terms of like how intense the
Speaker 1: imagery of Come and See is, which is like nothing else. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Russian movies about the World War Two. Uh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's interesting because like when you think about the fact
Speaker 1: that um Mathraditis and the Nazis had the same basic idea,
Speaker 1: but he immediately proceeded to genocide and it took them years.
Speaker 1: You might conclude. One of the things you might conclude
Speaker 1: from this is that a benefit from modern civilization, and
Speaker 1: that is that in order to get a population to
Speaker 1: buy into a genocide, you have to separate the killing
Speaker 1: from the financial gain by a couple of years, um. Everybody.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if that does speak well of civilization, Like,
Speaker 1: I know, you can try and you can interpret that
Speaker 1: however you would like. If that's what you choose to
Speaker 1: take out of this lesson, I would argue that it
Speaker 1: does not, especially because it seems like the most genocide
Speaker 1: is not all, but most in the modern era, Like
Speaker 1: the vast majority of work that has done is done
Speaker 1: to make it palatable, um, not only to lay people
Speaker 1: in civilization, but also to the perpetrators. Yeah. And it's
Speaker 1: because this might shuck some people. Ideology isn't all that
Speaker 1: important for people doing the killing. It's important for people
Speaker 1: doing the organizing. Yeah, and that's what we're we're this
Speaker 1: is I mean, this is all what we're talking thinking about.
Speaker 1: But first, you know, who doesn't organize people to participate
Speaker 1: in an ethnic cleansing in order to make financial benefits
Speaker 1: for a specific class of people. We actually don't know that. Well, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because it could be and they are certain have. Um,
Speaker 1: the Ford Motor Company when abducts children for their child
Speaker 1: hunting island off the coast of Indonesia, they abduct children
Speaker 1: from all socioeconomic classes, all major religious and racial groups,
Speaker 1: all kinds of kids on the child hunting island off
Speaker 1: the coast of Indonesia. That's the guarantee, the the guarantee
Speaker 1: of of equality. Freely sourced children. Yeah, are kidnapping gangs,
Speaker 1: do not see race. Ah, we're back. So we've discussed
Speaker 1: a shortcoming I think of Dr Stanton scale, and again
Speaker 1: we're not trying to show them like his research or anything.
Speaker 1: This is primarily even not really an issue with this scale,
Speaker 1: but with like the way it is popularly interpreted, like
Speaker 1: it's a like genocide is a thermometer, right um, gonn
Speaker 1: to dial up the genocide? Yeah, yeah, temperature. Um, that's
Speaker 1: not quite how it works. And I'd like to present
Speaker 1: folks with another rubric that they might find more useful
Speaker 1: for determining how people and specifically individual people, this does,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of work on communities get to tip
Speaker 1: to the point where they are willing to participate in genocide. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: This is another way of looking at it that I
Speaker 1: find more useful. We can talk about like the shortcomings
Speaker 1: of this way as well, if um and I'm sure
Speaker 1: we will. Genocide historian Irvin Staub, who, by the way,
Speaker 1: was only alive to do his research because Raoul Wallenberg
Speaker 1: saved his life. He's one of the he's one of
Speaker 1: the kids that Wallenberg hid in like a house during
Speaker 1: the genocide in Hungary. Um Staub was a pioneer in understanding,
Speaker 1: specifically the temporal procession of motivations in individuals who consent
Speaker 1: to take part in genocide. That was like a thing
Speaker 1: he was really interested in, is what is happening in
Speaker 1: the head? Like are the different things that have to
Speaker 1: happen for someone to be like willing to do this?
Speaker 1: You know um up until his and he's obviously he's
Speaker 1: he's very much working off of the work that Limcoln pioneer.
Speaker 1: He quotes Limpton Limpcoln constantly in his book. You know,
Speaker 1: none of these people are like doing anything entirely like
Speaker 1: this is scholarship, right, everybody's like participating and building and understanding. UM.
Speaker 1: Up until his book was published in nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: there was fairly little organized scholarship concerned with how individuals
Speaker 1: changed over time to support genocide. Staub focused on what
Speaker 1: he called a continuum of destruction, which other scholars have
Speaker 1: empirically documented in studies of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia. The
Speaker 1: findings of all of this research on motivation were aptly
Speaker 1: described by one of the scholars who followed Staub, Scott Strauss,
Speaker 1: who wrote a Rwanda quote. Rwandans killed for multiple reasons.
Speaker 1: Others joined in the attacks for one reason, but then
Speaker 1: continued for other reasons. Their motivations changed over time. Um Now.
Speaker 1: I found a good article published in twenty by Jan
Speaker 1: Reinerman and Smothey Williams in the incredibly named International Journal
Speaker 1: of Violence. I think it's actually called Violence and International Journal,
Speaker 1: but either way, it's a pretty pretty cool title for
Speaker 1: a thing. Um now. Based on the research of guys
Speaker 1: like stalbin Strass going all the way back to Limpkeoln,
Speaker 1: they propose a sort of hierarchy of needs in list
Speaker 1: ways in which different motivations can influence those needs to
Speaker 1: make people capable of like directly carrying out mass murder quote.
Speaker 1: To understand why individuals engage in violent action, we need
Speaker 1: to understand both their motivations and inhibitions, both of which
Speaker 1: stem from certain needs, inhibitions conceptually being motivations for not
Speaker 1: engaging in violent action. As such, we can identify individual
Speaker 1: hierarchies of needs, and only when the most salient one
Speaker 1: is a motivation for action will an individual participate. Now
Speaker 1: to explain why they present a chart listing the needs
Speaker 1: of an individual and specific moment, which can generally be
Speaker 1: categorized as security, moral integrity, social belonging, and a desire
Speaker 1: for better life conditions. So, for security, if persons to
Speaker 1: I are to keep themselves safe, might lead them to
Speaker 1: participate in a genocide to avoid coercion, violence, or the
Speaker 1: threat of violence from the state or another group. A
Speaker 1: person's moral integrity might keep them from killing if they
Speaker 1: believe that murdering people is always wrong. A person's need
Speaker 1: for social belonging might convince them to kill if doing
Speaker 1: so will keep them in good with the group, and likewise,
Speaker 1: they might not be willing to kill if that will
Speaker 1: ostracize them from the from the people around them, and
Speaker 1: they need to improve their own Individual circumstances might of
Speaker 1: course lead a person to support genocide for economic gain.
Speaker 1: Quote This can be illustrated through the actions of a
Speaker 1: Rwandan Hutu who might have faced strong pressure from other
Speaker 1: hohotoos to participate. As Strauss argues, this was the most
Speaker 1: common motivation for people to participate in the killings and
Speaker 1: rendered the need for security a most salient and the
Speaker 1: hierarchy of needs and motivations at this time in a
Speaker 1: similar vein, an example of coercion can be found in Cambodia,
Speaker 1: where coercion caused a diffuse feeling of anxiety in which
Speaker 1: everyone feared becoming a victim themselves, making fear endemic. Furthermore,
Speaker 1: coercion in this case provoked strict obedient to the orders
Speaker 1: of their superiors for the fear of life threatening consequences.
Speaker 1: Some former cadres of the Khmer Rouge claimed that if
Speaker 1: people did not kill and follow the rules, they would
Speaker 1: be killed, or stated they were fearful for their security.
Speaker 1: A statement of a former camer Rouge illustrated this as follows,
Speaker 1: But it was the order from higher and if they
Speaker 1: did not do it, they were also killed. Therefore, whether
Speaker 1: they wanted to do it or not, they had to
Speaker 1: do it. They just followed the order. Now, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that tracks, especially m Rwanda. I mean, the vast
Speaker 1: majority of the genocide wasn't committed by arms of the state,
Speaker 1: though the Rwandan military did help. Most of us done
Speaker 1: by Hutu power militias in the inter homeway, and uh
Speaker 1: like a huge number of the victims of that genocide
Speaker 1: are also moderate Hutus who refused the tip part. And yeah, people,
Speaker 1: you can actually go on the Rwanda Genocide Museum's website
Speaker 1: and and watch a ton of perpetrator uh like interviews
Speaker 1: and virtually all of them will point out that the
Speaker 1: community was doing it. Um. I was worried that if
Speaker 1: I didn't take part, I too would be killed. And
Speaker 1: also I stole their stuff. It's like the three things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that I think that's what's so important, is that,
Speaker 1: like it is all it's not just fear of coercion.
Speaker 1: It's not just that someone is ordering them um. And
Speaker 1: it's not just that they have an economic benefit. It
Speaker 1: is a continuum of things that kind of you know,
Speaker 1: and again you could get overly mechanistic with this in
Speaker 1: views like flipping switches. It's not quite. It's just it's
Speaker 1: the same way that like, you know, people in any
Speaker 1: circumstance can do things they would not expect of themselves
Speaker 1: because things change that like alter the calculus they're making
Speaker 1: in the moment about like what is what is the
Speaker 1: thing to do? Um? And it's I think that's much
Speaker 1: more useful than just being like, well, if you brainwash
Speaker 1: certain people, you can get them to commit genocide. Um.
Speaker 1: It's more like if if you can provide the proper
Speaker 1: incentives in the proper away at the right time, people
Speaker 1: can are willing to engage in horrific things that they
Speaker 1: would consider impossible of themselves in a different situation. Right.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's one of the main reasons why the
Speaker 1: Holocausts switch from being mass shootings to death camps, because
Speaker 1: human beings cannot continuously do that forever. No, no, and
Speaker 1: they will break they as they did. And we can
Speaker 1: talk about like the rates of alcoholism among the SS
Speaker 1: or like just like the fact that um uh, like
Speaker 1: so many of those guys killed themselves, right, which you
Speaker 1: shouldn't you shouldn't feel bad for them. But it's just
Speaker 1: like there's a certain there's a certain subset of the
Speaker 1: human population who could who could shoot, you know, unarmed
Speaker 1: people all day long and not have any effect, but
Speaker 1: it's not a lot of them, and it's not most
Speaker 1: of the people who do that kind of thing. Um.
Speaker 1: So the need for social belonging is also a well
Speaker 1: documented and powerful motivation for many participants in genocide. Obviously,
Speaker 1: a lot of Germans why their neighbors be led away
Speaker 1: and avoided speaking up. And this is an area where
Speaker 1: like the popular view was often because like, well, if
Speaker 1: they had said something, they would have gotten in trouble. Um.
Speaker 1: And we just talked about how coercion is a factor,
Speaker 1: especially in Rwanda, but it's also not as much of
Speaker 1: a factor in a lot of genocides as you think,
Speaker 1: for example, in Germany. Um. One thing that is worth
Speaker 1: noting is that soldiers in Germany were not punished or
Speaker 1: executed for refusing to participate in genocide. They were ostracized
Speaker 1: by their fellows sometimes. I'm sure some dudes got like
Speaker 1: beat up or whatever by their buddies, like if you're
Speaker 1: talking about like individual coercion, but the state did not
Speaker 1: execute German soldiers for refusing to kill Jewish people, of course,
Speaker 1: now and or and um, ordinary men. Christopher Browning points
Speaker 1: out before every mass killing, to include the largest mass
Speaker 1: killing of beings, yeah, which the Russians are shelling or
Speaker 1: we're shelling yes, yeaheah, the Holocaust Royal specifically good stuff
Speaker 1: like the it's noted that I mean this is a
Speaker 1: reserve police battalion. I believe reserve police telling a one
Speaker 1: oh one or something. Um, yeah, we're like given explicit permission,
Speaker 1: like you don't have to do this if you don't
Speaker 1: want to, like you can request to transfer. Has had
Speaker 1: an out. So again, it's not just any of these factors,
Speaker 1: because social coercion can be totally absent in the way
Speaker 1: that it's like in the way that we were describing earlier,
Speaker 1: where it's a fear of your own physical security right
Speaker 1: for not participating, that is not a necessary precursor of genocide.
Speaker 1: It can be um and it's it's it's interesting here
Speaker 1: because one of the things that is worth noting because
Speaker 1: I don't want to just be talking about why genocides happen.
Speaker 1: If you want to look at like how to prevent
Speaker 1: them or to mitigate them. One of the most successful
Speaker 1: things you can do is protest in the moment against it.
Speaker 1: And this is a thing that was successful in Nazi
Speaker 1: Germany against the Nazis um. On a number of occasions,
Speaker 1: people who protested direct acts of deportation and killing did
Speaker 1: not tend to be imprisoned or harmed by the state.
Speaker 1: In fact, the state on a number of occasions backed off,
Speaker 1: and stal writes it lengths about the power of bystanders
Speaker 1: to influence, or, at least in specific limited instances, halt
Speaker 1: and and and slow down the process of genocide. And
Speaker 1: when talking about this, he points to a well documented
Speaker 1: psychological phenomenon, the bystander effect. When a number of people
Speaker 1: are present in an emergency, significant number, somebody gets hit
Speaker 1: by a car or something, and there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: folks watching, responsibility is diffused, and each individual person on
Speaker 1: scene is less likely to help, right, because they assume
Speaker 1: someone else who knows better is going to get in there. Right.
Speaker 1: We could talk about the cops stacked up at Vivaldi
Speaker 1: refusing to like. That may be a different thing, but like,
Speaker 1: I'm sure that was a factor in what was happening. Psychologically, UM,
Speaker 1: the same thing that causes most people in a room
Speaker 1: to ignore when like a dude slaps his girlfriend, UM
Speaker 1: is at play when agents of the state come to
Speaker 1: disappear people. Stout points out that even the Nazis backed
Speaker 1: away repeatedly in the face of public resistance. Quote, they
Speaker 1: did not persist, for example, when Bulgaria, where people protested
Speaker 1: in the streets, refused to hand over its Jewish population,
Speaker 1: or when within Germany, relatives and some institutions protested the
Speaker 1: killing of the mentally retarded, mentally ill, and others regarded
Speaker 1: as genetically inferior um. Like there were cases in which
Speaker 1: and and there was a backlash after Christal Knock that
Speaker 1: caused changes in Nazi policy. And this is against the
Speaker 1: Some of these scholars who are talking about it in
Speaker 1: the in the way that we've just been discussing, will
Speaker 1: say that what's happening here is that in that moment
Speaker 1: where like you're trying to round up people, and folks
Speaker 1: show up to protest your human need for moral integrity
Speaker 1: can kind of switch to make you incapable temporarily of
Speaker 1: at least like continuing to do the thing you had
Speaker 1: come there to do. Right. You had come there morally
Speaker 1: willing to round up these people for genocide, but the
Speaker 1: the approbation of the community around you suddenly makes you
Speaker 1: unwilling to do that in that moment. Doesn't mean they
Speaker 1: weren't willing to do it later. Um, But it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that like they decide that it's morally wrong, you know. Um.
Speaker 1: A big factor in what may be happening is that
Speaker 1: when they are presented with a crowd of people protesting them,
Speaker 1: they suddenly think, why might get punished for this later?
Speaker 1: This might not be safe for me, Like, if this
Speaker 1: is pissing off this many people, I actually might like
Speaker 1: have to like deal with consequences for participating in this, right. Um.
Speaker 1: So that may be part of what's going on, But
Speaker 1: it does point to and this is something STAB points
Speaker 1: out a lot. It's actually not useless to like, one
Speaker 1: of the most useful things you can do at every
Speaker 1: stage of like of of kind of building genocidal tensions
Speaker 1: is make it clear that like you hate what these
Speaker 1: people are doing and you oppose them, um, because that
Speaker 1: has a number of influences that can like at least
Speaker 1: mitigate the harms that are being done. Um. And that's
Speaker 1: this is kind of gets to like the root of
Speaker 1: what the humanization dialogue is getting at. You know. The
Speaker 1: problem that most often when people talk about to humanizing
Speaker 1: in the context of genocide, they frame it as the
Speaker 1: use of specific language to deny people their humanity UM
Speaker 1: in order to prepare to execute a genocide UM. And
Speaker 1: that's not always how it goes, and in fact, there's
Speaker 1: more evidence for it occurring the opposite way around. In Cambodia,
Speaker 1: for example, killers reported being disturbed by the acts of
Speaker 1: mass murder they committed it first, and then reported that
Speaker 1: it got easier with time, like killing ducks and chickens.
Speaker 1: And part of this is that like the longer you
Speaker 1: do this without people stopping you, and the more the
Speaker 1: less like resistance you encounter to it, the more it
Speaker 1: just seems like if you're in a culture where people
Speaker 1: are doing this, you feel less like number one, you're
Speaker 1: gonna get punished for it, less like it's a problem.
Speaker 1: It gets more like That's a big part of like
Speaker 1: what the humanization is not what happens before, but what
Speaker 1: happens like during UM And a lot of the participants
Speaker 1: in the Cambodian genocide will say that, like they hated
Speaker 1: what they were doing at first, and then with time
Speaker 1: they just came to regard it as like killing ducks
Speaker 1: and chickens, you know, the way they'd slaughtered animals as
Speaker 1: kids on the farm. UM. They integrated the execution of
Speaker 1: human beings in their lives into their lives in order
Speaker 1: to like protect themselves right. Um and professor Eliza Luft
Speaker 1: has also written and researched this topic extensively, and she writes, quote,
Speaker 1: I find that the humanization is more often an outcome
Speaker 1: of participation in violence rather than a precursor. In other words,
Speaker 1: people make difficult decisions about whether or not to participate
Speaker 1: in genocide based on their access to financial resources, who
Speaker 1: they're being asked to kill, their proximity to extremists ordering
Speaker 1: the violence, and signals sent by local elites. But the
Speaker 1: more they kill, the easier killing becomes, and this is
Speaker 1: partly due to shifts in social perception. Although a vincent
Speaker 1: genocide describe reactions that include vomiting, shaking, nightmares, and trauma
Speaker 1: the first few times they kill, over time their physical
Speaker 1: and emotional horror at killing subsides. My research suggests this
Speaker 1: cognitive adaptation of violence goes hand in hand with a
Speaker 1: transformation and how ordinary killers perceive their victims. Dehumanizing propagandic
Speaker 1: and help with this process, but providing participants with cultural
Speaker 1: narratives that frame violence is the morally right thing to do.
Speaker 1: And this is when we talk about preventing genocide you
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, like the racial motivations and stuff. That's key
Speaker 1: at like the core of people who are trying to
Speaker 1: plan and organize this. One of the ways to disrupt it,
Speaker 1: you have to disrupt all of these potential incentives, right.
Speaker 1: It's about creating friction for the people who want to
Speaker 1: organize this. It's about making it difficult for folks to profit.
Speaker 1: It's about making it difficult for people to feel like
Speaker 1: this is okay. It's about making them like see and
Speaker 1: encounter resistance constantly at every stage of this, because that's
Speaker 1: a big part of like stopping people from feeling stopping
Speaker 1: people from like stopping the people who will actually do
Speaker 1: most of the activity of genocide from getting from feeling
Speaker 1: like they this is a good thing for them to do. Um,
Speaker 1: it's disrupting like the signaling and the messaging that that
Speaker 1: that brings people in, you know, like that's the stage
Speaker 1: at which you can stop this stuff. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that there's there's certainly a level of feeling of impunity,
Speaker 1: and most of the people that would end up doing
Speaker 1: these things, they'll they'll also, in my opinion, a lot
Speaker 1: of the people who would end up committing the violence
Speaker 1: didn't actually ever see themselves doing it. Um Like the
Speaker 1: Reserve Italian that Christopher Browning writes about, those guys were
Speaker 1: all people who were um uh like discharge from military
Speaker 1: service or not allowed to have military service due to
Speaker 1: medical problems. So it's a job like they thought they
Speaker 1: were gonna like go be occupied territory cops and ship um.
Speaker 1: And as far as like uh the Rwandan Genna said,
Speaker 1: or even the Armenian gen I said, where a lot
Speaker 1: of violence is communal. Uh, there's there's an intense um
Speaker 1: economic problem, economic friction and a history of conflict with
Speaker 1: these people between the two groups, and unfortunately just takes
Speaker 1: someone to harness it and allow them to be in
Speaker 1: a position to grant impunity. Um. But I think that
Speaker 1: the communities they are taking part in it, uh like
Speaker 1: you've pointed out, or only doing it because they're like, well,
Speaker 1: we're clearly going to get away with this, Like they're not,
Speaker 1: They're not gonna live. Nobody starts off, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: starting a checkpoint with a a chetty outside of if
Speaker 1: they think like there's would be a trial in like
Speaker 1: six months exactly exactly and part of like, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that Left points out is that
Speaker 1: like a thing that can influence populations to participate is
Speaker 1: like their proper their proximity to extremists ordering the violence.
Speaker 1: What stand them to point out is like these malicious,
Speaker 1: these nonstate groups, which is like one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why when anti fascists talk about the point the value
Speaker 1: of like confronting groups in the street at the early
Speaker 1: stages of this, that's part of the value of that.
Speaker 1: It's not just that like you'll stop them from coming out,
Speaker 1: because in a lot of ways it just makes them
Speaker 1: want to come out. It's other people who might kind
Speaker 1: of passively go along with them when they start setting
Speaker 1: up checkpoints, seeing how much resistance there is to those
Speaker 1: groups and the things that they say, Right, it's about
Speaker 1: keeping Yeah, some of it is about because again there's
Speaker 1: a number of things that can like flip in a
Speaker 1: person that can make them willing to participate this. It's
Speaker 1: it's about trying to make it so that people never
Speaker 1: feel like this is a thing they can participate in
Speaker 1: with impunity or without being ostracized from society, right, Like
Speaker 1: that's that's that's part of it. That's part of it,
Speaker 1: Like none of this there's no simple solution to stopping genesis. Oh,
Speaker 1: of course, that's part of something. It's something that we've
Speaker 1: been trying to figure out since Raphael Emkin first wrote
Speaker 1: his insanely long book. But like a good example of
Speaker 1: this is like, oh, the water is getting too hot.
Speaker 1: Time to fucking bail. Is like the plots against Hitler
Speaker 1: during World War Two. I mean, yeah, there was several
Speaker 1: plots against him early on, but they really only picked
Speaker 1: up once it became pretty fucking clear that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this this, this ship is coming down on us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like the famous Staufenberg plot was like not because Staufenberg
Speaker 1: hated the Nazis, it was because he didn't like that
Speaker 1: they were losing. Yeah, i mean he was a Nazi
Speaker 1: and he was anti Semitic, and he was one of
Speaker 1: those guys. It's like, okay, so death camps a stepped
Speaker 1: too far, But even even that, it seemed like and
Speaker 1: then that seemed but even then him and most of
Speaker 1: the central organizers of that plot had all been on
Speaker 1: the Eastern Front at some point and they were like,
Speaker 1: we're gonna fucking lose. Yeah, we're going to We're gonna lose.
Speaker 1: And also when you're at that level of command where
Speaker 1: you're like sitting with Hitler to bunker, you know, not
Speaker 1: only are we're gonna lose, but like, oh ship, there's
Speaker 1: going to be hell to pay, and this is coming
Speaker 1: down on us. There is going to be hell to pay.
Speaker 1: It isn't the consequences of my action. Yeah, speaking of
Speaker 1: the consequences of my actions. If you buy these products
Speaker 1: and services, the main consequence of your actions is that
Speaker 1: you'll finally be happy. All right, here's that. All right,
Speaker 1: we are back. So you know, people, I think, as
Speaker 1: we're repeatedly getting onto here, are complicated and so our
Speaker 1: genocides and we're never talking about a single reason. You know, again,
Speaker 1: in every genocide, there's probably there's individual people whose motivations
Speaker 1: are very simple and can be as simple as like
Speaker 1: I'm just a piece of it. You know, those guys
Speaker 1: like Oscar Durro Linger, like these guys exist, right, there's
Speaker 1: people who just suck ass like comprehensively, and that's why
Speaker 1: they're on board. But you you can't actually do a
Speaker 1: whole genocide with just those people. No, you need the
Speaker 1: they need the whole banality of evil to back you
Speaker 1: up exactly exactly. UM. And that's the thing like I
Speaker 1: think people UM misinterpret that sometimes is like being entirely
Speaker 1: focused on like guys like um Aikman, who are these
Speaker 1: like bureaucrats. But like part of it is that motivations
Speaker 1: for genocide can be ben ow they're not. Everyone was
Speaker 1: radicalized to think that the Jews were this like Titanic threat.
Speaker 1: It's like, no, they were like they they participated in
Speaker 1: the Holocaust for pretty banal reasons in a lot of cases. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of attempting to make things palatable
Speaker 1: for people. Like a good example like, um, the very
Speaker 1: beginning stages of the Holocaust is like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: before they started death campster killing the mentally ill, um,
Speaker 1: the disabled, And that was to you know that we
Speaker 1: don't hate these people, um, but you know they're you know,
Speaker 1: evolutionary dead ends. Um. They're hurting everybody, but this is
Speaker 1: better for them, you know. UM. And you see a
Speaker 1: good parallel of that in my opinion and in the
Speaker 1: peak of the elimination eliminationist rhetoric that we're seeing in
Speaker 1: the United States right now is um, the framing of
Speaker 1: trans identity is mental illness. Yes, um, so you well,
Speaker 1: you want to cure mental illness, right, Like why wouldn't
Speaker 1: you want to do that? So you have states like
Speaker 1: Florida or I believe Texas and a few others who
Speaker 1: are forcing de transition on people, um in order to
Speaker 1: cure them. And it's I think it's it's both that
Speaker 1: they are talking about forcing de transition because these people
Speaker 1: need to be cured, but they're also talking about um
Speaker 1: they're a belief that they're spreading it, right, which justifies
Speaker 1: could be used to justify elimination in the same way
Speaker 1: that like the Nazis talked about the Jews and how
Speaker 1: like you can't let people who are just like a
Speaker 1: quarter Jewish lib because they're spreading this like there's something
Speaker 1: inherently you know. And again this is the high level
Speaker 1: justification for it. But like this is also that's part
Speaker 1: of why the individuals got on board, is like this
Speaker 1: this this rhetoric that was explained to them, like because
Speaker 1: you have to give people some kind of explanation, right,
Speaker 1: people feel a threat from the state or they feel
Speaker 1: like that they're going to be ostracized, and also the
Speaker 1: propaganda lets them feel that they're victims are somehow less
Speaker 1: human and not just that but a threat to them, right. Um.
Speaker 1: And you you get some of this in like the
Speaker 1: correspondence of einstets group of talking about like what, we
Speaker 1: have to kill these babies because they'll grow up into
Speaker 1: Jews will like threaten our babies and stuff. Um. And
Speaker 1: so you know the killing is justified. But also it's
Speaker 1: not just that it's that I'm getting paid to do this.
Speaker 1: This is my job. This is keeping me away from
Speaker 1: a more dangerous chunk of the front um or maybe
Speaker 1: I'll get a promotion from the party if I'm like
Speaker 1: doing it, you know, this other role in like the
Speaker 1: Holocaust or something. If I can effectively move all these
Speaker 1: people on these trains, you know, it's it's almost best
Speaker 1: to look at the willingness of members of a population
Speaker 1: to participate or allow genocide to occur with their consent,
Speaker 1: as like the weakening of an immune system. Like there's
Speaker 1: certain individual barriers and people that make them unwilling to
Speaker 1: support something like this. And you don't just like flip
Speaker 1: a switch over time, but you you weaken barriers and
Speaker 1: you get them to like, well, you know, you're not
Speaker 1: saying yes to massacre in all these people, but like,
Speaker 1: let's get them out of our community. Um, let's get
Speaker 1: them out of our schools, let's shut down their ability
Speaker 1: to operate clinics. Let's do And like the every kind
Speaker 1: of new incentive weakens more barriers, and again things get
Speaker 1: you know, It's like we just talked about Staffenberg, high
Speaker 1: level Nazi UM and he was deeply anti Semitic. He
Speaker 1: believed in the Nuremberg Laws and see anything wrong with them.
Speaker 1: His main problem is he didn't he thought killing them
Speaker 1: was too far. But once you've gotten to that point,
Speaker 1: what what barrier is? They're like, you've already you've already
Speaker 1: acquiesced to camps, to arianization, to force deportation, Like, really,
Speaker 1: how far of a jump is it? For most people?
Speaker 1: And for him, I mean, he didn't attempt to kill
Speaker 1: Hitler because of the Holocaust. So for for people like him,
Speaker 1: who I fully believe would be and are generally the
Speaker 1: vast majority of people that are the you know, the
Speaker 1: state actors of any kind of genocidal powder, whether it
Speaker 1: be the Empire, Nazi, Germany, UH, the United States, uss R, whoever, UM,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of people will talk themselves into accepting
Speaker 1: a certain amount of this um that they directly have
Speaker 1: their hands in, or they can directly see, and whatever
Speaker 1: happens beyond what they see, and that somebody else's problem,
Speaker 1: I can't speak of it. They'll they'll talk themselves into
Speaker 1: becoming palatable because much like you reserved police Batalion one
Speaker 1: oh one, this is this is a salary, this is
Speaker 1: the pension I can take care of my family. So
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, people are able to compartmentalize of
Speaker 1: why they need to be this, you know, horribly murderous bureaucrat,
Speaker 1: because well, I'm just filing papers. My hands aren't bloody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this is I think why I have been as
Speaker 1: I think most people who participated in a lot of
Speaker 1: protests very critical about the value of protests in a
Speaker 1: lot of situations. But when it comes to stuff like
Speaker 1: they don't say gay Bill, when it comes to stuff
Speaker 1: like like okay, folks are saying some really sketchy elimination
Speaker 1: of stuff about trans people, we should get as many
Speaker 1: fucking people out in the street. And a part of
Speaker 1: the value of that is making not the most You're
Speaker 1: not going to change anybody's mind. I'd like the fucking
Speaker 1: Rhonda Santis level, But there's a lot of people who
Speaker 1: are more on the edge, and you're not going to
Speaker 1: make them into suddenly nicer, woke people, but you can
Speaker 1: convince them as like, oh, if things get worse and
Speaker 1: more is demanded of me against this population, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of folks who are gonna want my fucking head,
Speaker 1: you know, And there's a value you and I mean
Speaker 1: you're know, like it's like Paul Gossar as a fucking
Speaker 1: white nationalists. You're never going to change it. And we
Speaker 1: do the psychoever, yeah, and you know, we both have
Speaker 1: in the past and will in the future, have laughed
Speaker 1: at things like polite society and things like that. But
Speaker 1: when you make a guy like that feel so deeply
Speaker 1: unwelcome and any open space because if his his rhetoric
Speaker 1: is obscene, it simply won't happen that much anymore. Like
Speaker 1: these ideas are allowed to propagate, like you've shown and
Speaker 1: talked about before on your show, Um, where they use
Speaker 1: the guy as a freedom of speech to spread hate.
Speaker 1: They don't care about freedom of speech, they care about
Speaker 1: spreading hate. That's it. Yeah, Um, so yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think what's important about looking at it all this way
Speaker 1: and the way that we've been talking about is that
Speaker 1: when you think about when you think about kind of
Speaker 1: getting people able to commit to participate, to allow genocide
Speaker 1: as as in this more fluid way, it frames the
Speaker 1: willingness to engage in mass killing as more fragile than
Speaker 1: people tend to think it is, which is important. This
Speaker 1: is why strident's sudden opposition in the moment can delay
Speaker 1: or prevent acts of genocide. Is Wallen. Wallenberg stopped a
Speaker 1: shipload of people from getting deported from Budapest on fucking
Speaker 1: trains because he would wave papers in their face and
Speaker 1: yell bureaucratically at Nazi soldiers, and it made them think
Speaker 1: they'd get in trouble, right, and that saved thousands of lives.
Speaker 1: Look at the safety community in Nan king exactly, headed
Speaker 1: by a literal Nazi who pointed out that, like all
Speaker 1: fucking contact the Counselate of of Nazi Germany, if you
Speaker 1: hurt anybody under my command, like anybody under my protection,
Speaker 1: and that that wall of like I might get in
Speaker 1: trouble is what stopped Japanese soldiers from like they They
Speaker 1: possibly saved over two or thousand people. Yeah, And the
Speaker 1: only thing that saved him was in force of arms.
Speaker 1: So that is important when a genocide is unfolding, because
Speaker 1: once it started, you can't prevent it. You have to
Speaker 1: stop it. But in the prevention stage, the thing that
Speaker 1: stops people from the murder is this smite blow up
Speaker 1: in my face exactly exactly um. And And again that's
Speaker 1: the uplifting part of this is that like, you can,
Speaker 1: you can, you can stop this. And and it's about
Speaker 1: like what we're talking about when a guy like Wallenberg
Speaker 1: shows up or that fucking Nazi and Nan King, they
Speaker 1: are disrupting and reordering the higher like the hierarchy of
Speaker 1: kind of needs and fears and the head of the
Speaker 1: individuals who were previously willing to undergo genocide, and they're
Speaker 1: deciding in that moment, this is not safe, this is
Speaker 1: not a good idea, this is not beneficial in this moment. Again,
Speaker 1: you're not de radicalizing them, but you don't always need
Speaker 1: to write um and yeah. It's honestly, I think a
Speaker 1: lot about like the way doctors can talk about suicide
Speaker 1: sometimes where it's like, well, there are and this is
Speaker 1: not everyone who participates in a genocide, but like there
Speaker 1: are moments where they're willing to especially in the case
Speaker 1: like Rwanda and other moments where they wouldn't be willing
Speaker 1: to and if you can disrupt someone in them and
Speaker 1: what they're willing to, they won't do it again necessarily. Um,
Speaker 1: that's maybe worth thinking about. Um yeah, prevention. Prevention is
Speaker 1: real tricky. Um. I mean it's something that even people
Speaker 1: in the field of genocide studies still don't completely agree
Speaker 1: on what should do. Like famously, the guy one of
Speaker 1: the people that runs Doctors Without Borders said like, you
Speaker 1: can't stop a fucking genocide with doctors, yeah, effectively saying
Speaker 1: that once it begins, the only thing you can do
Speaker 1: is kill the perpetrators until it stops, which I don't
Speaker 1: disagree with. I don't, I'm not I'm not going to
Speaker 1: argue with that statement. No, but obviously, like, of course,
Speaker 1: the prevention, like the key is prevention, Like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: great that you can, you know, the collective forces of
Speaker 1: the Allies stop the Holocaust from happening or from being complete,
Speaker 1: but the goal is to stop it from getting that
Speaker 1: fun boy, it got pretty far. Yeah, um yeah, it
Speaker 1: was not not a not a speedy uh, not a
Speaker 1: speedy intervention, And they certainly didn't even intervene to stop
Speaker 1: the Holocaust. Honestly, it was the fucking international equivalent of
Speaker 1: stacking dudes outside the door in a fucking classroom. While
Speaker 1: there's like it took way longer than it should have.
Speaker 1: We can talk about boatloads of Jewish people being sent
Speaker 1: away from the shores of the United States during the
Speaker 1: Holocaust because the administration didn't want to seem sympathetic towards
Speaker 1: the Jews as they were trying to get support built
Speaker 1: up to enter the war, like all sorts of ship
Speaker 1: I mean, and really even the successful genocides that have
Speaker 1: been ended via military action were never that military action
Speaker 1: the end. Then we're never initiated, with the exception of
Speaker 1: very very few, to actually stop a genocide like obviously
Speaker 1: World War two comes to mind, world War One and
Speaker 1: the Eastern Front, And I would add, what the what
Speaker 1: the YPG did in northern Iraq, Vietnam invading Cambodia, they
Speaker 1: stumbled into a genocide, saying what the funk is going
Speaker 1: on here? You know? I would I would argue that
Speaker 1: the YPG and coalition forces stopping the genocide. This Yas
Speaker 1: is one of the one of the times that I
Speaker 1: was done on purpose and in a relatively timely manner. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: the same with you know, Yugoslavia. Yeah, less timely, significantly less,
Speaker 1: significantly less timely. Unfortunately, once you pull the military card,
Speaker 1: things get even worse because you have to kill people.
Speaker 1: That's why prevention is so freaking important and it's so
Speaker 1: widely overlooked, and it's one of the things like I
Speaker 1: I think I already said that, it's very, very hard
Speaker 1: two champion genocide prevention because you're proving that something did
Speaker 1: not happen, uh, and people and what if you It's
Speaker 1: a lot like how we all would really like to
Speaker 1: um envision convincing really weird right wingers at climate change
Speaker 1: is real, because like, what's the worst thing that happens
Speaker 1: if I'm right? The air is cleaner, Yeah, it's nicer outside. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you're gonna crash the economy. Yeah, what's the worst
Speaker 1: thing that happens if we are worried about elimination? Elimination
Speaker 1: is rhetoric whenever it pops up, whether it be trans
Speaker 1: or gay people or um uh you know, uh rohingia
Speaker 1: or weagers, like, what's the worst that happens if we're wrong?
Speaker 1: There wasn't a genocide? No, sorry, people were less shitty
Speaker 1: to teenagers who were dealing with one of the things
Speaker 1: that is most difficult to deal with in our society.
Speaker 1: It's it's literally something that own the group of kids
Speaker 1: had a better childhood. That's the downside. Fuck, you can't
Speaker 1: have that. It's one of the things that literally only
Speaker 1: has upside. No, and it's it's I mean, it comes
Speaker 1: down to because again, as you said, there's not broad
Speaker 1: agreement on how to prevent genocides because spoilers, we have
Speaker 1: not figured out conclusively how to stop genocide from happening.
Speaker 1: There's several going on right now, but one thing is
Speaker 1: making the people at the at the the central top
Speaker 1: level of the genocide hierarchy, the folks pushing all of
Speaker 1: the things the kind of genocide elites, making them scared
Speaker 1: to say ship that's a part of it, and making
Speaker 1: the people who are potentially lower on that totem pole,
Speaker 1: who might listen to those militias or whatnot in the moment,
Speaker 1: realize that they they they will be wrecked if they
Speaker 1: take part in that. That there's more people who don't
Speaker 1: like that sort of ship. So they get scared and
Speaker 1: they shut the funk up, make racists afraid again, not
Speaker 1: that it's always about racism, but like you know, you
Speaker 1: get what I'm saying, Like, make bigots worried about their actions,
Speaker 1: Like that's why would people complain, Like what's the worst
Speaker 1: thing that are What could you possibly be doing uh
Speaker 1: to to change anything? If you're outing members of far
Speaker 1: right militias at protests, That's why they're covering. They're high
Speaker 1: seeing themselves for a reason, because they're worried about what's
Speaker 1: going to happen to them when people realize they're marching
Speaker 1: around where wearing a short says six million wasn't enough. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: make them yeah exactly. And it's one of those things
Speaker 1: to get back to the script a little bit um
Speaker 1: when we talk about how like much you can disrupt
Speaker 1: someone's motivational hierarchy and the way in which like that
Speaker 1: can actually stop actions. There's there's a Robert J. Lifton
Speaker 1: cites a case of an inmate in a concentration camp
Speaker 1: who put in a request with a Nazi doctor who
Speaker 1: had a I mean, who was a Nazi doctor in
Speaker 1: a concentration right, um, yeah, and he he puts in
Speaker 1: this like weird request in the doctor grants it and
Speaker 1: it winds up saving this guy's life and and referencing
Speaker 1: the situation, Staub argues, apparently the inmates unusual behavior activated
Speaker 1: some motivation low in the hierarchy, politeness, correctness, and responding
Speaker 1: to a request, perhaps even compassion um, and this allowed
Speaker 1: him to like grant this guy's exception requests that got
Speaker 1: him out of like the uh you know, the kind
Speaker 1: of hopper to get fed into the genocide machine. And
Speaker 1: it's like it's in the same way that like what
Speaker 1: Wallenberg was doing with a lot of these Nazis who
Speaker 1: were trying to load Jews onto on two trains. He
Speaker 1: was disrupting what they were doing by activating something that
Speaker 1: was deeper programmed in them. The idea that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: if a guy who claims to be a government official
Speaker 1: comes up to you and you're a state employee and
Speaker 1: tells you to stop what you're doing because it's illegal,
Speaker 1: you kind of stop, right, Yeah. And there there's a
Speaker 1: there's a book on rescuers during the Holocaust. I think
Speaker 1: it's called like the Psychology of Rescue. You can't I
Speaker 1: can't remember exactly what's called, but they point out that
Speaker 1: one of the ways that many people rescued people. Wasn't
Speaker 1: because they had some deep seated revulsion of Um, of
Speaker 1: of Nazism, or even they maybe they didn't even like
Speaker 1: Jews all that much. But one of one of the
Speaker 1: things that stuck out, especially in the case of like
Speaker 1: that doctor, not that I'm called him a rescuer, he
Speaker 1: was a literal doctor at a concentration camp. But his
Speaker 1: psychology was like, well, he put in a request, as
Speaker 1: you should, I reproved it. Like I'm not saving this
Speaker 1: man's life, I'm simply doing my job. Yeah. Like there
Speaker 1: there was like a bureaucratic shield in front of them
Speaker 1: where they didn't see what they're doing is necessarily good
Speaker 1: or bad. They're simply doing their job. And this is why, um,
Speaker 1: oh God, I forget the name of the sky. The
Speaker 1: guy who wrote Blood Lands UM, which is a great
Speaker 1: book about the genocide in in primarily like East or
Speaker 1: in like Ukraine and Poland, will point out that the
Speaker 1: areas in which the Jewish communities were most thoroughly destroyed
Speaker 1: were places that had suffered what he called double state
Speaker 1: destruction UM, which is where like the government is destroyed,
Speaker 1: another government came in, and it was in this case
Speaker 1: it's like the Soviets took over, they destroyed the existing government,
Speaker 1: and then the Soviets were destroyed and the government structure
Speaker 1: they took they had created, was destroyed, and you saw
Speaker 1: higher percentages of like the Jewish population wiped out in
Speaker 1: those areas. Then you didn't say France, where the Nazis
Speaker 1: just kind of took over and tweaked the existing state structure.
Speaker 1: And part of it is because there was bureaucratic There
Speaker 1: were levels of bureaucracy that people could hide in and
Speaker 1: that provided like kind of excuses for folks to save
Speaker 1: their lives. Right. A lot of the Jews who were
Speaker 1: saved in Western Europe were saved because like some functionary
Speaker 1: was able to find a way that it wasn't technically
Speaker 1: illegal to like protect them, you know. Um. Anyway, it's
Speaker 1: probably worth talking about propaganda at some point here because
Speaker 1: while we've been I think intel like rightfully cautioning people
Speaker 1: against over like amplify over amplifying the value of a
Speaker 1: elimination is propaganda and genocide because it's all the popular
Speaker 1: culture tends to focus on. Um. It is a factor, right,
Speaker 1: it's not a non fall corn genocide. UM. And in
Speaker 1: the context of modern fears about a new genocide. A
Speaker 1: number of folks recently have made very direct comparisons between
Speaker 1: modern right wing media and radio um and radio stations
Speaker 1: in Rwanda during that genocide. This line of argument became
Speaker 1: particularly common in the wake of the Buffalo shooting, in
Speaker 1: which a teenaged white supremacist killed ten people at a
Speaker 1: grocery store in a majority black area. Because the shooter
Speaker 1: espoused the great Replacement conspiracy theory, which Tucker Carlson also pushes,
Speaker 1: a lot of folks claimed to causitive link between the two.
Speaker 1: I will tell you right now, there was none, Tucker.
Speaker 1: The kid was radicalized elsewhere, right, Not that Tucker Carlson
Speaker 1: is not saying things that can that can influence people
Speaker 1: to participate in mass Kelly, I'm not saying that. But
Speaker 1: this kid that that's not where this happened from. But
Speaker 1: and and similarly, like Scott's Scott Stross sort of research
Speaker 1: paper r TLM, which is the main uh compower radio
Speaker 1: station broadcasting at a Kigali And um, it didn't. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it didn't have an effect. It did marginally. UM.
Speaker 1: I mean, and I think that shows um again, what
Speaker 1: we we talked about that while propaganda is real, it's
Speaker 1: not the magic bullet um. Sort of like people have
Speaker 1: this concept of r t l M as being machette.
Speaker 1: Radio is like, it's a term commonly used for it,
Speaker 1: but it hardly broadcasted outside of the capital of Kegali
Speaker 1: due to geography. Rwanda has tons of mountains. Radio doesn't
Speaker 1: like contains um so and not to mention like, some
Speaker 1: of the worst killings took place in a southern commune
Speaker 1: which had no r TLM reception, so like, similarly, these
Speaker 1: people were influenced by other means to do mass killing,
Speaker 1: not this thing that makes it easier for us to understand.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, um so, uh yeah, I think um when
Speaker 1: it comes to kind of the way in which this
Speaker 1: incorrect view of what happened in Rwanda is getting sort
Speaker 1: of like compared with things today. A good example would
Speaker 1: be NPR Steve inn Skype, who tweeted quote a fact
Speaker 1: about Rwanda's genocide has always struck with me. The ruling
Speaker 1: party caused much of the killing by going on the
Speaker 1: radio and telling ethnic Hutoos that ethnic tootsies must be killed.
Speaker 1: Along with Hutus, who disapproved, many people listened and dismembered
Speaker 1: their neighbors. For a brief overview of the Rwanda We're
Speaker 1: we're getting in all of this, but let's let's get
Speaker 1: it overwhere. So Rwanda was a Belgian colony for a
Speaker 1: long time, and if you know the Belgians, they did
Speaker 1: them some genocide in the regions that they were in. Things. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: the Tootsies were used as their model natives right and
Speaker 1: favored over the huto This is a thing that every
Speaker 1: colonizing power, it does absolutely everywhere UM and it's um
Speaker 1: caused a lot of anger between the Hutuos and the Tutsies,
Speaker 1: who previously had not really been all that separate right
Speaker 1: as they were, they weren't even an ethnic group. It
Speaker 1: was a social class exactly. It was very fluid. A
Speaker 1: hut could become a Tootsie, Tutsi could become a hut
Speaker 1: the Because it's easier for them as the colonizers, they
Speaker 1: solidify this, and part of what they do is they
Speaker 1: put out a system of racial ideas which further informalize
Speaker 1: this division. UM. Now, this does support one of Dr
Speaker 1: Stanton's ten stages of genocide, but it also interestingly makes
Speaker 1: the point that stages don't all need to be purposefully
Speaker 1: incited in order their drive people towards the genocide, because
Speaker 1: the Belgians are just doing this because they're lazy. Um
Speaker 1: in this makes it easier to run a colony. But
Speaker 1: it does help, and this is a big part of
Speaker 1: why the genocide happens, and it's part of why they're
Speaker 1: able to know who's whotu and who's a Tutsies because
Speaker 1: we have fucking cards, you know. Um ye. Then they
Speaker 1: then that probably like you were just talking about propaganda,
Speaker 1: that propaganda takes over and then over generations it becomes
Speaker 1: real like that like Divide. It doesn't matter if it's
Speaker 1: real or fake. It's it's perceived as being real, therefore
Speaker 1: it's real now in any case. In nineteen nine four,
Speaker 1: following the assassination of the president during a very ugly
Speaker 1: civil war, WHO to government and military officials, orchestrated a
Speaker 1: three month orgy of racial violence, culminating in the massacre
Speaker 1: of more than five hundred thousand people. In the aftermath
Speaker 1: of the killings, a lot focused on the broadcasts of
Speaker 1: specific radio stations, notably r T l M, and how
Speaker 1: announcers referred to Tutsi as in yezi, which means cockroach,
Speaker 1: and advised listeners to hunt them down and massa here them.
Speaker 1: There were cases where violence was clearly caused by radio broadcasts.
Speaker 1: On April twelfth, the broadcaster claimed armed Tutsie were at
Speaker 1: an Islamic center in Kegali. A day later, a mob
Speaker 1: stormed the mosque and killed hundreds of people. That same day,
Speaker 1: the announcer came back on the air and urged people
Speaker 1: to exterminate Tutsi and stopped them from taking power, so
Speaker 1: certainly not claiming that the radio had no influence on
Speaker 1: what was happening. Now there's a reason why they were
Speaker 1: all convicted of genocide. Yes, journalists and scholars seized on
Speaker 1: this as an explanation for the nightmarish slaughter, which seemed
Speaker 1: kind of inexplicable otherwise. Unfortunately, this led to descriptions of
Speaker 1: events that sounded more than a little fucking racist. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote Strauss here. Strauss isn't the one being
Speaker 1: the racist, but he's quoting other people's how they interpreted this.
Speaker 1: I believe Darrell Lee is who he's quoting. Parts, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think one of them. But yeah. Writing in the
Speaker 1: preface to a siminal study. For example, a u An
Speaker 1: investigator claimed that Rwanda. In Rwanda, media were the vector
Speaker 1: by which the poison of racist propaganda is spread. Similarly,
Speaker 1: Melverne claims, in order to commit genocide and is necessary
Speaker 1: to define the victim as being outside human existence, vermin
Speaker 1: and subhuman. In Rewanda, the propaganda campaign against the minority
Speaker 1: Tutsis was relentless and its incitement to ethnic hatred and violence.
Speaker 1: Another observer, a journalist, asserts, when the radio said it
Speaker 1: was time to kill the people opposed to the government,
Speaker 1: the mass has slid off a dark edge into insanity.
Speaker 1: The UN investigator quoted above similarly concluded that the poison
Speaker 1: of radio propaganda is all the more effective because it
Speaker 1: is said the Rwandan peasant has a radio culture of
Speaker 1: holding a transistor up to his ear in one hand
Speaker 1: and holding a machette in the other, waiting for orders
Speaker 1: emitted by our TLM. That's pretty racist, right. It reduces
Speaker 1: them to like murdering automaton exactly. And what a lot
Speaker 1: of people are missing when you like, when you read
Speaker 1: passages like that and that one about the machete in
Speaker 1: one hand radio, that's not Darely, that's someone else, but
Speaker 1: um One of the things that they're leaving out is
Speaker 1: our TLM only started about six months before the Genesis.
Speaker 1: Yeah we're we're yeah, well yeah, it's it was not
Speaker 1: this was not like deeply rooted into their coach radio.
Speaker 1: How of Wanda, I believe has no radio signal at all.
Speaker 1: It is worth noting that, like this is a very
Speaker 1: centralized state. It had been centralized under the Belgians, or
Speaker 1: Wanda still quite centralized today, and like that's not a
Speaker 1: non factor in stuff. But like it is not this
Speaker 1: that people are not just like radio said to murder,
Speaker 1: time to go murder. I guess this is why I'm
Speaker 1: doing it. It's very racist that it takes away everything,
Speaker 1: and it's even it's worse because it'll it also allows
Speaker 1: you to couch this and like, well they're illiterate, and
Speaker 1: you know they they did have a high illiterate population,
Speaker 1: but they're illiterate and therefore they're not as intelligent as
Speaker 1: I enlightened person from the outside. That's why this When
Speaker 1: this radio tells gonna go man a checkpoint with a
Speaker 1: machete and kill everybody, I'm simply going to do it.
Speaker 1: There's this thing we had that we had these episodes
Speaker 1: on General Butt Naked and the Liberian Civil War recently,
Speaker 1: And you know, I had to make a point of
Speaker 1: because so much of what happens is so lurid, and
Speaker 1: it gets reported as like look at this, like these
Speaker 1: crazy like witch doctor like cannibals and stuff. That is,
Speaker 1: as someone accused me on Reddit of like trying to
Speaker 1: mitigate what he did by going into how it's not
Speaker 1: really any different from Western war crimes. And that's the
Speaker 1: same thing with Rwanda. It's not like, yes, there are
Speaker 1: elements of Rwandan culture that made this are part of
Speaker 1: why this happened, right, and some of that is how
Speaker 1: centralized the state and government is. And you can say
Speaker 1: the same thing about Germany that had an impact on
Speaker 1: why things occurred the way that they did. There's nothing
Speaker 1: different about the centralization. They weren't like Rwandans weren't commanded
Speaker 1: by their radios to do a genocide anymore than Germans
Speaker 1: were commanded by Hitler over the radio to do a genocide. Um,
Speaker 1: there was a continuum of things that we're going on
Speaker 1: that made people willing to participate in this, and it's
Speaker 1: a lot more complicated than they had a radio in
Speaker 1: their ears. I mean to mention that they check literally
Speaker 1: every block like Strauss's risk risk factor for genocide, like
Speaker 1: they've had previous massacres. Paul Harbor and Mia who I
Speaker 1: believe his first name is Paul, who is president that
Speaker 1: was shot down, had since the civil war been eating
Speaker 1: more and more power to the Hutu power dynamic to
Speaker 1: rally power around himself because they were losing. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he had seeded more and more power to the incredibly
Speaker 1: far radical extreme of the Hootu power So by the
Speaker 1: time he was dead, he had effectively already lost power.
Speaker 1: That's why when the major overlying conspiracy theories is he
Speaker 1: was shot down by the Hootu power section, nobody's entirely sure,
Speaker 1: but they think he was. And that is like the
Speaker 1: inciting inside of the geness the president's plan get shot down.
Speaker 1: It's still a mystery as to exactly what happened anyway.
Speaker 1: Strauss goes on to note that quote most discussions of
Speaker 1: Rwandan media affects attribute little or no agency to listeners.
Speaker 1: The Rwandan public is often characterized as hearing a drumbeat
Speaker 1: of racist messages and directly internalizing them, or as hearing
Speaker 1: orders to kill and heating the command. Those views are
Speaker 1: consistent with stereotypes about Rwandan's, namely that they obey orders blindly,
Speaker 1: that they are poorly educated and thus easily manipulated, and
Speaker 1: that they are immersed in the culture of prejudice. Now
Speaker 1: Strauss carried out an exhaustive analysis of massacres in Rwanda
Speaker 1: where they occurred in relation to broadcast towers. In particular,
Speaker 1: he looked at the strength of those towers and where
Speaker 1: they could reach, and when massacres occurred in relation to
Speaker 1: specific broadcasts. His conclusion was that the vast majority of
Speaker 1: the violence could not be explained by urgents to kill
Speaker 1: from radio personalities, and then in fact, most of the
Speaker 1: broadcast people cited as inciting things happened after most of
Speaker 1: the violence had occurred. UM. A follow up investigation from
Speaker 1: another group of academics used a village level data set
Speaker 1: from the genocide to estimate the impact of RTLM in
Speaker 1: encouraging genocide. The attributed roughly ten percent of the overall
Speaker 1: violence to the station, which is a lot. Don't get
Speaker 1: me Rock. That's a lot for a radio station to
Speaker 1: incite UM and noted that these broadcasts had more of
Speaker 1: an influence on convincing militias who were organized and radicalized
Speaker 1: to kill ahead of time, to go after specific targets,
Speaker 1: and then those militias would rope in civilians rather than
Speaker 1: again people just like again, those folks prior to the
Speaker 1: fucking radio being involved, were already ready to kill. They
Speaker 1: moved into an area because as a specific target was
Speaker 1: signed posted by the radio, and they would rope civilians
Speaker 1: in through coercion and a variety of other means that
Speaker 1: we've already talked about. Um so yeah. Radio in mass
Speaker 1: media Absolutely no, No reasonable scholar would argue does not
Speaker 1: play a significant role in genocide. Um But consistent with
Speaker 1: the research of guys like Stalbin Strauss, the willingness to
Speaker 1: participate in such violence exists on a continuum. Even a
Speaker 1: most Rwandan radio inspired massacres were committed by dudes who
Speaker 1: joined militias. Um so yeah. The article by Reynerman and
Speaker 1: Wilson I cited earlier notes of Rwanda quote. A need
Speaker 1: for social belonging can result in a motivation for an
Speaker 1: individual to want to conform to his or her group,
Speaker 1: leading to participation in order not to stick out and
Speaker 1: to be able to remain part of the group. A
Speaker 1: member of a group. Intervite interviewed by Hatsfield mentioned the
Speaker 1: strong bond to the group with whom he killed during
Speaker 1: the genocide. We liked being in our gang. We all
Speaker 1: agreed about the new activities, and we helped each other
Speaker 1: out like comrades. Um their need. And again, it's traumatic
Speaker 1: to partake in this kind of killing, and trauma bonds
Speaker 1: people together, you know. Um. So even in those situations
Speaker 1: where killings can be tied to particular broadcasts, it's ignorant
Speaker 1: to blame the propaganda in a vacuum, just as it's
Speaker 1: kind of ignorant to blame the propaganda Tucker Carlson spits
Speaker 1: out for the Buffalo shooting. Tucker is allowed to do
Speaker 1: what he does because people listen, and those people were
Speaker 1: conditioned to listen by folks other than Tucker, generations of
Speaker 1: right wing media and also family and friends. Right, the
Speaker 1: fact that he's able to get up there and spread
Speaker 1: great replacement bullshit is the end part of a continuation
Speaker 1: of propaganda and and hatred. Um that you could, you could,
Speaker 1: you could pull right back to the Civil War if
Speaker 1: you want to go back far enough, you know, um,
Speaker 1: Which doesn't mitigate Tucker's complicity in it at all. But
Speaker 1: it's not he's not generating it. You know, he's not
Speaker 1: generating it. He's he's Um, he's a stage in a
Speaker 1: long procession. I'd like someone pointed out that he might
Speaker 1: be one of the first extremists that was radicalized by
Speaker 1: his own audience. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a big factor,
Speaker 1: because he's doing it in part because it gets him
Speaker 1: the views, because it gets people to us in right,
Speaker 1: And that's the same thing that happens with a lot
Speaker 1: of people who get radicalized online. Right when we talk
Speaker 1: about the way like four chan and eight chan work,
Speaker 1: where like people come into it like joking about this
Speaker 1: stuff and over time radicalize each other and into supporting
Speaker 1: the literal actions because there's no racism. No, there's no
Speaker 1: ironic racism, and there's no iron there's no lone wolves.
Speaker 1: People are radicalized for violence in communities and by communities. Um,
Speaker 1: it's shared jokes, it's shared lingo, it's a desire for acceptance. UM.
Speaker 1: It's a variety of different things that like push people here. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: of course again, obedience to authority can be one of
Speaker 1: these things. UM, but it's it's authority doesn't always mean
Speaker 1: like a fewer sometimess the authority of like the kind
Speaker 1: of group consensus about what's cool, you know, about what's funny,
Speaker 1: about what's good. Um. Obviously like one of the things
Speaker 1: that gets talked about that got and this is something
Speaker 1: that like I think as maybe a little more debatable
Speaker 1: when we talk about like the role of authority in genocide.
Speaker 1: Um is the Milgram experiment, right, that's get This gets
Speaker 1: talked about a lot. And in short, the Milgram experiment
Speaker 1: consisted of I think he didn't want the seventies. It
Speaker 1: may I think it's because these went on for a while. Um,
Speaker 1: But the experiment consisted of experiment ers because Milgram was
Speaker 1: trying to study like why do people like he was
Speaker 1: looking at the just following orders excuse that a lot
Speaker 1: of nazis made and being like, well is that the case?
Speaker 1: And basically he would have a student deliver electric shocks
Speaker 1: to a patient who was actually an actor, but the
Speaker 1: student who was the test subject thought that they were
Speaker 1: really shocking the person, and like a dude with a
Speaker 1: clipboard would tell them to periodically increase the voltage until
Speaker 1: it got up to a level that was noted as
Speaker 1: being potentially lethal and the people who were delivering the shocks.
Speaker 1: Some of them would cry, a lot of them would argue.
Speaker 1: They were generally all pretty unhappy, but most would deliver
Speaker 1: the shocks when ordered to do so by an authority.
Speaker 1: Figure Stalbrights quote. Milgram suggested that people can enter an
Speaker 1: agentic mode in which they relinquish individual responsibility and act
Speaker 1: as agents of authority. While obedience is an important force,
Speaker 1: it is not the true motive for mass killing your genocide.
Speaker 1: The motivation to obey comes from a desire to follow
Speaker 1: a leader, to be a good member of a group,
Speaker 1: to show respect for authority. Those who willingly accept the
Speaker 1: authority of leaders are likely to have also accepted their
Speaker 1: views in ideology guided by shared cultural dispositions, the shared
Speaker 1: experience of difficult life conditions, shared motivations that result from them,
Speaker 1: and shared inclinations for ways to satisfy motives, people join
Speaker 1: Rather than simply obey out of fear or respect. We
Speaker 1: must we must consider not only how those an authority
Speaker 1: gain obedience, but how the motivations of the whole group evolve.
Speaker 1: Miilgrim's dramatic demonstration of the power of authority, although of
Speaker 1: great importance, may have slowed the development of a psychology
Speaker 1: of genocide as others came to view obedience as the
Speaker 1: main source of human destructiveness. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's always interested, especially because when the main points I
Speaker 1: believe of that experiment was that they were told repeatedly
Speaker 1: they could quit whenever they want, yes, and the person
Speaker 1: in the room with them, I believe, could only say
Speaker 1: you must continue the experiment. Yeah. Um, but like yeah,
Speaker 1: and that of course directly inspired the writing of Ordinary
Speaker 1: Men and amongst other things. Yeah, and it it definitely
Speaker 1: allows the dispersion of personal responsibility if you believe of
Speaker 1: a bigger structure. And another thing I think is key
Speaker 1: is dispersion of your own personal responsibility into a structure
Speaker 1: you believe is impune, like you's not going to be
Speaker 1: held accountable for anything that it does. Yeah. Um. And
Speaker 1: it's it's again like so and and and stabs not
Speaker 1: saying like this isn't a factor or like the Pilgram
Speaker 1: experience doesn't say anything useful about genocide. It's the it's
Speaker 1: the kind of boiling at all that people want to say,
Speaker 1: like one thing, right, um, and and it isn't And
Speaker 1: it's like and also just like the fact that people
Speaker 1: are like following authority isn't just as simple as like
Speaker 1: they're following orders. It means that like they are they are.
Speaker 1: Their motivation is a desire to be in a power
Speaker 1: structure underneath an authority, and they accept the views and
Speaker 1: the values of that authority, right, which is more complicated
Speaker 1: than just thus, just I will follow orders, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: there's and and this is an an area in which,
Speaker 1: like the authoritarian culture of Germany prior to the Nazi
Speaker 1: rise of power, affected the willingness of people to participate
Speaker 1: in the the instrument of genocide. Um. Yeah, uh, it's cool,
Speaker 1: and I think it is. It's important to have a
Speaker 1: more complicated understanding of like what can motivate people to
Speaker 1: this than just I do whatever the leader tells me. Um,
Speaker 1: Because that's not where genocides start. All genocide starts with
Speaker 1: the willingness of human beings to partake in the act itself,
Speaker 1: right like that is or if if not start because
Speaker 1: it may be wrong to like prescribe it that way,
Speaker 1: but that you can't have a genocide without the willingness
Speaker 1: of the of the people of people to participate, not
Speaker 1: just to participate, but to welcome or at least not
Speaker 1: discourage the people doing the participation, right, Like folks like it.
Speaker 1: It's it's never, it's never one thing, Like societies are
Speaker 1: are more complicated than that, And genocides are accomplished by societies, right,
Speaker 1: They're noted by dudes who suck. Yeah. And and to
Speaker 1: be completely clear, we're not saying that like genocides occur
Speaker 1: because of like the marginalized turned it out group is
Speaker 1: not resisting hard enough. It's lay people that could escape this.
Speaker 1: No problem, it's this. It's the slow incoming tide that
Speaker 1: you're fined with. Like we like to like stereotypically, there's
Speaker 1: a famous poem about this. Um you know, um it's uh.
Speaker 1: It's one of like, well, you know there's lawn Florida
Speaker 1: isn't really a big deal. I don't live in Florida.
Speaker 1: Well millions of people do. Yeah. Yeah. The the idea
Speaker 1: that like ha ha, well this is what the right gets,
Speaker 1: you know, this bad thing happening in Florida because they
Speaker 1: wouldn't vote against It's like no, no, no, this is
Speaker 1: a problem. And it's the same people who are are
Speaker 1: dumb enough to believe that this isn't gonna go nationwide
Speaker 1: after a while. Are the most naive motherfucker's have ever
Speaker 1: heard of. And this is a deeper naivety than just that.
Speaker 1: I would extend it to people who say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not our business, Like I don't like,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna I can dismiss the mass killings of
Speaker 1: of protesters in Syria because that's over there, you know.
Speaker 1: Um oh, Now suddenly millions of refugees have flooded Europe
Speaker 1: and it's reignited a far right and victor Orbon has
Speaker 1: seized and centralized and into democratic functional democracy and Hungary
Speaker 1: and now the Republicans are holding a sea pack. They're
Speaker 1: talking about how to do the same here, like but
Speaker 1: like every like I forgot that they had they did
Speaker 1: you you it's all like you. You can't. You can't
Speaker 1: abrogate your responsibility to to be a part of the
Speaker 1: human race. And that includes being like, well this is
Speaker 1: like that, that's what actual like resistance to fascism is right,
Speaker 1: is like comprehensively calling out bad ship is bad, Like
Speaker 1: that's not not not being like, well it's in Florida,
Speaker 1: you know, Um, well it's until stupid South, stupid South,
Speaker 1: right like it's it's it's taking as much offense to
Speaker 1: like acts of evil that occur far away as the
Speaker 1: ones that happened like next door, because like everything like
Speaker 1: eventually it will. It's the same as like climate change, right,
Speaker 1: it's it's like it's not being like oh well, fun California.
Speaker 1: I live up here in Washington State where climate change
Speaker 1: will never hit us, or like, um right, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the difficult thing about it, um, and it's it's
Speaker 1: and I think it's even harder for people to grasp
Speaker 1: um when it literally doesn't impact them at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're I mean, the vast majority of people in any
Speaker 1: coming or future genocide like rarely are they going to
Speaker 1: be directly impacted if face if they don't want to be,
Speaker 1: unless you are, of course the out party. But like
Speaker 1: you know, a random guy in you know, Duluth, Minnesota,
Speaker 1: like he's not going to be impacted by this. But
Speaker 1: the hard part and the the key for prevention is
Speaker 1: realizing that if you want to prevent this from happening,
Speaker 1: it needs to be made important to the point that
Speaker 1: people who literally cannot have no role in it can
Speaker 1: make a role in it by stopping it. Um. Because
Speaker 1: Obviously these things are going to impact outgroups minorities, racial, ethnic, religious,
Speaker 1: or otherwise. They're not They purposefully do not have a
Speaker 1: voice that can stop this from happening. Nope, that's why
Speaker 1: they're being targeted. Yeah, so uh rowan egg, get Rhonda Santis.
Speaker 1: It's the conclusion we've made here. Um or or Abbott,
Speaker 1: Abbott could use use an egg. That fucking guy give
Speaker 1: him an all good egging egg it out? Um like that?
Speaker 1: Like that kid in Australia. Um oh, I forgot about
Speaker 1: that kid. Kids. It was a good kid because when
Speaker 1: we find out he did something terrible immediately afterwards. I
Speaker 1: think he raised a bunch of money for some nice
Speaker 1: cause people were paying attention to him. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Hopefully someone's gonna be like, please don't milkshake duc that kid. Well, Joe,
Speaker 1: I don't know. How do you feel at the end
Speaker 1: of this genocide? Yeah? Your a I'm you know, I'm
Speaker 1: going to be a centrist on this one. No one
Speaker 1: can say some people like genocide, some people dislike some
Speaker 1: people comm Yeah, we're going to compromise to everything that
Speaker 1: they've ever said. Um No, I mean I got into
Speaker 1: this field because it's very important to me both in
Speaker 1: my and in my history, and you know, in the future,
Speaker 1: it's it's something that's the history of These things are important.
Speaker 1: So we can stop revisionism from coming and taking place,
Speaker 1: and also so we can help prevent it in the future,
Speaker 1: and hopefully we can make prevention something that is not
Speaker 1: like a weird thing to bring up. No, so go
Speaker 1: out and don't commit genocide. That's that's the key here.
Speaker 1: That is definitely there's a lot of debates as to
Speaker 1: how to prevent it, but don't do a genocide. We
Speaker 1: ask that. That's the baseline we ask of our listeners
Speaker 1: is please do not participate in an active genocide. Lower
Speaker 1: in the bar here, Yeah, the bar is through the floor.
Speaker 1: Unlike some of our sponsors, including the Washington State Highway
Speaker 1: Patrol and funk those guys I used to live in Washington,
Speaker 1: hear the worst. We had a very funny one star
Speaker 1: review of someone being like I thought I was gonna
Speaker 1: love this podcast, but then they started talking about the
Speaker 1: Washington State Highway Patrol. I have to two relatives in
Speaker 1: the Highway Patrol, and they're both like wonderful men who
Speaker 1: are not violent at all. I would really like to
Speaker 1: believe that they listen to the Behind the Police series
Speaker 1: like this sounds fun. Yeah, up until they were totally
Speaker 1: down with shooting on every other police department, and so
Speaker 1: we got some when their cousin was in Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: funk the St. Louis Cole. Wait a second, we're the
Speaker 1: good one. Yeah, bow t Highware and Fox. My my
Speaker 1: cousins in the Washington State Highway Patrol aren't violent at all.
Speaker 1: T shirt is bringing up a lot of questions answered
Speaker 1: by my I'm not a lot around their families anymore.
Speaker 1: They're not allowed outside their house. It's weird anyway, Joe,
Speaker 1: you got any plug doubles? Have you ever done a
Speaker 1: podcast before this happened in the world. I'm the host
Speaker 1: of the Lines led by Donkeys podcast. We talked about
Speaker 1: uh funk ups in military history. We also talk extensively
Speaker 1: about genocide specifically. We talked about it. We've talked about
Speaker 1: Nan King, We've talked about the Namibian genocide. We've talked
Speaker 1: for seven hours about the cambody in genocide. Uh. I
Speaker 1: promise it's not all that heavy. We do other stuff too.
Speaker 1: Now if you want that, then you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: go to the genocide cast, Uh With With with Rock
Speaker 1: and Robbie and Uh the Butt John Wilson, It's the
Speaker 1: drivetime radio show. I was doing a radio but I
Speaker 1: didn't think it out very well. A Morning Zoo crew
Speaker 1: Morning that's just about well. It's six in the morning.
Speaker 1: We got a lot of traffic blacked up on the
Speaker 1: I five. You know what else got backed up on
Speaker 1: a highway. Good stuff all right? Episodes over Go Home
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: zone media dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.