Hate From Above & Below

How the Rwandan Genocide was made possible by words

“Hate Speech”, Original Artwork © 2025 Nicholas Kircher

Warning: This post includes references to acts of Genocide

Note from the author: Although my voice has returned for the most part, you will have to forgive my hoarseness in the audio narration; my vocal cords are still recovering. Regardless, I encourage you to listen to the audio version. I put a ton of effort into recording them. Enjoy!

Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste.

Voltaire
Questions sur les Miracles (1765)

Commonly summarised as: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

I have this on-going back and forth debate in my head about free speech. This debate has only become more complex since I joined the Substack community, a place which certainly wants to think of itself as a safe harbour open to all. It hosts views from all corners, even the darkest ones.

Earlier this year, I got into an interesting (and very cordial) discussion in the comments on another article talking about how this openness is an inherently good thing. I agreed for the most part, but drew a red line:

I was adamant that there is indeed a difference between free speech and hate speech, and I don’t believe there should be anywhere on earth that is safe for actual Nazi ideology, ever.

Colour me naive, but I was surprised by the amount of people who disagree with both of those positions.

Of all the things we could have differing opinions on, I never imagined my position on Nazis would be one of them; save, of course, for people that are Nazis, who I’m sure would disagree with me. However it turns out that even this, one of my own “sacred cows”, is not taken to be so sacred, even by people who do not identify in any way shape or form with Nazis or their ideas.

The point being made by my interlocutors seems to be that actually defining a Nazi can become inherently slippery. How do we identify them? How does one differentiate them from people that are not Nazis? Those who sport a Swastika arm band, or wave the Nazi flag, or voluntarily identify themselves as Nazis are almost certainly identifiable as such, but what about actors playing a role in a film, or a re-enactment?

Ok, how about people who share all the same abhorrent views and opinions as, say, Adolf Hitler, but who vehemently deny having any association with or admiration for Nazis?

Is everyone who has ever murdered a Jew a Nazi? Or only those who murdered them because they were Jews? How do we even identify what their real intent was?

What about Kanye West? Is he now, officially, a Nazi? (This one is even more complicated, because mental illness is very much involved)

If you think that’s a challenge, let’s try explicitly defining “Hate Speech”.

Hate speech is an act that expresses or incites hatred toward people on the basis of some aspect of their identity.

Hate speech is speech, writing, behaviour, text or commentary, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language towards a person or a group on the basis of identity. It can be based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, culture, colour, descent, class, sexuality, gender or other identity factors.

Racism No Way, Australia
https://racismnoway.com.au/about-racism/hate-speech/

I quite like this definition, because it’s probably the most clear I’ve seen. However it presents two problems: the first is that it’s likely very Australia-specific. Second, since Nazi is a kind of identity, does that mean those speaking out against Nazis are engaging in hate speech?

There are some possible solutions to this: we can define identity as something which is not formed by choice. For example, sexuality, gender, skin colour, ancestry, ethnicity are things that we don’t get to choose for ourselves. However, religion is certainly a chosen identity, and yet much of the prejudice we seek to deter is between those of different faiths.

Nationality can be chosen, since (some of us) can choose to immigrate and take on the citizenship of another nation, yet so much prejudice is directed at such individuals, as though it’s a sacred right to choose which brand of milk you want to drink, but some kind of unnatural transgression to choose what country you want to live in.

Some places have defined a special subset called “protected groups”, containing a kind of grab-bag of the most commonly targeted identity groups, but this of course has its own problems.

The Wikipedia page on Hate Speech notes that “There is no single definition of what constitutes "hate" or "disparagement". Legal definitions of hate speech vary from country to country.”

Ok, so I think you will agree that my interlocutors from that comment thread do indeed have a point: it’s complicated. Perhaps we should take a step back and ask the obvious question:

Why is hate speech a problem?

Voltaire - that most influential Enlightenment figure I quoted earlier in the original French - is spot-on: he was talking about how "absurd” - i.e unenlightened - ideas, once believed, effectively forfeit ones self-control to those who have convinced one of such ideas. You become nothing but a tool in the hands of others, whose intentions can be malicious.

“Si vous n’opposez point aux ordres de croire l’impossible l’intelligence que Dieu a mise dans votre esprit, vous ne devez point opposer aux ordres de malfaire la justice que Dieu a mise dans votre coeur.” - If your God-given intellect cannot resist a demand to believe something impossible, then your God-given sense of justice cannot resist a demand to commit malicious acts.

I frikkin love being able to translate that. Voltaire was no stranger to his own absurd ideas: he was quite the anti-semite even for his day, and believed that different races were, essentially, entirely different species with completely different genetic origins (polygenism), but this is not a post about Voltaire.

Unpronounceable philosophising aside (redundant?), history does indeed demonstrate that the pre-requisite to just about any mass atrocity committed against any group is the determined spreading of absurd ideas about that group. They are absurd because they cannot make sense: a generalisation of a diverse group taken as literal and universal fact, applicable in the same way to all members.

The ideas that drive hate speech are not benign, either. You might say that such and such an ethnic group have a universal love for unicorns; it’s still absurd, but generally harmless. Hate-speech, however, is about explicitly dehumanising whole groups of people - ascribing to them an absence of qualities that are seen as positive and uniquely human - and charging them as an imminent if not active threat.

For example, lets take the utterly absurd idea that Jews - all of them - conspire together to control the world, or to bring about some specific catastrophe or disaster upon other peoples.

There are, and have been pretty much throughout history, people who believe this literally. That literally all Jews, no matter where they live, where they were born, where they grew up, their age, sex, whether they even know that they have Jewish ancestry at all, are conspiring together to do all kinds of dastardly deeds which threaten you and your loved ones.

It’s nuts. It’s almost perfectly absurd. You might as well believe the entire universe is contained inside the anus of a Dolphin.

Nevertheless, people who might seem otherwise completely rational have been made to believe such madness, one way or another. In fact, most people involved in pogroms in 20th century Europe for example likely didn’t have to believe the full scope of all anti-semitic ideas circulating in their societies at the time.

When being offered a banquet of such absurdities, most people treat it like a buffet: they might take a bit of this one and a bit of that one, sampling only those which resonated with their own sensibilities and tastes.

For example, some believed that Jews were over-represented in Politics, while others believe them dominant in Entertainment, or Finance, with the implication being that they deliberately bar the way to other non-Jews; or that they were under-represented in the Armed Forces, the implication being that they are not as loyal to the nation.

These ideas also created the sense of the Jews as “pest”, at first only implicitly, but then later quite explicitly, such as in Nazi propaganda which referred to Jews as various kinds of insect.

However, the ideas themselves aren’t as important as the underlying association between the group and the threat which the ideas create in the mind of the believer. Even more powerfully, if one can create the association between a group and something already salient in the community - such as a war, or a drought, or a famine, or an economic downturn, or some other crisis - then all that is needed is but a single spark to set this particular Hindenburg aflame.

Whatever sense of right and wrong the average “sensible” individual might have can be bypassed entirely, and when ordered to exterminate millions of innocent human beings they might at first hesitate, until informed they were all “Jews”.

“Ja wohl,” and so the killings begin.

“Do Your Work”: The Rwandan Genocide

Translated transcript of a broadcast from Rwandan radio station RTLM. “Cockroaches” refers to members of the Tutsi ethnic minority.

By my estimate, nearly two-thirds of Rwanda’s Tutsi population were eliminated; one in five Hutu men participated in their deaths; the carnage was accomplished in just over 100 days; and it took place in almost every community in Rwanda where Tutsi lived.

Omar McDoom, The Path to Genocide in Rwanda (2022).

On 6th April 1994, Juvénal Habyarimana, President of Rwanda and an ethnic Hutu, alongside the President of Burundi, also an ethnic Hutu, were killed when their aircraft was shot down while coming in to land in the Rwandan capital of Kigali.

In less than 48 hours, one of the most brutal episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing in modern history, conducted at the community and village level, had begun, with machete-wielding civilian Hutus incited by racist extremists broadcasting over popular radio networks, against those whom they considered responsible for shooting down the Hutu presidents: an ethnic minority group called the Tutsi, as well as anyone else considered “sympathisers”.

A typical machete, though longer than most.

I’ve owned machetes. In the Solomon Islands where I spent some of my most formative years, they were an essential tool for tasks such as cutting grass, clearing a path through thick jungle, and opening coconuts. Everyone had one, or several. These were not well-made instruments: consisting of a shaped sliver of metal, with two pieces of polished wood sandwiched around one end for a handle. Such household machetes are rarely kept sharp, and spend most of the time in humid open air. It’s even rarer to see one not covered in rust end to end.

Yet this was by far the most commonly used weapon during the slaughter. Victims occasionally begged for a bullet instead. Very few were granted that wish.

Neighbours. Friends. Colleagues. Random people on the street. Men. Women. Children. Even family members. If they were Tutsi, they were slaughtered. If they were protecting Tutsis, they were slaughtered. It was the most efficient mass killing since the Atomic Bomb, and people were massacred faster than in the industrialised mass-murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

Overall, it lasted 100 days and resulted in 800,000 dead.

That’s 333 people killed every single hour, hour after hour; almost 8,000 people every single day, day after day.

The sheer effort involved to carry out this task was immense. They didn’t have German-style camps or gas chambers. They weren’t rounding up their victims beforehand. Instead, people were literally chopped down wherever they were found, mainly with machetes, but sometimes, even with backhoes, or whatever they had lying around. Not designed for cutting through flesh and bone, these yard work tools made it a gruesome and back-breaking slog. Some survivors endured innumerable strikes and the loss of some limbs, only to miraculously make it out alive.

That means not only did it require a massive number of perpetrators to carry it out, most of them worked at it like a full time job. A common refrain on Radio RTLM during the 100 days was "Do Your Work”, a call to continue the killings until there was no one left to kill.

It was the culmination of a process which had been underway for nearly 100 years by that point. Between independence in 1962 and the outbreak of civil war in 1990, there had already been a few smaller and more localised massacres of Tutsis; and yet, no one predicted the sheer ferocity, vastness and overwhelming scale of the Rwandan Genocide.

“The ethnicization of society and politics is the first indicator of civilian radicalization.” writes Omar McDoom of the London School of Economics, in his book The Path to Genocide in Rwanda (2022).

In the context of inter-ethnic relations, threat then activates latent ethnic boundaries and raises the salience of ethnic identities. As the threat intensifies, ethnic distance increases and ingroup hostility toward the ethnic outgroup escalates.

This distance and hostility can be amplified when the threat is framed as having historical and contemporary parallels. The threat then resonates against the collective memory and shared perceptions – the myths and narratives – that the threatened ingroup has of the threatening outgroup.

This is the simplified pathway to Genocide. It never happens in a vacuum: the near-universal pre-requisite to all genocides is a process of perception-shifting, by which the in-group and out-group become increasingly stratified, through the spreading of certain cultural and collective myths, memories and beliefs.

We collect our perceptions from the things we hear around us. We humans are voracious consumers of information, whether right or wrong, good or bad. We are especially receptive to it when it’s information coming from trusted and authoritative sources, or those with whom we feel a shared identity. Information salience further increases the more emotional its content, particularly fear and outrage. We tend to remember emotional negatives far more readily than emotional positives or neutrals.

Such perceptions alone are rarely ever enough to spark a genocide: instead, they contribute significant flammable material to the socio-political environment.

The Invention of Identity Politics

Rwanda was said to have originally been inhabited by members of the Twa ethnic group since the ice age, with Hutus supposedly migrating around the year 1000AD, followed supposedly by Tutsi in the 15th or 16th century. Prior to colonial domination by European powers, it had been an independent Kingdom for an unknown period of time, ruled by a supposedly Tutsi royal bloodline. When the Germans sent an expedition in the late 1800s, it was the first time a Rwandan Mwami - King - had encountered Europeans. Although they had a strong administrative state and defended their borders with a strong unified army, the situation became volatile and unstable following the King’s death due to a succession struggle. The Germans took their opportunity and established a protectorate called German East Africa, with a figurehead Mwami on the throne.

When the First World War broke out, the neighbouring Belgian Congo invaded the German East African territories, including the Rwandan lands, establishing an occupation which continued until the war’s end, when Belgium was granted the territories under something like a United Nations mandate. They continued the setup the Germans had established: choosing indirect control via a puppet Mwami. At the same time, they sought to divide and rule by creating a heightened awareness of ethnic identity, despite the fact that Rwandans had been a highly integrated people long before the Europeans turned up. Government-issued identity cards came clearly marked with a determined ethnicity, making possible a racist administrative caste system.

The Belgian colonials had brought with them the Hamitic hypothesis: the utterly absurd myth which determined Tutsis to be Rwanda’s “Master Race”, supposedly of Semitic origin, and therefore “superior” to the common African Hutus. Therefore, the Belgians ensured Tutsi were always placed in positions of power. This naturally created a kind of “Tutsi Elite”, and by design, the result was that Hutus felt unjustly subjugated, and the target of their animosity was the Tutsi, rather than the Belgian colonial masters. This remained a core part of Rwandan historical memory long after the shackles of colonialism finally fell away following independence in 1962.

In the Rwandan context, the brutal history of this deliberate stratification of ethnic groups out of what was once a highly integrated mix of peoples, served as a historical anchor by which the emotional sense of outrage and injustice felt by Hutus at what was seen as Tutsi’s historic (and contemporary) criminality was legitimated.

This was coupled with the colonial myth that Tutsi peoples were essentially foreigners: that somehow they must have come from Ethiopia, turning up some time after the Hutus. This would become another important factor during the genocide, and was used as propaganda to denounce Tutsis as foreigners with no right to live in Rwanda, let alone to rule it.

…the Belgians propagated the idea the Tutsi were racially distinct and, in origin, alien to Rwanda. They drew on both racial science and religious scripture to justify these beliefs.

…

The idea that the Tutsi were allochthonous – they did not belong in Rwanda - would become an important theme during the genocide.

In 1962, Rwanda became a republic and saw its first-ever attempt at democratic elections, which propelled the radical and racist Mouvement Démocratique Républicain “Parmehutu” (MDR) party to an overwhelming majority. The MDR was the embodiment of radical identity politics, which believed staunchly in not only overthrowing the old Tutsi elite as they saw it, but establishing Hutu supremacy over all Rwanda. They wanted to flip the old order upside down, and then scale it even further in their direction.

By 1965, the MDR was deemed the only legal political party in Rwanda.

Furthermore, the ongoing civil war which had begun in 1990 between primarily Tutsi exiles - who had been trying to return home since being forced to flee during the revolution - and the Rwandan Government, made for an emotionally salient threat, and propaganda easily turned the civil war into an ethnic war in the minds of many Hutus.

Extremist Hutu ideologues had been referring to Tutsi peoples as Inyenzi - cockroaches - since the 1960s. As far as they were concerned, this was a problem of pest control; everyone well knew that cockroaches are pests to be eradicated.

Then, in 1992, Government leaders actively began calling for their extermination.

Why don’t we seize all those who bring them and exterminate them all? Are we really waiting now for them to come and exterminate us?

Leon Mugesera, Government Official in 1992, speaking to party members

Smaller-scale massacres of Tutsi peoples had been occurring since the Civil War’s onset, sometimes in the form of “counter-insurgency” operations by the Rwandan militia, but other times, purely as a reaction by Hutu civilians to something heard on the Radio.

The Radio was the most important source of media and information to Rwandans, as only 56% of the population had basic literacy.

Also in 1992, “the radio falsely broadcast that Tutsi planned to kill important Hutu leaders, especially in Bugesera,” which kicked off a massacre of Tutsi peoples in that region.

It was a harbinger of things to come.

2 years later, during the Genocide, Hutu men were seen walking around carrying their machete in one hand, and a portable radio in the other. Through the hate speech and incitement to violence propagated via radio - and often through one particular extremist radio station, RTLM - those Hutus who had been convinced of absurdities for much of their lives about the Tutsi being foreigners, inhuman pests, and an active threat, were given their marching orders, and proceeded to follow them without mercy or hesitation.

Long time friends, neighbours, family in law, teachers and students, these interpersonal bonds suddenly lost all importance and meaning for the perpetrators.

Rwanda became a land of mutilated and rotting corpses. They were everywhere. It was difficult to walk the land without eventually hearing the crunching of bone and feeling the unnatural squash of dead flesh underfoot. Many were simply left in piles, along the sides of roads, in ditches, stuffed into drains and wells, poisoning the only sources of fresh water for many, resulting in deadly cholera outbreaks. Some were left in shallow mass graves. Some merely had a mound of dirt poured over the top.

Those who had managed to survive often didn’t fare much better: many a victim was left with limbs missing when the perpetrators who hacked at them with the machetes failed to complete the job, leaving them to bleed out.

Occasionally, like with many Genocides before it, people were saved from death when a perpetrator or person of authority recognised them as a good friend. Indeed, while the vast majority of those killed were murdered by people they knew, including their own friends and family, there are harrowing stories from survivors saved at the very last moment when an interpersonal bond with a perpetrator somehow managed to rise above that homicidal drive, and they would be quickly hidden away somewhere out of sight, where they could remain for months waiting for the killings to stop.

Ethnicity had been part of Rwandan politics since independence, and over time, it became seen as a replacement for having individual political views in the minds of many. If you were Hutu, you were for the Government. If you were Tutsi, you were for armed rebel groups. This was the tenor of Rwandan identity politics, completely distorting the reality of the situation.

Ultimately, all this stratification and segmentation was built on nothing but words. Words which were wielded as a means to political ends, whether by the European Colonials who sought to keep the native people divided and subjugated, or later, by native Hutu politicians who were effectively pursuing the same ends.

Simply being exposed to hateful messaging is unlikely to drive someone to kill. Humans are an overwhelmingly pro-social species. We are genetically pre-disposed toward helping others over harming them, even those that we may not necessarily like, or identify with. However, we are also prone to tribalism. We can be suspicious and wary of out-groups. We are also sensitive to threats, or perceptions of threats; emotions, especially fear, can overwhelm our rationality, simplify our thinking, and make every action we take seem justified at the time.

Of all the factors which have been studied about Genocide and its precursors, there is one near-universal pre-requisite for all: the deliberate and purposeful spreading of hate speech.

Without the kind of messaging that dehumanises and isolates the target group, whether in the moment of greatest tension or throughout the years preceding the critical events, the likelihood of genocide becomes practically negligible.

Paul Kagame: Coward, Murderer, Liar, & Dictator of Rwanda.

Aftermath: Theory vs Practice

The 100 days of slaughter came to an end when the rebel RPF effectively defeated the government militias, and seized power. The drafting of a new constitution began shortly thereafter, in which the new government introduced articles allegedly intended to depoliticise factors like race and religion, clan or gender, and make the political hegemony of any one ethnic group impossible. The stated goal was to prevent extremist identity parties such as the old MDR - the Hutu Supremacist and formerly governing party - from being formed to begin with.

Most would have agreed, in the context of the aftermath of a genocide, such a measure made sense.

So the new constitution included Article 54, which states: “political organizations are prohibited from basing themselves on race, ethnic group, tribe, clan, region, sex, religion or any other division which may give rise to discrimination".

Furthermore, laws were introduced which made it a crime punishable by decade-long prison terms to simply “belittle” the genocide, laws so vague they could be used to justify the imprisonment of just about anyone. More laws were added which meant anyone who had spent more than 6 months in prison, for any reason, was permanently barred from public office.

Almost immediately, Paul Kagame, leader of the RPF and installed as Vice President of Rwanda, as well as Defence Minister, began using Article 54 to turn Rwanda into effectively a one-party state: this time, instead of outright banning all other parties, he would simply ban those which he deemed a potential threat to RPF dominance. During the transition years, he kept himself in the Vice Presidents position officially in order to create a false sense of humility and shared power. Whenever asked about his political ambitions, he would tell about his desire to leave politics and become a farmer. Western aid organisations and governments fawned over his show of democratic principles.

Yet that was all it was to be: a show.

When the time came for Rwanda’s next attempt at presidential elections in 2003, Paul Kagame stood for the RPF. Although a handful of newly minted parties contested, the results had been pre-determined: Kagame has won over 90% of the vote in every single election he has now stood for. Every single result was overwhelmingly fixed, through violence, intimidation, ballot-stuffing, and if that wasn’t enough, he used the vague hate-speech laws meant to prevent genocide to instead imprison anyone seen as a potential rival for the presidency, thereby making them legally ineligible to run.

His rule closely resembles the personal dictatorship of the tiny and cowardly Vladimir Putin, yet somehow he manages to get away with it more successfully. A combination of international shame over having done nothing to intervene during the 100 day genocide, and a historic sense of guilt (entirely justified) over the crimes of colonialism, the international community is desperate to please, continuing to send aid and offer loans, while praising the “clean streets” of the capital Kigali, and turning a blind eye to the massive rigging of elections, which delivered over 98% of the “vote” to Kagame in the 2024 edition of this charade.

It is a complete police state, on par with the old East German regime, yet more violent. People are still being disappeared for not showing complete obeisance and grovelling at the feet of Kagame: whether they be old RPF fighters who had fought all their lives for the cause, the closest old school friends of Kagame who had for one reason or another become suspect in his eyes, or innocent civilians who were supposedly overheard saying something potentially critical of the state of the country, the RPF, or Kagame himself.

Revenge killings en masse at unknown scale were carried out after the RPF’s seizure of power, and kept mostly quiet. Some have called these reprisal killings genocidal: some estimates are that around 30,000 additional people, mostly Hutus, were slaughtered by the triumphant RPF.

Many former insiders of the RPF over the years, frozen out by Kagame’s psychotic paranoid rage, have admitted to the RPF’s role in shooting down the presidential airplane in 1994 which immediately precipitated the genocide. Paul Kagame himself, it seems, planned the operation, and gave the shoot-down order.

Such whistle-blowers continue to be hunted down relentlessly worldwide by the Rwandan security services to this day, alongside the extra-judicial killings and assassinations of Rwandan expatriates all over the world who dare to voice even minor criticisms of Kagame, the RPF, or the situation in Rwanda.

So the dilemma is a real one. How does a country effectively prevent the necessary pre-requisite to all genocide - violent hate-speech - without risking the creation of a police state?

Ultimately, I believe the answer comes down to the strength of institutions to stand up to the executive. Rwanda makes a big show of democratic principles, yet keeps everyone in fear for their lives, and uses hate-speech laws to silence dissent. Notice, however, how no one ever criticises Paul Kagame (and lives), and moreover, anyone that ruled against him in the very early days of Rwanda’s post-genocide government from the judiciary were silenced. Despite being against Rwanda’s constitution, all their Supreme Court justices were replaced by Kagame himself with those who were ready to kowtow to him personally.

So the story of free speech continues to play out in the west. Yet Rwanda serves as the cautionary tale of all cautionary tales.

On the one hand, how genocide is made possible by certain forms of speech, and on the other, how trading freedom for safety can leave you with neither in the end.

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Thank you so much for reading and listening. This has been my most intensely-researched article, and although I only quoted from a few sources, two books in particular helped me to understand the Rwandan context immensely, and made this work possible:

• We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch, (1998)

• Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong (2021)

Thank you to my paid subscribers, who make all of this possible, and everyone who has donated to the coffee fund.

Until next time!