Propaganda of the Rwandan genocide


	genocide in rwanda

"Power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happen." Philip Gourevitch

critical toolbox	Foreign invaders, plundering the rich earth of Rwanda. Bloodthirsty parasites, who prefer exploitation to honest labor. An elite minority, enjoying influence out of all proportion to their numbers— ferreting their way into the highest-paying jobs, monopolizing the banking system, the educational system, even the very government to ensure the soft life for themselves and their kin. Scheming, shrewd and crafty. Without scruples. Without conscience. Fearsome, loathsome, cunning as a cockroach. Intent on the destruction of every hard-working member of the native people to whom the country rightfully belongs. If they were in your country, wouldn't you want to be warned? Wouldn't you read the newspaper each morning, wouldn't you keep all the radios on?	propaganda case studies
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rwandan machete

Listen to the radio, pick up a newspaper, go out onto the street and listen to the word. It's 1962, or it could be 1973, or 1983, or then again perhaps it's 1991. Ethnic hatred has lived in Rwanda all those years, since the Belgians conflated the country's agricultural class division with the ethnic duality to create a familiar European system of serfs and rulers. After elevating the Tutsi to superior status, the Belgians saw the change in the wind, felt their own slim power slipping, recognized the danger of alienating an increasingly politicized 5-to-1 majority on their own home soil. Before granting independence in 1962, the Belgians committed a reversal of loyalties. All those things they'd said about Tutsis—far too noble to be native, clearly born to command—those things were still true, in the logic of the new Rwanda. They just weren't admirable anymore. To be a native, to have roots in the soil, to dig hands into that rich heritage: this was true nobility. This was the Hutu race, so long oppressed. And this value inversion set the population suddenly, dangerously out of balance: a Hutu majority taught to perceive their neighbors as aliens, as privileged overlords, now channeled their strength through the moral upper hand. Employment quotas. Forced exile. Exclusion from political participation. After thirty years of such discrimination, it would be tricky to maintain the fiction that the Tutsi had a death-grip on the power and the resources within Rwanda.

Smoke without fire—but it can be done.

In 1994 Rwanda blazed into genocide. 800,000 Tutsi were murdered. They were murdered with clubs, with hoes, with machetes. They were murdered by their colleagues, and by their friends, and by their neighbors. They were murdered in their homes during door-to-door searches, and they were murdered at pre-ordained public points of collection. This happened. This happened. And it didn't happen in 1962, the minute the Belgians turned their back and left the Rwandans to themselves. It didn't happen in 1973, when a National Guard commander with influential Hutu-supremacist family ties seized power. It didn't happen in 1990, when an army of exiled Tutsi and politically sympathetic Hutu invaded from Uganda, threatening the ruling Hutu Power elite.

We will talk about the genocide that did happen: the genocide of 1994, when a frustrated public was transformed into a weapon of the political will. In the following pages we'll explore the cultural mechanics of genocide by examining the official, state-sponsored propaganda campaign and the tactics by which it so successfully demonized the minority Tutsi as to legitimate, even glorify, atrocities against them. Further, we'll explore the conflicted worldview of Western nations—signatories to a convention requiring the prevention and punishment of genocide, who nevertheless decided that more pressing interests overruled intervention in Rwanda—and the ideological propaganda by which they legitimated their own scheme of active inaction in the crisis.

Start with the timeline of events in Rwanda, even if you're familiar with the history. In Rwanda there is no such thing as an accepted fact—every party invested in the conflict has its own arsenal of events, its own blindness to occurrences it needs to deny. Attempting to document objective history is the most subjective of endeavors, and as you read the timeline of facts you'll not only find a historical context for understanding the arguments about propaganda, but also begin to understand my own blindness, deafness, weakness, my own belief, my own axe to grind. If you're going to make up your own mind about the occurrences of 1994, you'll need to know how far you trust your sources. If you're wending you way through a website concerned with linguistic manipulation, you'd be a fool to take anything on trust. And you're no fool.

Now why would I have said that?

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