Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Ancient Genocide and the War on Carthage

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Robert is joined again by Joe Kassabian to continue to discuss ancient genocide.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Thank you all. Oh, what's shitting orange, my Joe? That's just for us, for nobody else. This is the best intro of all time. How are you doing, Joe, for part two of our genocide spectacular? I'm good. I often, people that listen to my show often joke that I surprise my guests with a genocide. And this time, it gets to happen to me, and it's quite nice, you know? I did almost open this episode with what's eliminating ethnic groups, my every people in the history of the human race.

But that wouldn't, I just didn't want to see Sophie's disappointed face one more time. I can feel her shaking her head now across the internet. She always is somewhere. Robert, you could never disappoint me. I often have. So part two, everybody's good to go. This is behind the bastards, by the way. You're Joe Cassavian, co-host of The Lion Sled by Donkey's podcast.

Let's get back to some genocide. As I'm sure everyone listening to this show is aware, the United States is currently in a bit of a moral panic over the fact that transgender people exist. The groomer discourse, which has arisen on the right wing, in which trans and now increasingly all queer people are accused of being child molesters or want to be child molesters because they like write books that tell kids that people who aren't cisgender exist. Right. Yeah, the folks have been accusing this or folks like on the left and queer people have been pointing out that this is eliminationist rhetoric, right? This is potentially the kind of rhetoric that can lead to a genocide. And the basic fear is that right wing thought leaders are trying to convince their followers that transgender people are pedophilic monsters because you can do anything to pedophiles, right? Right, it's the lowest of the low.

Exactly. So if you can like lump a group of people in as being that, it doesn't matter what you do to them. Now, I've seen a number of number of posts in this line on on the interwebs that have brought up Dr. Gregory Stanton's 10 stages of genocide, which he laid out in 1986 and we're revamped in 2016. Step one is classification, e.g. splitting society into us and them rather than using mixed categories. This is not always done intentionally. This often just kind of happens, but it can feed into what later becomes a genocide. Next is symbolization, which gives names or symbols to the classification. The most obvious example of this from history would be the yellow star that Jewish people were forced to wear in Nazi Germany or indeed the purple triangle that homosexual people were made to wear.

Next comes discrimination on a legal basis and then dehumanization, which is comparison of members of the target group to insects or vermin. This is also not in his list, but plague bacillus is a really common one, particularly by the Nazis. I think that had something to do with the fact that there had been a plague not that long before the rise of the Nazis. And famously in Rwanda calling people Inyesi or cockroaches. Yes, cockroaches, which we'll chat about a little bit more later. And then there's organization, which is the forming of militias and other crucially non-state groups geared towards the elimination of targeted people. Polarization is number six in which extremists strive groups apart and broadcast propaganda in the mass media to indoctrinate people with hate. Now, most of the time when I see people bringing up Stanton's 10 stages of genocide to talk about how that's where the rights trying to push people.

They will lease the United States at either step four or step six, and you can certainly make a strong case for either. But while Dr. Stanton's scale has has its uses, I'm not like shitting on it or anything. I think the way in which people are interpreting it leads to some inaccurate beliefs about how genocide tends to proceed. And it overall pushes people towards a more mechanistic and centralized view of how genocides occur. And while this can't this does describe some historic genocides, well, because he's looking back at genocides and trying to describe them in stages. I don't know that it's super useful in predicting them, which I would argue that it's not simply. I mean, I'm not, of course, I'm not hating on his research. His research is great. No, no, it's just I think it takes a lot of agency from the perpetrators of genocides themselves.

I think it's very good. And I mean, even Strauss sometimes does this as well. It's very good to understand when you're doing this kind of history, right? Right. And it's it's something that's very, very good to understand the organization of the radical core that makes all genocides possible, but isn't inevitable. Radical cores can form and there can still not be a genocide. Yes. And I also like the kind of the fact that we're sort of critiquing this doesn't mean we're not saying like, for example, trans people should not be concerned about the rhetoric coming out of the right as eliminationist, not saying that at all. Just I think focusing on the stages and the way that people do kind of leads people to inaccurate expectations about how things proceed and have proceeded historically. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

So in order to get into that, let's start with another example from ancient history. This is one that you brought up to me, Joe, when I mentioned that I wanted to do this episode, the Asian Vespers of 88 BC. The Asiatic Vespers where Romans got the hit with the Uno reverse card. Yes, exactly. Yeah, this is the Uno reverse of the of the genocide that they did in Carthage. So starting in like 91 BC, Romans had what they called the social war, which was social because the people they lived next to Italians were not Roman citizens. But they had to submit to some Roman policies. They couldn't vote. They weren't like, I don't know, as a general rule, when people have to submit to policies by a government but have no say in that government, they can get unhappy with that. This is not a thing Americans would be familiar with, right? Nothing like that has ever happened here.

Never, never, never occurred in this part of the world. So eventually the Italians go to war with the Romans. I'm not going to get into detail about that, but they call it the social war, which is funny because it is unbelievably brutal. And this is also this is a pattern in Roman history where like a group of people who are close to the imperial core will have an uprising because their rights are being denied and they will make demands which will be denied and then they'll fight a war. The Romans will crush them brutally and then grant most of the demands later. That's what happens here because like the Italians get everything they want after the Romans wipe out like a generation of them. Right. Well, there's fewer of you now to grant rights to, so this is better for us. So, yeah, the Rome is at war with Italy in this period. And while this is all going down, there's a, you know, this place called Pontus, which is in the modern day Black Sea region of Turkey. And the guy who runs it is a king named Mithradites, Mithridates, whatever you want to call them, the sixth. And he starts like rubbing his hands together, like that guy in that meme, you know, the guy rubbing his hands together. Wasn't it Birdman? He's doing this? That's exactly Mithradites. It's like, that's what he's doing. Look at it, Rome fighting Italy like, oh yeah, I'm gonna get some shit.

Famously, Mithridates was also related and again, this is something that goes back through histories. It's related into the neighboring kingdom of Armenia and they take part in this as well. Yeah, they sure do. So, Rome and the peoples in like, that whole region of the world, you know, the coast, which generally like, they'll call these guys like, Persians a lot of the time, like it's all like, it's this, you know, it's Asia, right? Like, that's what the, the, the, the Rome's, this is just Asia. And they fought a while and they would fight many more wars in the future. So, old Mithradites decides that like, while the Republic's got his back turned, he's gonna annex two neighboring kingdoms that have like, tight relationships with Rome, primarily like trading based. So, because Rome has so much economic interest in the area, they have a Roman commission to Asia. And the guy who's running it, basically, the guy who's running the Roman commission to Asia is like, hey, Mithradites, you can't annex these places. You have to give them back to their kings. You have to restore their sovereignty. And the head of the Roman commission doesn't do this because he's a cool dude, but because he's been bribed, right? Like, these guys paid him to do it. Because, you know, stuff can't come back. Like, it's not like Rome is centralized for the day, but it's not like he can radio back home and be like, what do you want me to do? Like, that takes like six months to get anything back, right?

So, the two countries that Mithradites had annexed, Cappadocia and Bithnia, get freed, because Mithradites doesn't really want a straight up fight with the Romans at this date. But they now owe the chief Roman dude in the area a lot of money, because they promised to pay him for this. Now, this guy, this dude who like, makes Mithradites leave and gets bribed, is Manius Aquilis. Aquilius. We don't actually know how many of these names were pronounced, because here's the fun thing, as a guy who took three years of Latin, nobody knows how ancient Latin was pronounced. We know how people have said like Ecclesiastic Latin, but it is different. Like, nobody actually understands exactly how Romans would have said everything. So, Manius Aquilius, head of the Roman delegation, tells the king of, I think, Cappadocia and Nicomedes, that a good way to get money that he owes Manius might be by invading Pontus and taking their stuff. Now, the fact that they had just been annexed by Pontus, if you're a smart person, you might be like, well, maybe these guys can't beat Pontus in a war, if this just happened, right? Like, maybe their invasion won't go well. Maybe this is a stupid idea. You might think Manius Aquilis would think that, but he does not. So, Nicomedes tries to invade Pontus, and they just take it curb stomped by Mithradites, just absolutely pounded.

So, next, I'm going to quote from a write-up for the University of Chicago's Encyclopedia Romana, quote, Mithradites retook Cappadocia and Bithnia, defeating Nicomedes at the river Amnius. Fighting against chariots armed with sides on the wheels, the army was terrified at seeing men cut in halves and still breathing, or mangled in fragments or hanging on the sides. Overcome rather by the hideousness of the spectacle, but then by loss of the fight, fear disordered their ranks. Mithradites then swept into Phyrgia and the Roman province of Asia. Aquilis, who so ill-advisedly had precipitated the war without ratification from the Senate, fled the mainland, but was given up by the citizens of Mitalene. Ridiculed and paraded on an ass, he eventually was executed, relates Appian, when Mithradites poured molten gold down his throat, thus rebuking the Romans for their bribetaking. And this is a cool and good way of executing powerful rich people that happens a bunch of times to Romans in Asia.

This is not the last time a Roman will be force-fed molten gold in this part of the world. It rocks. It's pretty cool. It's objective. Mithradites, I'm not calling him a great guy, but it's pretty cool to do this to guys like that. I want to say this happens to someone Mithradite. It happens to one of these relatives later on, but I can't remember who. Oh, cool. That's good. It famously happens later during the time of Caesar and you've got Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. Crassus is like the richest guy in the world at the time. Some people will argue he's the richest dude there ever was. He made a big chunk of his fortune by when there would be fires in Rome. He owned a fire department and so he would go to people and he would be like, you want me to save your house? You got to sell me your house and then you'll be able to get your shit out at least.

So big asshole. He goes to war in this vague region of the world against Parthia because he's a dick and his army gets its ass. Again, this is one of those times where the Romans lose a whole generation of young men. According to legend, he gets killed by having gold poured down his throat too, the richest man in history, which is neat. Marching your army through the mountains of Parthia and getting wrecked is kind of an origin story for a lot of important people in Rome. Like, Mark Antony did that too. It's like getting chicken pox for Roman military leaders. You just got to go get your ass wrecked in Asia. So again, obviously, so far this is broadly speaking morally unproblematic within the context of ancient history. But if you know your Roman history, you know that like, and maybe if this hadn't happened, if he'd gotten back to Rome,

there's a decent chance they would have like executed Marcus, like thrown him off the tarpaion rock or something for fucking around. They did that sometimes. But now a Roman elected leader has been executed by a foreign king and Rome does not take kindly to that shit. So things start churning up for a war and Mithridates decides his first step should be to cleanse his new territory of all Roman citizens. And this is where things get genocide-y. In 88 BC, in a measure of the hatred felt for the Romans in Asia, Mithridates wrote secretly to all his satraps and city governors that on the 30th day thereafter they should set upon all Romans and Italians in their towns and upon their wives and children and their freedmen of Italian birth, kill them and throw their bodies out unburied and share their goods with King Mithridates. Tens of thousands were massacred. Valerius Maximus records 80,000 deaths, Plutarch 150,000 and what has been called the Asian or Ephesian Vespers.

So yeah, this is definitely a genocide. Pretty clear example of a genocide. And one that happens very rapidly, it might be most reasonable to compare it to Rwanda where there were pre-existing tensions because the Romans had kind of come into this area with all the money. They were backed by this state that had bossed people around. They were like landlords and they were bankers and they were like seen as kind of economically oppressing people in the region, seen as arrogant, seen as like backed by this outside state that was unfairly exerting power in the area. And so people had been pissed for a while and when Mithridates takes over and says like, hey, it's time to get rid of these motherfuckers. There's a lot of folks who are like willing to do it because of these pre-existing ethnic tensions. Yeah, obviously this...

With the main difference of these ethnic tensions were actually different ethnicities and not invented. Yes, and not invented. Yeah, because these are like dudes from Italy showing up in fucking Turkey. Which is actually, again, like with garbage, not all that far, but yeah. So this upsets Rome. The whole story ends after two more wars with Roman victory and the death of Mithridates and the rise of a guy named Sola who sucks ass, but that's a story for another day. Definitely an active historical genocide. It does not, however, again, if we're talking about Dr. Stanton's scale, it doesn't correspond directly to that. Now, there is an us versus them component to the massacre, right? That exists well prior to Mithridates giving the order, right? The fact that there are these divisions that Romans are kind of seen as other.

But there's no buildup to this, really. There's no propaganda arm to dehumanize them. There's no gradual stage of separating Romans from other people in their community. He issues secret orders that local officials and their levies fulfill. And as an incentive, he divides the property of the dead Romans between himself and the inhabitants of the city that they're killed in. There it is. That's why. Yes. That's why, right? And this is the thing, I think. Scholars, obviously, because we're quoting a bunch of scholars, talk about this a lot. But as a general rule, when people popularly discuss genocide, they almost never talk about how fucking much of it is about money. Yeah.

It's starting to become more accepted now. Like we talked about, I think, in the very beginning of the last episode, is that people really wanted to believe that every perpetrator of a genocide is a dead-eyed psycho who's a dead-set racial propagandist of some kind. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty solidly thrown out the window by Christopher Browning's work and Ordinary Men, which then spawned one of the worst books on the Holocaust I think I've ever read called Hitler's Willing Executioners. Oh, yeah. But yeah, it's...

There's a lot that's problematic about that. Make a long story short for people who don't want to read it. He hits the Nazis with their own race science. Yeah. Which you don't need to do. You don't need to do. Robert, the only thing that could stop a bad guy with race science is a good guy with race science. But in that dimension, like the Rwandan genocide jumps the night immediately with some of the new scholarships.

Yeah, we'll be talking about this quite a bit. But yeah, I mean, this is actually literally what we're leading into. But yeah, I mean, it's worth noting that like, yeah, the king incentivizes people who inform on hidden Romans and he promises slaves freedom. Again, the genocide occurs. There is an aspect of it as people have been pissed at Romans in this region for a long time, but they have incentives, right? They don't just suddenly get let off the leash and do a genocide because they're angry at Romans.

It's worth it. The balance sheet makes it worth it, you know? And this is an important truth about why people do do genocides because it pays. Racism and nationalism are always major causes cited, along with kind of vague and constantly frustrating claims of brainwashing by propaganda. But as we'll cover, focusing on those things leads to a really myopic view about why mass killings occur. Our earliest two genocides, we have no context about it, right? We have no idea why the Yom Naya, how the Yom Naya justified like what they did

or how the people who killed the people in Naderuk justified what they did. But it seems safe to conclude that the folks carrying out the violence and their civilians, the civilians back home, whatever that was, probably saw there being some sort of a resource gain in killing those people. That is very likely. Popular scholarship of the Holocaust tends to focus on the yellow stars and arson attacks on synagogues and, of course, the camps. And obviously, all of that's very important. But many Americans have never even heard of Aryanization.

And in order to explain what that is, I'm going to quote from the Holocaust Encyclopedia. Under voluntary Aryanization, the Nazi German state encouraged Jewish businessmen who were already facing economic and social discrimination to sell their businesses in Germany at radically reduced prices. In early 1933, there were about 100,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany. About half of those were small retail stores dealing mostly in clothing or footwear. The rest were factories or workshops of varying sizes or professional offices for lawyers, physicians, and other independent professionals.

By 1938, the combination of Nazi terror, propaganda, boycott, and legislation was so effective that some two-thirds of these Jewish-owned enterprises were out of business or sold to non-Jews. Jewish owners often desperate to immigrate or to sell a failing business except at a selling price that was only 20% or 30% of the actual value of each business. And I think it's important to highlight this because you can draw a real direct line between what Mithratides is doing and what the Nazis are doing here, right?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's the same basic idea, yeah. Especially when Aryanization became forced. Which, I mean, of course, you could argue that it already is forced. Yes, yes, yes. But when it becomes, you know, they go from voluntary to forced in the Nazi sense of the word. When they start deportations. All their property, outside of precious metals and things

which end up vanishing into Swiss bank accounts. Right. And are still there to this day. They get auctioned off at drastically reduced prices to German civilians. Yes. And yeah, it's obviously one of the things to note is that what Mithratides does is faster. Because it's years between Aryanization and the actual physical elimination of Jewish human beings in Europe on a mass scale.

There's a good, again, this is not something that gets talked about, especially in our popular retellings of the Holocaust. It tends to get glossed over. There's one very good movie that is like focused on Aryanization. Although it's Aryanization on the Eastern Front during the invasion of Russia by the Nazis. It's called The Shop on Main Street. It won a foreign Oscar. It was made in the USSR in like the 60s.

And it is all about a local dude named Tonneau who's like a just like a Russian dude who's like brother collaborates. I think it's his brother collaborates with the Nazis. And because his brother's working with them, this like kind of he's the town drunk basically gets given a Jewish woman's business. And he like tries to hide her and stuff. It's it's a very bleak movie. But it's a good movie about that aspect of the genocide that I don't think I've ever seen anything else tie into it. And one of the things that's really interesting about The Shop on Main Street, I recommend watching it is that this is again filmed in the USSR in like the 60s.

So all of the people acting in the movie had lived through this. Like the actors in this movie had either participated in or watched their neighbors give up their Jews when they were kids. Like during the Nazi advance. So it's they're not so much acting as like remembering. And it's it is a potent film. Like you should watch The Shop on Main Street. It's a very good movie. Just like have something like the new Nicholas Cage movie to put on afterwards that will make you less sad.

Because holy shit is it bleak. But World War Two movie about the Eastern Front. Yeah, I can't believe it's depressing. Anyway, I'm going to go have a nice palette. Cleds are coming. Yeah, I would say it's on the level of come and see in terms of not in terms of like how intense the imagery of come and see. Is which is like nothing else. Yeah, Russian movies about World War Two.

Yeah, it's interesting because like when you think about the fact that Mithratites in the Nazis had the same basic idea, but he immediately proceeded to genocide and it took them years. You might conclude one of the things you might conclude from this is that a benefit from modern civilization in that is that in order to get a population to buy into a genocide, you have to separate the killing from the financial gain by a couple of years. You gotta make it palatable for everybody. I'm not sure if that does speak well of civilization. Like I don't, you can interpret that however you would like if that's what you choose to take out of this lesson. I would argue that it does not.

Especially because it seems like most genocides, not all but most in the modern era, like the vast majority of work that is done is done to make it palatable. Not only to lay people in civilization, but also to the perpetrators. Yeah. And it's because this might shock some people. Ideology isn't all that important for people doing the killing. It's important for people doing the organizing. Yeah, and that's what we're, this is, I mean, this is all what we're talking about. But first, you know who doesn't organize people to participate in an ethnic cleansing in order to make financial benefits for a specific glass of people?

We actually don't know that. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, because it could be **** and they for certain have. Yeah. The Ford Motor Company. When **** abducts children for their child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia, they abduct children from all socioeconomic classes, all major religious and racial groups, all kinds of kids on the child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. That's the **** guarantee. The guarantee of equality, freely sourced children. Yeah, our kidnapping gangs do not see race.

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Oh, we're back. So we've discussed a shortcoming, I think, of Dr. Stanton's scale. And again, we're not trying to shit on like his research or anything. This is primarily even not really an issue with the scale, but with like the way it is popularly interpreted. Like genocide is a thermometer, right? Going to dial up the genocide temperature. That's not quite how it works. And I'd like to present folks with another rubric that they might find more useful for determining how people and specifically individual people, although this does kind of work on communities, get to tip to the point where they are willing to participate in genocide, right?

This is another way of looking at it that I find more useful. We can talk about like the shortcomings of this way as well, and I'm sure we will. Genocide historian Irvin Staube, who, by the way, was only alive to do his research because Raul Wallenberg saved his life. He's one of the kids that Wallenberg hid in like a house during the genocide in Hungary. Staube was a pioneer in understanding specifically the temporal procession of motivations in individuals who consent to take part in genocide. That was like a thing he was really interested in is what is happening in the head? Like what are the different things that have to happen for someone to be like willing to do this, you know? Up until his and he's obviously he's very much working off of the work that Limkin pioneered.

He quotes Limkin constantly in his book, you know, none of these people are like doing anything entirely. This is scholarship, right? Everybody's like participating and building an understanding. Up until his book was published in 1989, there was fairly little organized scholarship concerned with how individuals changed over time to support genocide. Staube focused on what he called a continuum of destruction, which other scholars have empirically documented in studies of Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia. The findings of all of this research on motivation were aptly described by one of the scholars who followed Staube, Scott Strauss, who wrote of Rwanda, quote, Rwandans killed for multiple reasons. Others joined in the attacks for one reason, but then continued for other reasons. Their motivations changed over time. Now, I found a good article published in 2020 by Jan Reinerman and Timothy Williams in the incredibly named International Journal of Violence.

I think it's actually called Violence and International Journal, but either way, it's a pretty, pretty cool title for a thing. Now, based on the research of guys like Staube and Strauss going all the way back to Limkin, they propose a sort of hierarchy of needs enlist ways in which different motivations can influence those needs to make people capable of like directly carrying out mass murder, quote, To understand why individuals engage in violent action, we need to understand both their motivations and inhibitions, both of which stem from certain needs. Inhibitions conceptually being motivations for not engaging in violent action. As such, we can identify individual hierarchies of needs and only when the most salient one is a motivation for action will an individual participate. Now, to explain why they present a chart listing the needs of an individual in specific moment, which can generally be categorized as security, moral integrity, social belonging, and a desire for better life conditions. So for security, a person's desire to keep themselves safe might lead them to participate in a genocide to avoid coercion, violence, or the threat of violence from the state or another group.

A person's moral integrity might keep them from killing if they believe that murdering people is always wrong. A person's need for social belonging might convince them to kill if doing so will keep them in good with the group and likewise they might not be willing to kill if that will ostracize them from the people around them. And the need to improve their own individual circumstances might of course lead a person to support genocide for economic gain. Quote, This can be illustrated through the actions of a Rwandan Hutu who might have faced strong pressure from other Hutus to participate. As Strauss argues, this was the most common motivation for people to participate in the killings and rendered the need for security a most salient in the hierarchy of needs and motivations at this time. In a similar vein, an example of coercion can be found in Cambodia, where coercion caused a diffuse feeling of anxiety in which everyone feared becoming a victim themselves, making fear endemic. Furthermore, coercion in this case provoked strict obedience to the orders of their superiors for the fear of life-threatening consequences. Some former cadres of the Khmer Rouge claimed that if people did not kill and follow the rules, they would be killed or stated they were fearful for their security.

A statement of a former Khmer Rouge illustrated this as follows, but it was the order from higher and if they did not do it, they were also killed. Therefore, whether they wanted to do it or not, they had to do it. They just followed the order. Yeah, that tracks especially Rwanda. The vast majority of the genocide wasn't committed by arms of the state, though the Rwandan military did help. Most of it was done by Hutu power militias in the Inter-Homway. A huge number of the victims of that genocide are also moderate Hutus who refuse to take part. You can actually go on the Rwandan Genocide Museum's website and watch a ton of perpetrator interviews. Virtually all of them will point out that the community was doing it. I was worried that if I didn't take part, I too would be killed and also I stole their stuff. Yeah, and I think that's what's so important is that it's not just fear of coercion. It's not just that someone is ordering them. And it's not just that they have an economic benefit. It is a continuum of things that kind of...

And again, you could get overly mechanistic with this and viewed as flipping switches. It's the same way that people in any circumstance can do things they would not expect of themselves, because things change that alter the calculus they're making in the moment about what is the thing to do. And I think that's much more useful than just being like, well, if you brainwash certain people, you can get them to commit genocide. It's more like if you can provide the proper incentives in the proper way at the right time, people are willing to engage in horrific things that they would consider impossible of themselves in a different situation. Right. I mean, that's one of the main reasons why the Holocaust switched from being mass shootings to death camps is because human beings cannot continuously do that forever. No, no. We will break down. As they did. We can talk about the rates of alcoholism among the SS or just the fact that so many of those guys killed themselves, right? Which shouldn't feel bad for them, but it's just like...

Oh, God, no. There's a certain subset of the human population who could shoot unarmed people all day long and not have any effect, but it's not a lot of them. Most of the people who do that kind of thing. So the need for social belonging is also a well documented and powerful motivation for many participants in genocide. Obviously, a lot of Germans watched their neighbors be led away and avoided speaking up. And this is an area where like the popular view was often because like, well, if they had said something, they would have gotten in trouble. And we just talked about how coercion is a factor, especially in Rwanda. But it's also not as much of a factor in a lot of genocides as you think, for example, in Germany.

One thing that is worth noting is that soldiers in Germany were not punished or executed for refusing to participate in genocide. They were ostracized by their fellows sometimes. I'm sure some dudes got like beat up or whatever by their buddies. Like if you're talking about like individual coercion, but the state did not execute German soldiers for refusing to kill Jewish people. No, of course not. And ordinary men, Christopher Browning points out before every mass killing to include the largest mass killing of human beings. Which the Russians are shelling or we're shelling. Yes. Yeah. The Holocaust Memorial specifically. Good stuff.

It's noted that, I mean, this is a reserve police battalion. I believe reserve police battalion 101 or something. Like given explicit permission, like you don't have to do this if you don't want to. You can request a transfer. Had an out. So again, it's not just any of these factors because social coercion can be totally absent in the way that it's like in the way that we were describing earlier where it's a fear of your own physical security right for not participating. That is not a necessary precursor of genocide. It can be. And it's interesting here because one of the things that is worth noting because I don't want to just be talking about why genocides happen if you want to look at like how to prevent them or to mitigate them.

One of the most successful things you can do is protest in the moment against it. And this is a thing that was successful in Nazi Germany against the Nazis on a number of occasions. People who protested direct acts of deportation and killing did not tend to be imprisoned or harmed by the state. In fact, the state on a number of occasions backed off. And Staube writes at length about the power of bystanders to influence or at least in specific limited instances, halt and slow down the process of genocide. And when talking about this, he points to a well documented psychological phenomenon, the bystander effect. When a number of people are present in an emergency, a significant number, somebody gets hit by a car or something and there's a bunch of folks watching. Responsibility is diffused and each individual person on scene is less likely to help, right? Because they assume someone else who knows better is going to get in there, right?

We could talk about the cops stacked up at Uvaldi, refusing to like, although that may be a different thing. But like, I'm sure that was a factor in what was happening psychologically. The same thing that causes most people in a room to ignore when like a dude slaps his girlfriend is at play when agents of the state come to disappear people. Staube points out that even the Nazis backed away repeatedly in the face of public resistance. They did not persist, for example, when Bulgaria, where people protested in the streets, refused to hand over its Jewish population, or when within Germany, relatives and some institutions protested the killing of the mentally retarded, mentally ill and others regarded as genetically inferior. Like, there were cases in which, and there was a backlash after Kristallnacht that caused changes in Nazi policy. And this is, again, some of these scholars who are talking about it in the way that we've just been discussing,

will say that what's happening here is that in that moment where like you're trying to round up people and folks show up to protest, your human need for moral integrity can kind of switch to make you incapable temporarily of at least like, continuing to do the thing you had come there to do, right? You had come there morally willing to round up these people for genocide, but the the approbation of the community around you suddenly makes you unwilling to do that. In that moment, doesn't mean they weren't willing to do it later. But it doesn't mean that like, they decide that it's morally wrong, you know? A big factor in what may be happening is that when they are presented with a crowd of people protesting them,

they suddenly think, oh, I might get punished for this later. This might not be safe for me. Like, if this is pissing off this many people, I actually might like have to like deal with consequences for participating in this, right? So that may be part of what's going on. But it does point to, and this is something Stab points out a lot, it's actually not useless to like one of the most useful things you can do at every stage of like, of kind of building genocidal tensions is make it clear that like, you hate what these people are doing and you oppose them.

Because that has a number of influences that can like, at least mitigate the harms that are being done. And that's, this is kind of gets to like, the root of what the dehumanization dialogue is getting at, you know, the problem that most often when people talk about dehumanizing in the context of genocide, they frame it as the use of specific language to deny people their humanity in order to prepare to execute a genocide. And that's not always how it goes. And in fact, there's more evidence for it occurring the opposite way around. In Cambodia, for example, killers reported being disturbed by the acts of mass murder they committed at first, and then reported that it got easier with time, like killing ducks and chickens. And part of this is that like, the longer you do this without people stopping you,

and the more the less like resistance you encounter to it, the more it just seems like if you're in a culture where people are doing this, you feel less like number one, you're going to get punished for it, less like it's a problem. It gets more like, that's a big part of like, what dehumanization is, not what happens before, but what happens like during. And a lot of the participants in the Cambodian genocide will say that like, they hated what they were doing at first. And then with time, they just came to regard it as like killing ducks and chickens, you know, the way they'd slaughtered animals as kids on the farm. They integrated the execution of human beings into their lives in order to like, protect themselves, right? Right. Professor Eliza Luft has also written and researched this topic extensively, and she writes,

quote, I find that dehumanization is more often an outcome of participation in violence rather than a precursor. In other words, people make difficult decisions about whether or not to participate in genocide based on their access to financial resources, whether they're being asked to kill, their proximity to extremists ordering the violence, and signals sent by local elites. But the more they kill, the easier killing becomes, and this is partly due to shifts in social perception. Although events in genocide describe reactions that include vomiting, shaking, nightmares, and trauma the first few times they kill, over time they're physical and emotional horror at killing subsides. My research suggests this cognitive adaptation of violence goes hand in hand with a transformation in how ordinary killers perceive their victims. Humanizing propaganda can help with this process, but providing participants with cultural narratives that frame violence as the morally right thing to do.

And this is when we talk about preventing genocide, you mentioned earlier, like the racial motivations and stuff, that's key at like the core of people who are trying to plan and organize this. One of the ways to disrupt it, you have to disrupt all of these potential incentives, right? It's about creating friction for the people who want to organize this. It's about making it difficult for folks to profit. It's about making it difficult for people to feel like this is okay. It's about making them like see and encounter resistance constantly at every stage of this, because that's a big part of like stopping people from feeling,

stopping people from like stopping the people who will actually do most of the activity of genocide from getting, from feeling like this is a good thing for them to do. It's disrupting like the signaling and the messaging that brings people in, you know? Like that's the stage at which you can stop this stuff. Yeah, I think that there's certainly a level of feeling of impunity. And most of the people that would end up doing these things, they'll also, in my opinion, a lot of the people who would end up committing the violence didn't actually ever see themselves doing it. Like the Reserve Battalion that Christopher Browning writes about.

Those guys were all people who were like discharged from military service or not allowed to have military service due to like medical problems. So it's a job. Like they thought they were going to like go be occupied territory cops and shit. And as far as like the Rwandan genocide or even the Armenian genocide where a lot of the violence is communal, there's an intense economic problem, economic friction, and a history of conflict with these people between the two groups. And unfortunately, it just takes someone to harness it and allow them to be in a position to grant impunity.

But I think that the communities that are taking part in it like you've pointed out are only doing it because they're like, well, we're clearly going to get away with this. Like they're not going to live. Nobody starts off, you know, starting a checkpoint with a machete outside of Kigali if they think like there's gonna be a trial in like six months. Exactly, exactly. And part of like, you know, one of the things that Luft points out is that like a thing that can influence populations to participate is like their proximity to extremists ordering the violence.

What Stanton would point out is like these militias, these non-state groups, which is like one of the reasons why when anti-fascists talk about the point, the value of like confronting groups in the street at the early stages of this, that's part of the value of that. It's not just that like you'll stop them from coming out because in a lot of ways it just makes them want to come out. It's other people who might kind of passively go along with them when they start setting up checkpoints, seeing how much resistance there is to those groups and the things that they say, right? It's about keeping, yeah, some of it is about, because again, there's a number of things that can like flip in a person that can make them willing to participate this.

It's about trying to make it so that people never feel like this is a thing they can participate in with impunity or without being ostracized from society, right? Right. Like that's part of it. That's part of it. Like none of this, there's no simple solution to stopping genocide. Of course not. It's something that we've been trying to figure out since Rafael Lemkin first wrote his insanely long book. But like a good example of this is like, oh, the water's getting too hot. Time to fucking bail is like the plots against Hitler during World War II.

I mean, yeah, there was several plots against him early on, but they really only picked up once it became pretty fucking clear that like this shit's coming down on us. Yeah, like the famous Staufenberg plot was like not because Staufenberg hated the Nazis. It was because he didn't like that they were losing. Yeah, I mean, he was a Nazi and he was anti-Semitic and he was one of those guys. It's like, okay, so death camps are a step too far. But even that, it seemed like, and in that seemed, but even then him and most of the central organizers of that plot had all been on the Eastern Front at some point and they were like, we're going to fucking lose.

Yeah, we're going to lose and also when you're at that level of command where you're like sitting with Hitler and the bunker, you know, not only are we going to lose, but like, oh shit, there's going to be hell to pay for the shit that we did. And we're all in this bunker with Hitler. This is coming down on us. There is going to be hell to pay. Oh no, but isn't the consequences of my actions? Yeah, yeah. Speaking of the consequences of my actions, if you buy these products and services,

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And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we are back. So, you know, people I think as we're repeatedly getting onto here are complicated and so are genocides. And we're never talking about a single reason. You know, again, in every genocide, there's probably, there's individual people whose motivations are very simple.

And can be as simple as like, I'm just a piece of shit, you know, those guys like Oscar Duralwanger, like these guys exist, right? There's people who just suck ass, like comprehensively, and that's why they're on board. But you can't actually do a whole genocide with just those people. No, you need the, you need the whole banality of you to back you up. Exactly, exactly. And that's the thing, like I think people misinterpret that sometimes is like being entirely focused on like guys like Eichmann, who are these like bureaucrats, but like part of it is that motivations for genocide can be banal. They're not, everyone was radicalized to think that the Jews were this like titanic threat. It's like, no, they were like, they participated in the Holocaust for pretty banal reasons in a lot of cases. Yeah. And there's a lot of attempting to make things palatable for people. Like, a good example, like the very beginning stages of the Holocaust is like, well, you know, before they started death camps, they're killing the mentally ill, the disabled. And that was to, you know, that we don't hate these people, but, you know, they're, you know, evolutionary dead ends. They're hurting everybody. This is better for them. Yeah. You know, and you see a good parallel of that, in my opinion, in the peak of the eliminationist rhetoric that we're seeing in the United States right now is the framing of trans identity is mental illness.

Yes. So you, well, you want to cure mental illness, right? Like, why wouldn't you want to do that? Yeah. So you have states like Florida, or I believe Texas and a few others who are forcing detransition on people in order to cure them. And it's, I think it's, it's both that they are talking about forcing detransition because these people need to be cured, but they're also talking about their ability that they're spreading it, right? Yes. And that justifies, could be used to justify elimination in the same way that like the Nazis talked about the Jews and how like you can't let people who are just like a quarter Jewish live because they're spreading this like there's something inherently, you know, and again, this is the high level justification for it. But like this is also, that's part of why the individuals got on board is like this, this, this rhetoric that was explained to them like, because you have to give people some kind of explanation, right?

People feel a threat from the state or they feel like that they're going to be ostracized. And also the propaganda lets them feel that their victims are somehow less human and not just that, but a threat to them, right? And you get some of this in like the correspondence of Einsatzgruppe talking about like, well, we have to kill these babies because they'll grow up into Jews will like threaten our babies and stuff. And so, you know, the killing is justified, but also it's not just that, it's that I'm getting paid to do this. This is my job. This is keeping me away from a more dangerous chunk of the front. Or maybe I'll get a promotion from the party if I'm like doing it, you know, this other role in like the Holocaust or something. If I can effectively move all these people on these trains, you know, it's almost best to look at the willingness of members of a population to participate or allow genocide to occur with their consent as like the weakening of an immune system. Like there's certain individual barriers and people that make them unwilling to support something like this. And you don't just like flip a switch over time, but you you weaken barriers and you get them to like, well, you know, you're not saying yes to massacring all these people, but like, let's get them out of our community.

Let's get them out of our schools. Let's shut down their ability to operate clinics. Let's do and like the every kind of new incentive weakens more barriers. And again, things get, you know, it's like we just talked about Stoffenberg high level Nazi and he was deeply anti-Semitic. He believed in the Nuremberg laws. He didn't see anything wrong with them. His main problem is he didn't he thought killing them was too far. But once you've gotten to that point, what what barrier is there? Like you've already you've already acquiesced to camps to Aryanization to force deportation. Like really how far of a jump is it for most people and for him? I mean, he didn't attempt to kill Hitler because of the Holocaust. No. So like for for people like him, who I fully believe would be and are generally the vast majority of people that are the, you know, the state actors of any kind of genocidal power, whether it be the Ottoman Empire, Nazi Germany, the United States, USSR, whoever.

The vast majority of people will talk themselves into accepting a certain amount of this. Yeah, they directly have their hands in or they can directly see and whatever happens beyond what they see. And that's somebody else's problem. I can't speak of it. Yeah. They'll talk themselves into becoming palatable because much like, you know, Reserve Police Battalion 101. This is a salary, this is a pension I can take care of my family. So I mean, you know, people are able to compartmentalize of why they need to be this, you know, horribly murderous bureaucrat. Because well, I'm just filing papers. My hands aren't bloody. Yeah. And this is I think why I have been as of, I think most people who participated in a lot of protests, very critical about the value of protest in a lot of situations. But when it comes to stuff like the don't say gay bill, when it comes to stuff like, like, OK, folks are saying some really sketchy elimination of stuff about trans people, we should get as many fucking people out in the street. And a part of the value of that is making not the most you're not going to change anybody's mind of like the fucking Ron DeSantis level. But there's a lot of people who are more on the edge and you're not going to make them into suddenly nice or woke people. But you can convince them like, oh, if things get worse and more is demanded of me against this population, there's a lot of folks who are going to want my fucking head.

You know, and there's a value in, you know, like it's like Paul Gosar is a fucking white nationalist. You're never going to change his mind. He's a psycho. Yeah. And we both have in the past and will in the future have laughed at things like polite society and things like that. But when you make a guy like that feel so deeply unwelcome and any open space because if his rhetoric is obscene, it simply won't happen that much anymore. Yeah. Like these ideas are allowed to propagate like you've shown and talked about before on your show where they use the guys of freedom of speech to spread hate. They don't care about freedom of speech. They care about spreading hate. Yep. That's it.

Yeah. So, yeah, I think what's important about looking at it all this way and the way that we've been talking about is that when you think about when you think about kind of getting people able to commit to participate to allow genocide. As, as in this more fluid way, it frames the willingness to engage in mass killing as more fragile than people tend to think it is, which is important. This is why strident sudden opposition in the moment can delay or prevent acts of genocide. As Raul Wallenberg stopped a shitload of people from getting deported from Budapest on fucking trains because he would wave papers in their face and yell bureaucratically at Nazi soldiers and it made them think they'd get in trouble, right? And that saved thousands of lives. Yeah, I mean, look at the safety community in Nanking. Yeah, exactly.

Like headed by a literal Nazi who pointed out that, like, I'll fucking contact the consulate of Nazi Germany if you hurt anybody under my command, like anybody under my protection. And that wall of, like, I might get in trouble is what stopped Japanese soldiers from, like, they possibly saved over 200,000 people. And the only thing that saved them was in force of arms, though that is important when a genocide is unfolding. Because once it started, you can't prevent it. You have to stop it. But in the prevention stage, the thing that stops people from the murder is this might blow up in my fucking face. Exactly, exactly. And again, that's the uplifting part of this, is that, like, you can stop this.

And it's about, like, what we're talking about when a guy like Wallenberg shows up or that fucking Nazi in Nanking, they are disrupting and reordering the hierarchy of kind of needs and fears and the head of the individuals who were previously willing to undergo genocide. And they're deciding in that moment, this is not safe. This is not a good idea. This is not beneficial in this moment. Again, you're not deradicalizing them, but you don't always need to, right? And yeah, it's, honestly, I think a lot about, like, the way doctors can talk about suicide sometimes where it's like, well, there are, and this is not everyone who participates in a genocide, but, like, there are moments where they're willing to,

especially in a case like Rwanda and other moments where they wouldn't be willing to. And if you can disrupt someone in the moment they're willing to, they won't do it again necessarily. That's maybe worth thinking about. Yeah. The prevention is real tricky. I mean, it's something that even people in the field of genocide studies still don't completely agree on. Of course not. Like, famously, the guy, one of the people that runs Doctors Without Borders said,

like, you can't stop a fucking genocide with doctors, effectively saying that once it begins, the only thing you can do is kill the perpetrators until it stops, which I don't disagree with. I don't disagree. I'm not, I'm certainly not going to argue with that statement. No. But obviously, like, of course, there's no prevention. Like, the key is prevention. Like, yeah, it's great that you can, you know, the collective forces of the allies stop the Holocaust from happening,

or from being complete. But the goal is to stop it from getting that far. Boy, it got pretty far. Yeah. Yeah. It was not a speedy, not a speedy intervention, you wouldn't say. No. And they certainly didn't even intervene to stop the Holocaust.

Honestly, it was the fucking international equivalent of stacking dudes outside the door in a fucking classroom. Well, there's a, like, it took way longer than it should have. We can talk about boat loads of Jewish people being sent away from the shores of the United States during the Holocaust, because the administration didn't want to seem sympathetic towards the Jews as they were trying to get support built up to enter the war. Like, all sorts of fucked up shit. Really, even the successful genocides that have been ended via military action were never, that military action to end them were never initiated with the exception of very, very few to actually stop a genocide. Like, obviously, World War II comes to mind, World War I and the Eastern Front.

And I would add what the YPG did in Northern Iraq, you know, during the Sinjar. Yeah. Vietnam invading Cambodia, they stumbled into a genocide saying, what the fuck is going on here? I would argue that the YPG and coalition forces stopping the genocide of the Yazidis is one of the times that it was done on purpose. And in a relatively timely manner. Yeah. Same with, you know, Yugoslavia.

Yeah. Less timely. Significantly less timely. Significantly less timely. Unfortunately, once you pull the military card, things get even worse because you have to kill people. Yeah. That's why prevention is so fucking important and it's so widely overlooked. Yeah.

And it's one of the things like I think I already said that it's very, very hard to champion genocide prevention because you're proving that something did not happen. Yeah. And people and what if you, it's a lot like how we all would really like to envision convincing really weird right-wangers that climate change is real. Because what's the worst thing that happens if I'm right? The air is cleaner? Yeah. It's nicer outside. Yeah.

You're going to crash the economy. Yeah. The worst thing that happens if we are worried about eliminationist rhetoric whenever it pops up, whether it be trans or gay people or, you know, Rohingya or Uyghurs, like what's the worst that happens if we're wrong? There wasn't a genocide. Oh no. Yeah. Sorry. People were less shitty to teenagers who were dealing with one of the things that is most difficult to deal with in our society.

Yeah. It's literally something that only has. A group of kids had a better childhood. That's the downside. Fuck. Can't have that. It's one of the things that literally only has upside. No.

And it's, I mean, it comes down to, because again, as you said, there's not broad agreement on how to prevent genocides because spoilers, we have not figured out conclusively how to stop genocide from happening. There's several going on right now. But one thing is making the people at the central top level of the genocide hierarchy, the folks pushing all of the things, the kind of genocide elites, making them scared to say shit. That's a part of it. And making the people who are potentially lower on that totem pole, who might listen to those militias or whatnot in the moment, realize that they will be wrecked if they take part in that, that there's more people who don't like that sort of shit. So they get scared and they shut the fuck up. Yes. Make racists afraid of again.

Not that it's always about racism, but like, you know, you get what I'm saying. Make bigots worried about their actions. That's why people complain like, what's the worst thing that or what could you possibly be doing to change anything if you're outing members of far right militias that protests. That's why they're covering, they're hiding themselves for a reason. Because they're worried about what's going to happen to them when people realize they're marching around where wearing a shirt that says six million wasn't enough. Yeah, yeah, make them. Yeah, exactly. And it's one of those things to get back to the script a little bit.

When we talk about how like, much you can disrupt someone's motivational hierarchy and the way in which like that can actually stop actions. There's a Robert J. Lifton sites a case of an inmate in a concentration camp who put in a request with a Nazi doctor who had a, I mean, who was a Nazi doctor in a concentration camp. Right. Right. Yeah. And he puts in this like weird request and the doctor grants it and it winds up saving this guy's life and referencing the situation Stalb argues. Apparently the inmates unusual behavior activated some motivation low in the hierarchy, politeness, correctness and responding to a request, perhaps even compassion. And this allowed him to like grant this guy's exception requests that like got him out of like the, you know, the kind of hopper to get fed into the genocide machine.

And it's like, in the same way that like what Wallenberg was doing with a lot of these Nazis who were trying to load Jews onto onto trains, he was disrupting what they were doing by activating something that was deeper programmed in them. The idea that like, yeah, if a guy who claims to be a government official comes up to you and you're a state employee and tells you to stop what you're doing because it's illegal, you kind of stop. Right. Right. Yeah. There's a book on rescuers during the Holocaust, I think it's called like the psychology of rescue. I can't remember exactly what's called. But they point out that one of the ways that many people rescued people wasn't because they had some deep seated revulsion of of Nazism or even they maybe they didn't even like Jews all that much.

Yeah. And there were things that stuck out, especially in the case of like that doctor, not that I'm calling him a rescuer. He was a literal doctor at a concentration camp. But his psychology was like, well, he put in a request as he should. I approved it. Like I'm not saving this man's life. I'm simply doing my job. Yeah. Like there was like a bureaucratic shield in front of them where they didn't see what they were doing is necessarily good or bad.

They're simply doing their job. And this is why, oh God, I forget the name of this guy, the guy who wrote Bloodlands, which is a great book about the genocide in primarily like East or in like Ukraine and Poland. We'll point out that the areas in which the Jewish communities were most thoroughly destroyed were places that had suffered what he called double state destruction, which is where like the government is destroyed. Another government came in and it was in this case, it's like the Soviets took over, they destroyed the existing government and then the Soviets were destroyed and the government structure they took. They had created was destroyed. And you saw higher percentages of like the Jewish population wiped out in those areas than you didn't say France, where the Nazis just kind of took over and tweaked the existing state structure. And part of it is because there was bureaucratic, there were levels of bureaucracy that people could hide in and that provided like kind of excuses for folks to save their lives, right? A lot of the Jews who were saved in Western Europe were saved because like some functionary was able to find a way that it wasn't technically illegal to like protect them, you know.

It's probably worth talking about propaganda at some point here because while we've been, I think, like rightfully cautioning people against over, like, over amplifying the value of eliminationist propaganda and genocide because it's all the popular culture tends to focus on. Yes. It is a factor, right? It's not a non factor of genocide. And in the context of modern fears about a new genocide, a number of folks recently have made very direct comparisons between modern right wing media and radio and radio stations in Rwanda during that genocide. This line of argument became particularly common in the wake of the Buffalo shooting in which a teen aged white supremacist killed 10 people at a grocery store in a majority black area. Because the shooter espoused the great replacement conspiracy theory, which Tucker Carlson also pushes, a lot of folks claim to causative link between the two. I will tell you right now there was none.

Tucker, the kid was radicalized elsewhere, right? Not that Tucker Carlson is not saying things that can that can influence people to participate in mass kill. Of course. I'm not saying that. But this kid, that's not where this happened from. And similarly, like Scott, Scott Strauss wrote a research paper on RTLM, which is the main radio station broadcasting at a Kigali. And it didn't, I mean, I'm not saying it didn't have an effect. It did marginally.

I mean, and I think that shows, again, what we talked about that while propaganda is real, it's not the magic bullet. So like people have this concept of RTLM as being machete radio is like a term commonly used for it. But it hardly broadcasted outside of the capital of Kigali due to geography. Rwanda has tons of mountains radio doesn't like mountains. So and not to mention like some of the worst killings took place in a southern commune which had no RTLM reception. So like similarly, these people were influenced by other means to do mass killing, not this thing that makes it easier for us to understand. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, I think when it comes to kind of the way in which this incorrect view of what happened in Rwanda is getting sort of like compared with things today. A good example would be NPR Steve Enskeep who tweeted, quote, a fact about Rwanda's genocide has always struck with me. The ruling party caused much of the killing by going on the radio and telling ethnic Hutus that ethnic Tutsis must be killed along with Hutus who disapproved. Many people listened and dismembered their neighbors. For a brief overview of the Rwanda, we're getting in all of this, but let's give it over what happened there. So Rwanda was a Belgian colony for a long time. And if you know the Belgians, they did them some genocide in the regions that they ran things. Yeah.

Now, the Tutsis were used as their model natives, right, and favored over the Hutu. This is a thing that every colonizing power does absolutely everywhere. And it's caused a lot of anger between the Hutus and the Tutsis who previously had not really been all that separate, right? They weren't even an ethnic group. It was a social class. Exactly. It was very fluid, a Hutu could become a Tutsi, a Tutsi could become a Hutu. Because it's easier for them as the colonizers, they solidify this and part of what they do is they put out a system of racial IDs,

which further informalize this division. Now, this does support one of Dr. Stanton's 10 stages of genocide, but it also interestingly makes the point that stages don't all need to be purposefully incited in order to drive people towards a genocide, because the Belgians are just doing this because they're lazy. And this makes it easier to run a colony. But it does help, and this is a big part of why the genocide happens, and it's part of why they're able to know who's a Hutu and who's a Tutsi. Well, because we have fucking carts, you know? Yep.

Then you were just talking about propaganda. That propaganda takes over, and then over generations, it becomes real. The ethnic divide, it doesn't matter if it's real or fake. It's perceived as being real. Therefore, it's real. Now, in any case, in 1994, following the assassination of the president during a very ugly civil war, Hutu government and military officials orchestrated a three-month orgy of racial violence, culminating in the massacre of more than 500,000 people.

In the aftermath of the killings, a lot focused on the broadcasts of specific radio stations, notably RTLM, and how announcers referred to Tutsi as Inyesi, which means cockroach, and advised listeners to hunt them down and massacre them. There were cases where violence was clearly caused by radio broadcasts. On April 12th, a broadcaster claimed armed Tutsi were at an Islamic center in Kigali. A day later, a mob stormed the mosque and killed hundreds of people. That same day, the announcer came back on the air and urged people to exterminate Tutsi and stop them from taking power, so certainly not claiming that the radio had no influence on what was happening.

Oh, of course not. Now, there's a reason why they were all convicted of genocide. Yes. Journalists and scholars seized on this as an explanation for the nightmarish slaughter, which seemed kind of inexplicable otherwise. Unfortunately, this led to descriptions of events that sounded more than a little fucking racist. And I'm going to quote Strauss here. Obviously, Strauss isn't the one being the racist, but he's quoting other peoples how they interpreted this.

I believe Daryl Lee is who he's quoting. Parts. Yeah, I think one of them. But yeah. Writing in the preface to a seminal study, for example, a UN investigator claimed that Rwandan media were the vector by which the poison of racist propaganda is spread. Similarly, if Melbourne claims, in order to commit genocide, it is necessary to define the victim as being outside human existence, vermin and subhuman.

In Rwandan, the propaganda campaign against the minority Tutsis was relentless in its incitement to ethnic hatred and violence. Another observer, a journalist asserts, when the radio said it was time to kill the people opposed to the government, the masses slid off a dark edge into insanity. The UN investigator quoted above similarly concluded that the poison of radio propaganda is all the more effective because it is said, the Rwandan peasant has a radio culture of holding a transistor up to his ear in one hand and holding a machete in the other, waiting for orders emitted by RTLM. That's pretty racist. Yeah, it reduces them to like a murdering automaton.

Exactly. And what a lot of people are missing when you, like when you read passages like that and that one about the machete in one hand radio, that's not Daryl Lee, that's someone else. But one of the things that they're leaving out is RTLM only started about six months before the genocide. Yeah, it was not, this was not like deeply rooted into their culture. No, there's no radio. Half of Rwanda, I believe, has no radio signal at all. It is worth noting that like this is a very centralized state.

It had been centralized under the Belgians. Rwanda is still quite centralized today and like that's not a non-factor and stuff, but like it is not this that people are not just like, oh, radio said to murder, time to go murder. I guess this is why I'm doing it. It's very racist. It takes away everything. Yeah. And it's even, it's worse because it also allows you to couch this and like, well, they're illiterate and, you know,

they did have a high illiterate population, but they're illiterate and therefore they're not as intelligent as I, enlightened person from the outside. That's why this, when this radio tells me to go man a checkpoint with a machete and kill everybody, I'm simply going to do it. There's this thing, we had these episodes on General Buttnaked and the Liberian Civil War recently. And, you know, I had to make a point of because so much of what happens is so lurid and it gets reported. It's like, look at this, like these crazy, like witch doctor, like cannibals and stuff. Yeah. And someone accused me on Reddit of like trying to mitigate what he did by going into how it's not really any different from

Western war crimes. And it's the same thing with Rwanda. It's not like, yes, there are elements of Rwandan culture that made this part of why this happened, right? And some of that is how centralized the state and government is. And you can say the same thing about Germany that had an impact on why things occurred the way that they did. There's nothing different about the centralization. They weren't like Rwandans weren't commanded by their radios to do a genocide. Any more than Germans were commanded by Hitler over the radio to do a genocide.

There was a continuum of things that were going on that made people willing to participate in this. And it's a lot more complicated than they had a radio in their ear. Oh, God, of course. I mean, not to mention that they check literally every block of Strauss's risk factor for genocide. Like they've had previous massacres. Paul Harbrym-Mia, who I believe his first name is Paul, who was president that was shot down, had since the Civil War been ceding more and more power to the Hutu power dynamic to rally power around himself because they were losing. Yeah.

So he had ceded more and more power to the incredibly far radical extreme of the Hutu power. So by the time he was dead, he had effectively already lost power. That's why one of the major overlying conspiracy theories is he was shot down by the Hutu power section. Nobody's entirely sure, but they think he was. And that is like the inciting incident of the genocide. Yes. The president's plan gets shot down. It's still a mystery as to exactly what happened.

Anyway, Strauss goes on to note that, quote, most discussions of Rwandan media affects a tribute little or no agency to listeners. The Rwandan public is often characterized as hearing a drumbeat of racist messages and directly internalizing them or as hearing orders to kill and heeding the command. Those views are consistent with stereotypes about Rwandans, namely that they obey orders blindly, that they are poorly educated and thus easily manipulated, and that they are immersed in a culture of prejudice. Now, Strauss carried out an exhaustive analysis of massacres in Rwanda, where they occurred in relation to broadcast towers in particular. He looked at the strength of those towers and where they could reach and when massacres occurred in relation to specific broadcasts. His conclusion was that the vast majority of the violence could not be explained by urges to kill from radio personalities. And then, in fact, most of the broadcast people cited as inciting things happened after most of the violence had occurred.

A follow-up investigation from another group of academics used a village-level dataset from the genocide to estimate the impact of RTLM in encouraging genocide. They attributed roughly 10% of the overall violence to the station, which is a lot! Don't get me wrong! That's a lot for a radio station to incite. And noted that these broadcasts had more of an influence on convincing militias who were organized and radicalized to kill ahead of time to go after specific targets, and then those militias would rope in civilians. Rather than, again, those folks prior to fucking radio being involved were already ready to kill. They moved into an area because a specific target was signposted by the radio and they would rope civilians in through coercion and a variety of other means that we've already talked about. So, yeah, radio and mass media, absolutely, no reasonable scholar would argue, does not play a significant role in genocide. But consistent with the research of guys like Staub and Strauss, the willingness to participate in such violence exists on a continuum. Even a most Rwandan radio-inspired massacres were committed by dudes who joined militias.

So, yeah, the article by Reinerman and Wilson I cited earlier notes of Rwanda, quote, the need for social belonging can result in a motivation for an individual to want to conform to his or her group, leading to participation in order not to stick out and to be able to remain part of the group. We liked being in our gang. We all agreed about the new activities and we helped each other out like comrades. And again, it's traumatic to partake in this kind of killing and trauma bonds people together, you know? So, even in those situations where killings can be tied to particular broadcasts, it's ignorant to blame the propaganda in the vacuum, just as it's kind of ignorant to blame the propaganda Tucker Carlson spits out for the Buffalo shooting. Tucker is allowed to do what he does because people listen and those people were conditioned to listen by folks other than Tucker, generations of right-wing media, and also family and friends, right? And I think that he's able to get up there and spread great replacement bullshit is the end part of a continuation of propaganda and hatred that you could pull right back to the Civil War if you want to go back far enough, you know? Which doesn't mitigate Tucker's complicity in it at all, but he's not generating it, you know? He's not generating it. He's a stage in a long procession.

I think someone pointed out that he might be one of the first extremists that was radicalized by his own audience. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a big factor because he's doing it in part because it gets him to views because it gets people to listen, right? And that's the same thing that happens with a lot of people who get radicalized online, right? When we talk about the way like 4chan and 8chan work where like people come into it like joking about this stuff and over time radicalize each other into supporting the literal actions. So there's no such thing as ironic racism? No, there's no ironic racism and there's no lone wolves. People are radicalized for violence in communities and by communities. It's shared jokes. It's shared lingo. It's a desire for acceptance. It's a variety of different things that like push people here. Now, of course, again, obedience to authority can be one of these things, but it's authority doesn't always mean like a fewer. Sometimes it's the authority of like the kind of group consensus about what's cool, you know, about what's funny, about what's good.

Obviously, like one of the things that gets talked about that got, and this is something that like I think is maybe a little more debatable when we talk about like the role of authority in genocide is the Milgram experiment, right? This gets talked about a lot. And in short, the Milgram experiment consisted of, I think he did in what, the 70s? I think it may have been earlier than that. I think it may have. I think it's because these went on for a while. But the experiment consisted of experimenters, because Milgram was trying to study like why do people, like he was looking at the just following orders excuse that a lot of Nazis made and being like, well, is that the case? And basically, he would have a student deliver electric shocks to a patient who was actually an actor, but the student who was the test subject thought that they were really shocking the person. And like a dude with a clipboard would tell them to periodically increase the voltage until it got up to a level that was noted as being potentially lethal. And the people who were delivering the shocks, some of them would cry, a lot of them would argue they were generally all pretty unhappy, but most would deliver the shocks when ordered to do so by an authority figure.

Stoub writes, quote, Milgram suggested that people can enter an agentic mode in which they relinquish individual responsibility and act as agents of authority. While obedience is an important force, it is not the true motive for mass killing or genocide. The motivation to obey comes from a desire to follow a leader, to be a good member of a group, to show respect for authority. Those who willingly accept the authority of leaders are likely to have also accepted their views and ideology, guided by shared cultural dispositions, the shared experience of difficult life conditions, shared motivations that result from them, and shared inclinations for ways to satisfy motives people join rather than simply obey out of fear or respect. We must consider not only how those in authority gain obedience, but how the motivations of the whole group evolve. Milgram's dramatic demonstration of the power of authority, although of great importance, may have slowed the development of a psychology of genocide as others came to view obedience as the main source of human destructiveness. Yeah, I mean, it's always interesting, especially because one of the main points, I believe, of that experiment was that they were told repeatedly they could quit whenever they want.

Yes. And the person in the room with them, I believe, could only say, you must continue the experiment. Yeah. But like, and that, of course, directly inspired the writing of ordinary men and amongst other things. Yeah. And it definitely allows the dispersion of personal responsibility if you believe you're big of a power of a bigger structure. And another thing I think is key is dispersion of your own personal responsibility into a structure you believe is impugn. Yeah.

Like, it's not going to be held accountable for anything that it does. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, again, like so, and Stab's not saying like this isn't a factor or like the Milgram experiment doesn't say anything useful about genocide. It's the kind of boiling it all up. People want to say like one thing, right? And it isn't. And it's like, and also just like the fact that people are like following authority isn't just as simple as like they're following orders.

But like they are they are their motivation is a desire to be in a power structure underneath an authority and they accept the views and the values of that authority, right? Which is more complicated than just thus just I will follow orders, you know. There's and this is an area in which like the authoritarian culture of Germany prior to the Nazi rise of power affected the willingness of people to participate in the the instrument of genocide. Yeah. It's cool. And I think it is. It's important to have a more complicated understanding of like what can motivate people to this than just I do whatever the leader tells me. Because that's not where genocide start all genocide starts with the willingness of human beings to partake in the act itself, right? Like that is or if not start because it may be wrong to like prescribe it that way, but that you can't have a genocide without the willingness of the of the people of people to participate, not just to participate,

but to welcome or at least not like discourage the people doing the participation, right? Like folks like it's it's never it's never one thing like societies are more complicated than that and genocides are accomplished by societies, right? They're not accomplished by dudes who suck. Yeah. And to be completely clear, we're not saying that like genocides occur because of like the marginalized targeted out group is not resisting hard enough. It's lay people that could escape this. No problem. It's this. It's the slow incoming tide that you're fine with.

Like, well, like to be like stereotypically, there's a famous poem about this, you know, it's it's one like, well, you know, this lawn, Florida isn't really a big deal. I don't live in Florida. Well, millions of fucking people do. Yeah. Yeah. The idea that like, haha, well, this is what the right gets, you know, this bad thing happening in Florida because they wouldn't vote against us. No, no, no. This is a problem. And it's the same people who are dumb enough to believe that this isn't going to go nationwide.

After a while are the the most naive motherfuckers I've ever heard of. And this is a deeper naivety than just that. I would extend it to people who say, oh, well, it's not it's not our business. Like, I don't like I'm not going to. I can dismiss the mass killings of protesters in Syria because that's over there, you know. Oh, now suddenly, millions of refugees have flooded Europe and it's reignited a far right. And Victor Orban has seized and centralized and into democratic functional democracy in Hungary. And now the Republicans are holding a CPAC there talking about how to do the same here.

Like, but like every like, I forgot that they had CPAC in Hungary. Yeah, they sure did. You you it's all like you you can't you can't abrogate your responsibility to to be a part of the human race. And that includes being like, well, this is like that that's what actual like resistance to fascism is. Right. Is is like comprehensively calling out bad shit is bad. Like that's not not not being like, well, it's in Florida. You know, right?

Well, it's in Texas. LLL stupid south. Can't believe you're doing this. South, right? Like it's it's it's taking as much offense to like acts of evil that occur far away as the ones that happen like next door. Because like everything like eventually it will. It's the same with like climate change. Right.

It's like it's not being like, oh, well, fuck California. I live up here in Washington state where climate change will never hit us or like. Right. Right. Yeah. This is the difficult thing about it. And it's and I think it's even harder for people to grasp. Yeah.

When it literally doesn't impact them at all. Yeah. There's I mean the vast majority of people in any coming or future genocide like rarely are they going to be directly impacted. If they if they don't want to be. Unless you are, of course, the out party. But like, you know, a random guy in Duluth, Minnesota, like he's not going to be impacted by this. But the hard part and the the key for prevention is realizing that if you want to prevent this from happening, it needs to be made important to the point that people who literally cannot have no role in it. Can make a role in it by stopping it.

Because obviously these things are going to impact out groups, minorities, racial, ethnic, religious or otherwise. They're not they purposefully do not have a voice that can stop this from happening. Nope. That's why they're being targeted. Yeah. So Rowan egg at Ron DeSantis is the conclusion we've made here or or Abbott Abbott could use use an egg. You know, that fucking guy give him all the good egging. Egg it out like that like that kid in Australia.

Oh, I forgot about that kid. That was nice. It was good kid. This is when we find out he did something terrible immediately afterwards. No, I think he raised a bunch of money for some nice cause. Oh, nice. People were paying attention to him. I don't know.

Hopefully someone's going to be like, please don't milkshake duck that kid for me. Well, Joe, I don't know. How do you feel at the end of this genocide? Yay or nay? I'm, you know, I'm going to be a centrist on this one. No one can say some people like genocide. Some people dislike people. Can we compromise?

Yeah, we're going to compromise to everything that they've ever said. No, I mean, I got into this field because it's very important to me both in my history and, you know, in the future. It's something that's the history of these things are important. So we can stop revisionism from coming and taking place. Yeah. And also so we can help prevent it in the future. And hopefully we can make prevention something that is not like a weird thing to bring up.

No. So go out and don't commit genocide. That's the key here. Yeah. Look, there's a lot of debates as to how to prevent it, but don't do a genocide. We ask that. That's the baseline we ask of our listeners is please do not participate in an active genocide. We're lowering the bar here.

Yeah. The bar is through the floor. Unlike some of our sponsors, including the Washington State Highway Patrol. Man, fuck those guys. I used to live in Washington and they're the worst. We had a very funny one-star review of someone being like, I thought I was going to love this podcast, but then they started talking shit about the Washington State Highway Patrol. I have two, two relatives in the Highway Patrol and they're both like wonderful men who are

not violent at all. I would really like to believe that they listened to like the behind the police series. Yeah. This sounds fun. Yeah. Up until they were totally down with shitting on every other police department until we got to the one their cousin was in. Yeah.

Yeah. Fuck the St. Louis cow. Wait a second. We're the good ones. Yeah. The bow tie wear and fucks. My, my cousins in the Washington State Highway Patrol aren't violent at all. T-shirt is bringing up a lot of questions answered by my shirt.

I'm not allowed around their families anymore. They're not allowed outside their house. It's weird. Anyway, Joe, you got any pluggables? Yeah. Have you ever done a podcast before this? Have I? Happened in the world?

I'm the host of the Lines Live by Donkeys podcast. Holy shit. We talked about fuck ups in military history. We also talk extensively about genocide specifically. That's good. We've talked about Nanking. We've talked about the Namibian genocide. We talked for seven hours about the Cambodian genocide.

I promise it's not all that heavy. We do other stuff too. No, if you want that, then you're going to have to go to the genocide cast. With Rock and Robbie and the butt, John Wilson. It's a drive time radio show. I was doing a radio joke, but I didn't think it out very well. A morning zoo crew. A morning zoo crew that's just about shit.

Well, it's six in the morning. We got a lot of traffic blacked up on the I-5. You know what else got backed up on a highway? Shit. Good stuff. All right, episode's over. Go home. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com

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