American Tribalism: Road to Rwanda Redux

by @zizii2

I have been spooked these last 10 days by the insanity that erupted here in the US since the Paris terrorist attacks. I wanted to give words to my thoughts. But I froze. Then I rediscovered this piece I began writing in April 2013, but had abandoned for being too alarmist! If only I knew….

Here is the piece completed with a few edits…

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Rwanda: A Haunting Lesson

April 6 marked the (21st) anniversary of the launch of the genocidal nightmare in the central African country of Rwanda that ended 100 days later with 800,000 people dead, and a nation scarred deeply. That was 11.4% of the total population of 7 million. Nearly three-quarters of those massacred were Tutsis who comprised 14% of the entire population.

The word “anniversary” seems inappropriate because although it is technically a neutral term it still invokes positive associations and anticipation. No one should anticipate a genocide nor look forward to marking milestones in its aftermath. Yet mark, we must. The lessons are not simply framed in dog-eared history tomes or award winning films about a bygone tragedy. The lessons are here. With us. Today.

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In societies wracked by mass economic, social and political faultlines the signs are always there for a Rwanda Redux, or a Srebrenica. Hate Radio. Divide and conquer. Nihilism. Opportunistic politicians and cultural loudmouths. Group resentment. Grievance. Silence and apathy from the majority population. Now, all of these do not a genocide trigger. But they exist to be manipulated if conditions ripen.

“The Rwandan genocide resulted from the conscious choice of the elite to promote hatred and fear to keep itself in power. This small, privileged group first set the majority against the minority to counter a growing political opposition within Rwanda. Then, faced with RPF success on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, these few power holders transformed the strategy of ethnic division into genocide. They believed that the extermination campaign would reinstate the solidarity of the Hutu under their leadership and help them win the war, or at least improve their chances of negotiating a favorable peace. They seized control of the state and used its authority to carry out the massacre. (UnitedHumanRights.Org)”

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The images many of us remember from Rwanda in 1994 are the International News montages of decapitated bodies loaded onto construction trucks, machete-wielding “tribesmen” chanting death to their enemies, in-between commentary from western Reporters. To our glazed eyes, all we heard were “Hutu”, “Tutsi” “tribal conflict”, “United Nations”, “evacuating Westerners”.

What we never fathomed was how eerily familiar the political soundtrack in the run up to that horror would become for us here in the US two decades later.  Sure, the United States and 1994 Rwanda are structurally and culturally different. We like to think the former possesses more resilient political institutions and robust public spaces for exercising dissenting opinion, than the latter. The point here is not whether the fear mongering being spewed by politicians and radio shock jocks will lead to Americans hacking each other down with machetes. It is about the capacity for unfiltered HATE to saturate the public sphere without consequence for the peddlers, to the point of being rewarded with political ascendancy. We naively thought those things belonged elsewhere or in history books.

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HISTORY IS THE PRESENT

What caused the Rwandan genocide? The short-form media narrative was that the conflict began in 1992 after the Rwandan President Habyarimana, was killed in a plane crash, alleged to have been shot down by Tutsi Rebel forces RPF (Frontiere Patriotic Rwandais – Rwandan Patriotic Front)

“Cold blood, with a shot of motivating fear, was what the planners wanted: the Interahamwe weren’t fuelled by drink, drugs or mindless violence, but by fanatic dedication to a political cause. (PPU.Org)

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This “fear” got normalized. Not only normalized, but became the ONLY permissible form of public discourse. Ordinary people began to doubt their own social and moral compass and ask: “Who is my neighbor?” “Who is my brother/sister?” Hatred for the “other” jumped the realm of abstraction and became the filter for making sense of EVERYTHING PERSONAL. “What happened to the chickens in my coop? The enemy did it.”

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If one had any doubt about whether such thought was rational. The public airwaves reinforced the irrational. The sluice gates were opened wide for anyone to act out their baser instincts uninhibited. The mob ruled. Machetes, guns, snitching on a longtime neighbor to the rulers of the day became the daily arsenal for survival.

In reality, very few of those who participated in the orgy of massacres saw any personal benefit, such as a political appointment, business deal, or career advancement. Yet they partook by acts of commission or omission. Within a gory 100 days, hacking off neighbors and family members’ limbs and heads was the new norm.

Two Media stations were at the heart of the propaganda – Radio Rwanda and Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM)
From late October 1993, the RTLM repeatedly broadcast themes developed by the extremist written press, underlining the inherent differences between Hutu and Tutsi, the foreign origin of Tutsi, the disproportionate share of Tutsi wealth and power, and the horrors of past Tutsi rule. The RTLM also repeatedly stressed the need to be alert to Tutsi plots and possible attacks. It warned Hutu to prepare to “defend” themselves against the Tutsi. After April 6, 1994, authorities used the RTLM and Radio Rwanda to spur and direct killings, specifically in areas where the killings were initially resisted. Both radio stations were used to incite and mobilize populations, followed by specific directions for carrying out the killings.

The RTLM had used terms such as inyenzi (“cockroach” in Kinyarwandan) and Tutsi interchangeably with others referring to the RPF combatants. It warned that RPF combatants dressed in civilian clothes were mingling among the displaced people fleeing combat zones. These broadcasts gave the impression that all Tutsi were supporters of the RPF force fighting against the elected government. Women were targets of the anti-Tutsi propaganda prior to the 1994 genocide; for example, the “Ten Hutu Commandments” (1990) included four commandments that portrayed Tutsi women as tools of the Tutsi people, and as sexual weapons to weaken and ultimately destroy the Hutu men. Gender-based propaganda also included cartoons printed in newspapers depicting Tutsi women as sex objects. Examples of gender-based hate propaganda used to incite war rape included statements by perpetrators, such as, “You Tutsi women think that you are too good for us”, and “Let us see what a Tutsi woman tastes like.” (Rwanda Genocide)

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All this sounds familiar? The incessant dehumanization of groups using metaphors of “infestation,” is an old strategy from antiquity for defining the “Other” that works ALWAYS like clockwork. Why? Because it employs the metaphor of an easily abhorred domestic menace to define the “other.” It then moves from metaphor to literal naming. Vermin, Rodents, termites, cockoaches etc. need no introduction. Even the most pacifist people in society draw a line when it comes to pests. Everyone HATES them, and the immediate response is “ELIMINATE!” Bring out the Raid™, Doom,™, Terminix™ Man, Orkin™ Man. No hesitation. No gray areas.

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For demagogues that liminal response without exception, by the populace to any mention of an infestation, is music to their ears.  The target “other” is suddenly made menacingly familiar, even to the politically unengaged. Few cues are needed to prompt the desired reaction. Public decorum gets tossed out the window. War chants grow louder.

The war weary caution: “But it’s not that easy”…

The Mob: “Kill ’em all!!! in growing unison.”

The War Weary: But “this corrupts our values. There’ll be blowback.”

The Mob: “Who cares…it is either them or us!” Vermin!!!

A hundred days after the national orgy, carnage everywhere.

And when:

… Asked to use its hi-tech skills to get the génocidaire radio off the air, America replied, ‘the traditional US commitment to free speech cannot be reconciled with such a measure’, on this occasion. France, a backer of most French-speaking African governments, had been backing the genocidal government: it was one of their generals who advised the Hutus to ‘improve their image’ (hence, perhaps, the order to keep corpses out of the sight of cameras)

Participants were often given incentives, such as money or food, and some were even told they could appropriate the land of the Tutsis they killed. (BBC News)”

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To salvage our global cowardice in the aftermath, we looked furtively for redemption in the midst of horror. We latched onto the blockbuster film Hotel Rwanda and its Schindler’s List-esque portrait of Hutu hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina’s heroic acts to save over 1000 Tutsis at the Hôtel de Mille Collines. The difference in scale between the genocide and acts of kindness is the real scandalous story of how good people through INERTIA and myriad RATIONALIZATIONS, let terrible things happen to other people. And then the cycle catches up with them….

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An important film that refuses to let anyone off the hook, and brings that stark moral dilemma into clearer relief, is award-winning Haitian filmmaker, Raul Peck’s Sometimes in April (2005) . If you can, do watch the full 141 minute film (free legitimate viewing).

 

This film makes me fearful about Trumpism and the Koch-Topus in America, which is not the beginning but the unvarnished coda to decades’ long revival of “Brown-Shirt-ism.” Fascism is no longer an abstraction in this country. It is knocking down the doors of our country. It’s harbingers are ruthless, brazen, well funded, and wield unparalleled propaganda machinery. They exploited our very constitutional freedoms, to hollow out our Commonweal. Now like Pied Pipers they summon their armies of  tribal intolerance.

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AMERICAN TRIBALISM

It isn’t that we used to be better than this. The American system was built on inherent inequality. Some groups were ALWAYS excluded from the national pie & full citizenship rights — slavery, Jim Crow, Social security only passed after FDR excluded mostly minorities, farm workers, etc; Medicare pegged the eligibility age at 65 at a time when minorities had a lower lifespan.

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The only reason it seems really shocking today is that the plutocrats have decided to ditch the pretense and dismantle the COMMONWEAL wholesale, damn whoever gets screwed. A very sobering comment on Jonathan Cohn’s website on April 5, 2012 sums it up for me:

“today’s America is very different from yesterday’s: (1) we are ethnically, economically, religiously, and every otherly way a much more diverse nation, so my tribe is much less likely to be your tribe, making me less willing to pay taxes to support public benefits that most likely will go to members of another tribe, and (2) we are in an economic decline rather than an economic ascent, making me less inclined to be charitable to the less fortunate, who are likely to be members of another tribe anyway. Republicans understand this change, and they use it to their advantage.”

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But the deeper motivation for the wealthy classes to exploit Tribalism and the unleashing of the baser instincts of many people in this country, is the desire to engineer a permanently compliant electorate that gives them unquestioned control. The lesson the wealthy learned from the French Revolution, and FDR’s New Deal, is to never allow the people breathing room to foment any dissent. An astute comment I saved from RickB on Dailykos in 2012 captures WHY  conservatives are hellbent on dismantling our government

“A modern industrial nation requires a mobile workforce which is very educated (making universal public education a necessity.) This creates relatively uniform mass markets for businesses to serve (well paid consumers), it creates a work force which can operate the businesses those markets need to serve them, and the science that goes along with it creates the continual improvements required to cause the economy to continue to grow. But this requires a strong central government to coordinate the very highly specialized workers such an industrial economy requires.

Conservatives hate the continual change and diversity such an industrial economy demands, so they want to go back to the pre-1930’s model. Only that was a rural agricultural economy and a much, much smaller population. That traditional economy cannot feed today’s American population.

It doesn’t matter. The conservatives want to destroy the modern industrial and urban America and especially its culture of education, diversity and tolerance. They blame the federal government for forcing them to modernize their slow-moving mostly unchanging agricultural states (i.e the South and Midwest, as well as southern Illinois and Ohio.) The Constitution gives these small states an effective veto in the Senate.

Do you begin to see the pattern? The Republican Party has been taken over by the John Birchers and their like-minded angry people who demand an end to social changes.

…Also, this is tribal warfare to the conservatives.”

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So We either wring our hands or fight back to salvage whatever little there is left of this country. How? Stay tuned for my next post.

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A More Perfect Union…..