Hate Radio (2011)

https://rwandanstories.org/genocide/hate_radio.html

141 140 1 year ago

Apparently the music of Simon Bikindi was a favorite of RTLMC. After the genocide, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda indicted him. His details also make interesting reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Bikindi

dav_Oz• 1 year ago

An interesting read on that topic an nyt-article from 2002 "killer songs"

https://archive.ph/fy9SC

copx• 1 year ago

Something more people should know about the Rwandan genocide is that the Tutsi were not innocent victims but had previously committed genocide themselves - against the Hutu [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiza].

The hate of the Hutu was not artificially created by some "extremists" with a radio station, but was and is instead the result of the long and bloody history between these two peoples where neither side can claim to be the innocent victim.

dyauspitr3• 1 year ago

The dynamic here is the Tutsi were considered superior (taller, thinner noses, lighter skin) by the colonizers and made up most of the ruling class during and after colonialism. Pre-colonization these groups were genuinely fluid. The genocide was essentially an uprising.

mike-the-mikado• 1 year ago

Rwanda was under German, then a Belgian rule. I don't believe Britain was involved.

at-w• 1 year ago

Rwanda was never colonized by the British.

lurk23• 1 year ago

Pre-colonization these groups were genuinely fluid.

Where did you read this? I’ve seen many people make this claim but I’ve never seen any evidence that it’s true. The only source I have found for it is Philip Gourevitch’s book “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families”

I could not find the actual page where this claim is ostensibly made, just an unsourced claim that the identity cards made such mobility impossible. A similar claim is often made about the caste system in India (which gets attributed to the British), and the scholarship there is similarly very poor.

brookst2• 1 year ago

It is very wrong to look at murdered children of one group and say they’re not innocent because their grandparents were killers.

This conflation of group and individual responsibility is at the heart of pretty much every atrocity.

lukan• 1 year ago

Indeed, but it seems widespread.

Even the trial against a musician who incited violence argues in that direction.

"In addition to other evidence, the prosecution cited a song celebrating the abolition of monarchy and the regaining of independence from 1959 to 1961: a Rwandan expert in the trial later expounded that the latter song could not have been addressed to the Rwandan nation as a whole, because the Tutsis were associated with the Rwandan monarchy and colonial regime, and that it was impossible to hate the monarchy without hating the Tutsis"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Bikindi#Details

eviks• 1 year ago

What % of the killed Tutsi in Rwanda did themselves kill Hutus as part of the government/army of another country two decades prior?

energy1233• 1 year ago

You're buying into a genocidal mindset of collectivizing an entire ethnic group and assigning collective blame.

skrebbel3• 1 year ago

I vouched and upvoted your comment to counter the many downvotes. Like other respondents, I strongly disagree with your conclusion that "neither side can claim to be the innocent victim", but I think the rest is valid context. The reason many Hutus were so easily swayed was because they were afraid of Tutsis effectively doing the same to them, and there was historical precedent of just that.

This is exactly the same story as why Croatians were trying to de-Serb their villages and vice versa. Fear of what the other would do made them do the same, first (or even worse). See also the comment about "Accusation in a mirror" further up.

People often have the idea that the Rwandan genocide was some people spontaneously rising up and killing their neighbours with farming equipment because someone on the radio told them to. You're right that it was more complicated than that.

Still doesn't mean murder victims aren't victims though. They totally are, and they can't be blamed for actions done by other people vaguely similar to them.

throwanda• 1 year ago

Not constrained to Rwanda, the late '80s and early '90s saw the (re-)emergence of this flavor of broadcasting in many places around the world - especially in the US on the AM bands.

Fortunately, the conditions weren't present in the US to speedrun to civil war and genocide. Still, I grew up in Limbaugh-lovin' country during those years and was exposed to this... stuff... for more hours of the day than I care to think about. (In public school! Literally, teachers having Rush and assorted fellow-travellers on in the background while we did our classwork.)

I do not believe for a second that the fact it went different in the US wasn't for lack of trying. The trying hasn't even stopped.

PaulHoule5• 1 year ago

I never was a regular listener to Rush but if I were driving from Pt A to Pt B in rural America I might find the only thing Icould find reliably from noon to 2pm was an AM radio station that had The Rush Limbaugh Show. I tuned in deliberately on Jan 7, 2021, just a few days before Rush passed away, and found he was shocked and aghast at what had happened to the day before... but did not draw the connection to how the culture he created contributed to it.

Korzybski and Van Vogt warned us of "A=A" thinking but today I'm aghast at thinking that can best be described as ∀x,y: x=y. Back in the 1960s you'd expect an article in a Trotskyite newspaper to start with "The Red Sox beat the Yankees" and to end with "... therefore we need a socialist revolution." Today teen girls read Man's Search For Meaning because they think their school is like a concentration camp, politicians of all stripes [1] are accused of being fascists, and people delude themselves that adding a stripe to a flag will magically transform people into allies. Glomming together all social causes into one big ball has a devastating effect on popular support

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-social-issues-civil-rights-bac...

across all demographics.

I disagreed with Rush about most things and thought he had a harmful effect on the nation and the world but I'd never accuse him of advocating genocide. No, being against universal healthcare isn't the same thing as genocide and if you're interested in winning elections you'd be better off spraying random voters with pepper spray than talking this way.

[1] sci-fi writer Charlie Stross made the accusation against Keir Starmer

brookst2• 1 year ago

It’s going too far to say Rush advocated genocide, but he absolutely preached that all who opposed him were not just wrong but evil, that ends justify means, that people with different views are subhuman.

It’s the age-old populist / proto-fascist playbook. He didn’t attempt to convince on the merits, but on the argument that those who disagree aren’t real people.

owlninja• 1 year ago

I think you mean 2021 by the way.

dhosek• 1 year ago

He may not have advocated for genocide, but he did a lot to create a polarized political environment where anyone to his left was at best ridiculed and more often demonized. His general rhetorical strategy was to find some extreme example of something on the left, exaggerate it and then attribute his distorted version to everyone to his left. It made him a lot of money and led the way to Fox News which took it to even greater extremes.

RajT88• 1 year ago

I tuned in deliberately on Jan 7, 2021, just a few days before Rush passed away, and found he was shocked and aghast at what had happened to the day before... but did not draw the connection to how the culture he created contributed to it.

That's kind of his thing. He's complained about drug addicts and perverts, but yet he was a prescription junkie, and also got caught flying to the Dominican Republic with a bunch of Viagra and condoms in his suitcase.

Even if he was acutely aware of the connection between his rhetoric and Jan. 6 events, it would probably bother him not at all and he'd refuse to acknowledge it unless forced to face it (like with his drug woes).

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 1 year ago

I'd never accuse him of advocating genocide

I heard he celebrated AIDS deaths on air, which is disgusting behavior

keybored10• 1 year ago

No, being against universal healthcare isn't the same thing as genocide and if you're interested in winning elections you'd be better off spraying random voters with pepper spray than talking this way.

How popular is universal healthcare in America?

CalChris3• 1 year ago

speedrun to civil war

Well there was the OKC Federal Building bombing. Timothy McVeigh was a dedicated dittohead.

bloomingeek2• 1 year ago

Indeed! Okie here, Rush, Newt and Rove absolutely destroyed the Republican party. With their lies and hatred of anyone not like them, they duped an entire generation.

energy1233• 1 year ago

What many in the US don't have conceptual familiarity with is pre-genocidal speech. Historically and empirically, the actual call to violence only happens at the end of a long period of collectivizing dehumanization via media, when people are already pliable for it. In my view, those causal antecedents to genocide should be illegal due to their historically proven connection to genocide. This speech is more dangerous and leads to more dead bodies than other types of speech which are already illegal, like isolated calls to individual violence or libel.

tehjoker2• 1 year ago

You make some good points but the problem is these efforts are usually bankrolled by well connected right wingers, so the state will not enforce the law unless there has effectively been a socialist revolution that deprives the right of power and money almost completely.

ryeats2• 1 year ago

This is a good example of hate speech. You are dehumanizing people of the US saying they don't conceptual understand morality and can't decide for themselves what is morally wrong or right.

prosody• 1 year ago

When I read about the leak of the new Meta internal guidance for content moderation[1], my first thought was that the only things they banned were likely things that they understood to be pre-genocidal speech (eg comparisons of a group to vermin). Rules that seem kind of arbitrary to a modern western audience but which click in place if you look at propaganda that was issued during historical genocides.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-...

wat10000• 1 year ago

I wouldn’t even say it went differently, yet. So far it has only gone slower. A big chunk of the population now believes that “liberals” are Satan-worshipping baby killers thanks to decades of this propaganda.

seattle_spring• 1 year ago

especially in the US on the AM bands.

That sort of show is still alive and well in the US, it's just moved from AM to podcasts.

Yeul• 1 year ago

What saved America for a very long time is the existence of blue states and red states. Neither side actually had to really live with eachother.

This is the difference with Rwanda and Yugoslavia. The people you hate lived next door.

joshuanapoli• 1 year ago

I'm not sure that's really the case. Most states have a pretty good mix of Democrats and Republicans.

rendall2• 1 year ago

All States are various shades of purple.

mindcandy• 1 year ago

I still remember from over 20 years ago I was sitting in the kitchen talking to my grandmother. She was smoking and had some Fox News talking head on in the background. Maybe Hannity?

What I noticed what that there was a main story for the hour long program. But, it was pretty dull. Meanwhile, the host kept randomly going off into short non-sequitur diatribes. All of the non-sequiturs were depressing. They were about random stuff that made you feel just awful. Then he'd pop back to dull main story like nothing happened.

I realized the non-sequiturs were all designed to make you feel hate, fear and disgust towards liberals. The main story was just filler. The real product was a steady stream of emotional hits of hate, fear and disgust. Over and over forever. Just like puffing on her cigarettes.

That was decades ago. The hate, fear and disgust pipeline has refined a lot since then.

Decades later, the news got my father so deeply filled with hate, fear and disgust that he would randomly launch into hateful diatribes about the libs unprompted. It got bad enough that the kids had to tell Mom we weren't visiting until he got it under control. He wasn't like that at all until he retired and had more time to watch TV.

beloch• 1 year ago

It's moved beyond radio now too.

e.g. The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar was fuelled by Facebook's engagement algorithms[1].

In Rwanda, they had to create radio stations. Today, all you have to do is generate clicks for Meta.

[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

ArthurStacks• 1 year ago

Ah yes, the evil facebook, not at all caused by their terrorist activity.

dash2• 1 year ago

I think it's a shame, but revealing, that the most responded-to post about this topic brings everything back to US domestic politics.

rendall2• 1 year ago

Why shame? Most readers of HN are from the US. It's good that everyone discuss these lessons in relation to their own nations.

keybored10• 1 year ago

In a predictable turn of events American website makes topic about America.

lurk23• 1 year ago

I do not believe for a second that the fact it went different in the US wasn't for lack of trying. The trying hasn't even stopped.

What statements did Rush Limbaugh make that could be construed as instigating a genocide?

Barrin92• 1 year ago

One thing that seems underdiscussed to me is that oral culture compared to literary culture seems to have a strong impact on dissemination of hate or mass messaging. My pet theory is that the resurgence of the medium, that so much content is now again visual and audio dominated compared to textual, is responsible for a good amount of the increase in hate in recent years.

There's a one-to-many and sort of fuzzy, conspiratorial and hearsay nature to radio, podcasting, preaching, that you don't have in a literary context. It's the ease of transmission and ephemerality of it that enables so much uncritical engagement.

analog31• 1 year ago

One thing about the radio is that it can be on while you're doing other things, if those things don't require much concentration.

bloak• 1 year ago

That's an interesting theory, but isn't it a different set of people consuming the audiovisual material? So, roughly speaking, in the past, an educated minority read The Times, while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs. Nowadays public opinion matters so various powers (often foreign powers not controlled by the local establishment) generate material designed to influence the general population, which isn't exactly literate, as you'll know if you've ever had to do jury service. Meanwhile, the educated minority continues to read The Economist or whatever (The Times is rubbish nowadays).

cogman104• 1 year ago

while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs

Perhaps not foreign affairs so much, but I'd argue in the past politics was keenly important to a large percentage of the population in the past. Particularly local politics.

The reason for that was simple, politics was a form of entertainment and local politics was both fun to talk and gossip about, more so than national politics.

What I believe has changed is the internet and broadcasting in general has changed what's entertaining. People care less about the issues and more about the presenter. National broadcasting selected for the most entertaining presenters which have the opportunity to bend political opinions to their own. The internet has opened up access to presenters which has done the same thing as national broadcasting but allows for even more extreme positions. Interest in local politics died for pretty much the same reason why local theater is dead. It's simply not as entertaining as a large budget production (generally). Sure, someone could probably make local politics interesting, but that's inherently going to have a smaller audience draw. That's why national politics is easier to talk about.

One other thing that's changed, though, is the options for presenters is now humongous. It's simply unlikely that you or your coworkers will have similar enough media diets to discuss at the water cooler. That's made everything a lot more private and isolated.

PaulHoule5• 1 year ago

Marshall McLuhan thought that Adolf Hitler played really well on the radio but would not have played well on television, people would have seen his face turn red.

It's hard to tease apart the differences between modalities. On Youtube today there are many "videos" that are good to play in the background, be it Technology Connections, Pod Save America, or Asmongold's show. Part of the experience of reading is that an individual can find things that are rare, obscure, that it doesn't have to be massy at all [1] -- in the past economics required television and radio to be massy but podcasts, in principle, are really cheap and could service obscure tastes. Another fraction is that reading itself is a filter: even in the core a lot of people like Asmongold are functionally illiterate, in a place like Rwanda you just can't reach most people through writing.

[1] read https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med..., read https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...

themgt• 1 year ago

Some related topics I find interesting to ponder in relation to the Rwandan genocide and more broadly:

Accusation in a mirror:

Accusation in a mirror is a false claim that accuses the target of something that the perpetrator is doing or intends to do. The name was used by an anonymous Rwandan propagandist in Note Relative à la Propagande d'Expansion et de Recrutement ... he instructed colleagues to "impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do". By invoking collective self-defense, propaganda is used to justify genocide, just as self-defense is a defense for individual homicide. Susan Benesch remarked that while dehumanization "makes genocide seem acceptable", accusation in a mirror makes it seem necessary.

Double-genocide or at least mass war crimes against Hutu by the RPF:

Estimates of Hutu deaths from mass violence in the 1990s are much less precise than Tutsi death figures from the Rwandan genocide due to the greater timescale and geographic spread of the killings. Researcher Alison Des Forges estimated that the RPF killed 60,000 people in war crimes in 1994 and 1995. Historian Gérard Prunier estimated that 100,000 Hutu were killed by the RPF in 1994–1995. Historian Roland Tissot argued that there were around 400,000 Hutus killed by the RPF between 1994 and 1998 (excluding disease and excess mortality), while Omar Shahabudin McDoom estimated several hundred thousand Hutu victims during the 1990s. Demographer Marijke Verpoorten guesstimates 542,000 deaths of Rwandan Hutus (about 7.5 percent of the population), with "a very large uncertainty interval", from war-related causes in the 1990s, including battle deaths and excess mortality from poor conditions in refugee camps.

Kagame, the leader of the RPF, has also had an ... interesting tenure as president, in power 25 years and most recently winning 99% of the vote:

The highest-profile opposition figure for the 2017 election was local businesswoman Diane Rwigara. Although she acknowledged that "much has improved under Kagame", Rwigara was also critical of Kagame's government, saying that "people disappear, others get killed in unexplained circumstances and nobody speaks about this because of fear". Like Ingabire in 2010, Rwigara was barred from running in the election.

Throughout Kagame's tenure as vice president and president, he has been linked with murders and disappearances of political opponents, both in Rwanda and abroad. In a 2014 report titled "Repression Across Borders", Human Rights Watch documents at least 10 cases involving attacks or threats against critics outside Rwanda since the late 1990s, citing their criticism of the Rwandan government, the RPF or Kagame

My general impression is that Rwanda has been compressed down to a simplistic morality play when the reality seems a lot more complex and in many ways more unsettling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory_(Rwanda...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Blood#Death_toll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kagame#Assassinations

msgodel• 1 year ago

I think the reality is groups of people that different just can't peacefully share a state.

SiempreViernes• 1 year ago

Finally an opinion about emacs users I can get behind! /s

brazzy• 1 year ago

What exactly do you mean with "that different"?

lostlogin2• 1 year ago

Did you read what the difference are?

There aren’t any.

madaxe_again3• 1 year ago

I find the whole premise for the situation mind-boggling. Tutsi and Hutu were basically just categories for “someone who has cattle” and “someone who does not have cattle”. One could become the other quite readily.

Then the Belgians came along, measured skulls, pronounced the Tutsis a separate (and superior) race, and the rest is… absolutely idiotic history.

thaumasiotes5• 1 year ago

Tutsi and Hutu were basically just categories for “someone who has cattle” and “someone who does not have cattle”. One could become the other quite readily.

But none of that is true.

volleyball• 1 year ago

Major, minor or imagined differences between populations being exacerbated causing them to turn against each other wasn't a byproduct of some poorly conceived policy. It was the whole point and was (and continues to be) a keystone to colonial power over faraway lands.

thaumasiotes5• 1 year ago

https://vimeo.com/107867605

gopher_space• 1 year ago

My general impression is that Rwanda has been compressed down to a simplistic morality play when the reality seems a lot more complex and in many ways more unsettling.

Visiting the Genocide Memorial in Rwanda compresses the event into a simple morality play by displaying a wall of personal pictures of the dead. Snapshots of random people at a happy moment in time, but they're all violently dead now for absolutely no reason.

childintime• 1 year ago

Accusation in a mirror

Really nice description of the Trump era, where accusations fly at the strawman in the mirror, prioritizing psychological reality over facts, (let's continue the tangent here) accepting to speak in a woke echo chamber, as a victim, while secretly being an ultradem in need of love, and having found a way of just taking it, like a man standing in the tradition where he culturally submits the woman because he can. Not love, just satisfaction of self-assertion, at the expense of the woman. She exists to make a man feel good. The Taco Man creates the banana republic in his own image. Muscle brain, a dick. A reversal of civilization.

But the accusations in the mirror also happen to precede violence. The fire only needs oxygen. The Taco Wars. F*ck.

lazyeye• 1 year ago

What?

ge96• 1 year ago

Son Reebok o son Nike Ah serai serai!

(Rhythm of the night plays)

zahlman• 1 year ago

David Rawson, the US ambassador, said that its euphemisms were open to interpretation. The US, he said, believed in freedom of speech.

This is tossed in as if to imply that shutting down the radio station would have saved lives and that the US was therefore complicit in those deaths.

I am never swayed by arguments like this. A culture that produces that kind of hatred will not be stopped by losing a channel to express it. Word of mouth spreads quickly, and actions speak even louder.

Not to mention, per the sidebar, the radio hosts were already disguising their meaning in places despite not experiencing a threat of censorship. "Talking in code" for something that has already become socially acceptable, has its own social purposes - it allows for the hateful to bond over their hatred more strongly than if they were explicit, because the "shared language" is a strong signal of in-group belonging.

exceptione6• 1 year ago

  > A culture that produces that kind of hatred will not be stopped by losing 
  > a channel to express it. Word of mouth spreads quickly,
  > and actions speak even louder.

Culture... is the thing that prevents the enacting of our bestial urges. This channel normalizes the bestiality, and so it becomes culture.

Every society have some people without a mic that are blatantly inhuman. A society becomes it when you give them a mic.

skrebbel3• 1 year ago

What does it mean to "give them the mic"? I feel like your comment makes sense in the abstract but when it gets more concrete it gets a lot fussy. Do you mean disallowing people who make nasty radio broadcasts? Jailing people who send nasty tweets to all their 10 followers?

Most people aren't "given the mic" by some benevolent all-powerful force, they just grab a mic and use it.

wegfawefgawefg7• 1 year ago

no it doesnt. you could blast "kill your own baby" on radio but 99% of people wouldnt do it. and if they did its their own fault.

you either respect the sovereignty of an individual and they are responsible for their actions, or not and if you dont then follow that to its logical conclusion. which would be that all people are not responsible for anything ever, because even the broadcaster was told to by his own life and culture, and so on and so forth until your litigating the first living goo on the planet.

joe_the_user• 1 year ago

I agree that simply stopping one propaganda outlet would have been insufficient to stem the tide of violence.

I disagree with blaming the genocide on "culture". It seems clear that this event like many others came from a nexus of interests, money, ideology and, sure, culture.

And btw, if you blame massacres on culture, you have a whole lot of cultures you can blame, given the history of mass murder and genocide around the world.

uniqueuid• 1 year ago

My experience is that it is always important to criticize free speech absolutism, especially when people behave as if it were an atemporal concept. In reality, most of the world for most of the time has had various compromises between protecting individuals and society on one hand and free speech on the other.

That said, I think your take is also empirically supported. There is this [1] very interesting study which comes to the same conclusion. It uses broadcast range of radio towers to do a quantitative analysis on the potential effects and finds few. Interestingly enough, I have seen other studies with similar designs that do show persistent effects of exposure to broadcasts, so I’m favorable to the idea that this one really is a valid null finding.

[1] https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20100423-atrauss-rtlm-radio-hat...

wegfawefgawefg7• 1 year ago

most of the world for most of time had slavery. that doesnt mean we should have slavery now. your whole first paragraph is bunk.

skrebbel3• 1 year ago

A culture that produces that kind of hatred

According to other pages on this same site, the primary motivation for the people behind RTLM (rich powerful people, incl the presidential family) to spread said hate, was fears that Tutsis would sabotage their own country in support of the invading RPF.

This is the exact same fear that made Americans put their Japanese-American countrymen into concentration camps during WWII. So to me, either you're saying that Rwandan culture in the early 90s was pretty much the same as US culture in the 1940s, or something else than culture is to blame.

Obviously the Japanese-Americans weren't mass-murdered, so it's not a fair comparison, but I'm not immediately convinced things would've been super mega different if the Japanese army had already conquered the entire US west coast and was quickly moving eastward. People would be very afraid.

Hate Radio (2011)

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