QUESTIONS: What Kind of People Have A Media That Treats Military Battles Like Sporting Events? What Kind of People Would Teach Their People That Killing People They Did Not Know Constituted Patriotic Work? Would Kind of People Would Celebrate & Honor Their People Killing Others? What Kind of People Would Claim Their Wars Are To Eradicate Evil, Protect Democracy, Protect the Country, That We Must Kill Those KIllers Before They Try To Kill Us? What Kind of Media Would Incite Ethnic Hatred To Divide a Nation?... Only Rwanda, right?- DeNeice Kenehan With long-term hierarchical governance, Rwandans tended to respect rather than question authority. Historically, Hutus and Tutsis lived together in Central Africa, the region now divided into Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda. Divisions between them arose with European colonization. Belgian settlers devised a scheme to separate and distinguish the tribes from each other based on minor physical differences. Tutsis were somewhat taller, more slender, and had smaller noses. The distinctions were so slight that colonists instituted an identification system, requiring Rwandans to maintain papers so as not to confuse the groups. Initially, the Belgians bestowed benefits onto the Tutsis - offering them better education and prestigious social and political positions - in essence, making the Tutsis an upper class and the Hutus a lower class. But when Tutsis agitated for independence, Belgians shifted loyalties, replacing the Tutsi chiefs with Hutus, who were the majority group. Hutu leaders seized the opportunity and, in a turbulent revolution, they conquered the Tutsi rulers and took power. In the process, they killed an estimated one hundred thousand Tutsis and left several hundred thousand refugees.... Rwandans facing oppression fled, swelling the number of exiles and refugees in neighboring countries to nearly six hundred thousand by the 1980s, where some governments, particularly Ugandas, persecuted Rwandan refugees. There, a group of exiles formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) with a stated mission of ousting Habyarimana and establishing a more democratic government in Rwanda. On October 1, 1990, the RPF crossed into Rwanda and killed the customs guards at their entry point. With the aid of foreign troops from France and Zaire, the Rwandan military pushed the RPF back toward the Ugandan border and in the process, summarily killed more than five hundred thousand unarmed people, mostly for suspicion of aiding the RPF... There was one more factor: the mass media. Radio-Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM). Financed and controlled by a faction of the government, the RTLM launched its broadcast programs just after the peace treaty was signed. Led by a young intellectual and university professor, the radio station led an intense campaign to evoke passion, pride, hatred, and dedication to a murderous cause that was framed as a noble act. The narrative attacked the fundamental character of the government and Tutsi people as their evil accomplices. The Hutu Power-published bimonthly newspaper corroborated this myth, depicting Tutsis as monsters so different from Hutus that intermarriage would produce hybrid offspring - beings with two heads... If you are a cockroach, you must be killed. The media called the Hutu people the true Rwandans who had inherited the integrity, the truth and stood for the rejection of inequality, of the lie and praised the heroes who worked, a euphemism for murder. They honored the soldier workers with special medals and celebratory parties, coming home from the massacre in the church to a welcome that was the most terrific celebration... The media cheered on their imagined team and detailed battles as if keeping score at a sporting events. Broadcasters portrayed the genocide as a grand cause, the eradication of evil...The cause contained four righteous ends: righting injustice through revenge and destruction, asserting self-defense, instilling a majoritarian democracy, and protecting their country. With this crusade, Hutus could feel that the savage deeds before them were a means to a good end. Journalists asserted that theirs was a government for the entire country, not for political parties representing feudal-monarchists. Through the genocide, they would maintain democracy and prevent a dictatorship, they argued. Through blame frames and hate frames, the media incited ethnically based resentment, fear, anger, pride and hatred - intense emotions in a combination that had not been widespread. The emotions and new cultural values guided behavior. Hutus growing fear, resentment, anger, and hatred emerged from the belief that their neighboring Tutsis were evil, were plotting genocide, and must be preemptively exterminated. - Maria Armoudian, Excerpt From Kill the Messenger: The Medias Role in the Fate of the World @ truth-out.org/news/item/24034-hate-as-a-contagion-the-role-of-media-in-the-rwandan-genocide Read more about Social Dominance Theory, Racial Hierarchy, Authoritarianism , the Authoritarian Personality @ Wikipedia Thx, David Noyes
Posted on: Sat, 31 May 2014 15:37:29 +0000
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