The Role of Propaganda in Genocide

There have been a number of genocides in the last 100 years.  Some we know about, some are known to historians.  Unfortunately some are downplayed because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

The world has been forced to acknowledge the Holocaust.  At least six million Jews were murdered as well as a couple of million other undesirables.  The first step in the process was to make sure that everybody knew that they were not you.

If a politician stands up and screams his hate of everybody, he gets ignore.  Since you are part of “everybody” you know his target includes you.

But if the same politician screams his hate of those people and you are not part of those people then it isn’t your problem.

This is the first step in successful propaganda.  To separate “you” from “them.”

In a recent post we talked about how the first gun control laws were targeted at blacks.  Because most of the people of power in the places where Jim Crow and Black Code  were being passed were white they knew that the laws did not apply to them.  The powers that be had created a division between the two groups that allowed people to ignore what was being done to “them”.

In war, we use propaganda to dehumanize our enemies.  This is what allows a good man to kill another man.  Sometimes the man he is attempting to kill is himself a good man.

During military trials in the era of the musket, armies would put up cloth targets to represent a group of soldiers.  We are talking of a target yards in length and 2 to 3 yards tall.

To evaluate they used a combat formation (100+ men?) that were arranged in three ranks.  On command the first row would fire a volley.  The two rows behind would march forward and the row that just fired would begin reloading. The new first row would fire.  This would continue in a continuous progression to put rounds on target.

And in most of these trials the firearms were more than capable of putting many rounds through that large target.

But in battle the results were much worse.  At the time it was believed that the stress was causing the soldiers to miss.  Today there is research that strongly suggests that many soldiers were firing to intentionally miss.

It requires propaganda to train a good man to not see another man in his sights, but instead something that isn’t really a human.  A target, the enemy.

During WWI there was an unofficial ceasefire near Christmas and the men in the trenches came out, exchanged rations, played soccer and in short celebrated being alive and it being Christmas.

Afterwards command had to move the troops to other areas because the troops had identified with their enemies to the point where they were no longer combat effective.

Unfortunately there is a step past othering that propaganda can go.  That is the process of dehumanizing the enemy/target.

In Germany the propaganda targeted Jews as non-human. They were depicted as rats, disease carriers.  All of the countries problems could be traced back to the rats.  The rats brought the economic ruin that Germany was seeing.  The rats were taking all the wealth from the country.  The rats were eating fine foods and drinking fine wines while your baby cried from hunger.

Wouldn’t it be better if we just took all the stuff the rats had collected?  It could be put to much better use by the good people of Germany.

So when the brown shirts were destroying Jewish owned businesses, when the Jews were being removed from all public offices, when the Jews were having their life savings confiscated, it was for the good of Germany.  It was just taking from the rats, not people at all.

The next Genocides took place in communist controlled countries.  Since they were good little communists the media hid the horrific results from the people of the US (and Western Europe).

In these communists countries the “rats” were those that were successful.  It was impossible for the successful to have become successful without cheating.  Bosses didn’t add anything to the value of what was produced so they were worthless parasites.

Owning land meant you were wealthy and that meant that you were cheating.  If you weren’t cheating than your neighbors would be as wealthy as you.

Of note is the fact that they took all the land from the land owners and then gave it out equally to all of the peasants.  A few years later the communists came through and took the land away from the successful farmers.  It seems that when people start at a equal point and with a level playing field, some do better than others.

The only way to have equality of outcome is to have everybody fail.

Regardless, the process of treating “them” as less than human allowed the communists to kill well over 100 million people.  The real number is unlikely to ever be known.  And they did it on the cheap.

Having to have propaganda posters that read “Remember, it is wrong to eat your children” (Unverified, I’m unable to find an image of this supposed poster) because they were being starved to death in the Holodomor is an indication of the causal evil that takes place when “they” are no longer “humans”.

The latest known Genocide took place in Rwanda.

(Take the following with a grain of salt.  I’ve read about it and done a little studying of the Rwandan Genocide but I am not an expert)

As the Europeans left africa they left a power vacuum in their place.  Because Europeans like to have nice boundaries between political entities, this vacuum was going to lead to horrible things..  Europeans used things  like rivers for boundaries.  On this side of that river is Germany and on this side is France.  Mountain ranges also worked.  Anything that can be used as a visible boundary worked.

Many societies with lower tech levels don’t use rivers as boundaries but instead claim both sides of the river.  Thus a tribe in Africa, prior to the Europeans taking over, would own a distance up and down a river on both sides.  Their neighboring tribe would own the next river over.  The boundary between the tribes was “just known” and in fact might be very loosely defined.

It didn’t make that much of a difference because there was likely intertribal raiding and fighting going on.

When the Europeans took over they said “Enough of this “just know” crap, that river is the boundary of this colony and that river over there is the other side of the colony.”

In so doing they almost always ended up with multiple tribes living in the colony and each tribe split by the river.

As long as the Europeans were there to rule with an iron fist, the natives were forced to behave in a semi-civilized way toward each other.

Add to that a level of arrogance on the part of the Europeans of “All Blacks look the same” and you suddenly have two tribes being treated the same, not always well, but the same.  And the Europeans being pretty oblivious that they were forcing cultural enemies into close proximity with each other.

While the left talks about the noble native there isn’t any such creature.  While many natives had survival skills that the Europeans didn’t have, in most cases they really were at the lowest of tech levels.

The natives of north America did not use the wheel.  They had other means of transporting goods but they didn’t use the wheel.

The history that was taught in the 1960’s and 70’s said that the natives taught the Pilgrims how to plant and tend crops.  The big one that they taught was “The Europeans were so stupid they didn’t know how to fertilize their crops.  The Indians taught them to plant corn in clumps with fish heads at the base as fertilizer.”

The fact of the matter was that the Pilgrims were pretty ignorant about being first touch colonists.  They had trained in arms.  They were expecting to arrive much further south at one of the established colonies, such as Jamestown, where they expected to hire out as armed guards and to be able to purchase goods and services in exchange for what they brought with them and their skills in arms.

Instead they landed near what is now Boston.  They were totally unprepared to do survival living.  Of course the natives had things to teach them.

This argument is sort of like telling a master cabinet maker that he now has to raise his own crops.  The man could build everything you need in your home but might have a hard time identifying the south end of a mule.

The “noble savage” was busy kidnapping his neighbors, stealing their food, attempting to gather enough food and hunt enough protean to survive.  They weren’t creating great works of civilization.  They didn’t need to.  They were violent, dirty, and short lived.

To put this in perspective, Thomas Sowell points out that the Scottish people in the same time period or a little before were just as savage, just as violent and also struggling to survive.

Digression aside, as the Europeans left Africa, turning the different countries over to the natives, they didn’t pay attention to the fact that they were turning over the country to two or more tribes that had ancient hates for each other.  Think “Hatfields vs. McCoys” of Appalachia fame.

They hated each other with such burning hate for reasons that nobody could really remember.

Add to that, they were often physically different from each other.  Tribes tended to have enough inbreeding that natives of one tribe looked different from all other tribes.

This is the set up for the Genocide of Rwanda.

The germans took control of Rwanda around 1885 and turned it over to Belgium around 1916 as part of the League of Nations.  In 1945 it transitioned into a Belgian/UN trust territory.  They were granted their independence in 1962.

The country had two primary tribes, the Tutsis and the Hutus.  They country switched from being in control of one faction to being in the control of the other faction.  Because of the tribal split, when the Hutus took control the Tutsis were able to go to neighboring Uganda where they joined with the Tutsis living in Uganda and together they attacked Rwanda.

The Tutsis wanted concessions so that they could still live in Rwanda, safely.  The Hutus were scared the Tutsis wanted to take control back.  Sort of like Democrats are scared of Republicans taking control of the country back.

This was a civil war that went on for 4 years.

During that time the Hutus were in control of the government.  They started broadcasting anti-tutsis propaganda.

Whereas the Germans called the Jews “rats”, the Hutus called the Tutsis “cockroaches”.

The government controlled radio station would broadcast this sort of propaganda with a never ending drum beat.  Comedians would make jokes about “cockroaches” and everybody knew what they meant.  They meant Tutsis.

Sort of like when late night comics today make fun of conservatives.  Or those idiots in flyover country.  What?  You can’t take a joke?

Look at the political cartoons in any major publication, you’ll find that the overwhelming percentage is pro left and nasty to the right.

The right is evil.  They right wants to destroy.  The right will force you to be host mothers.  The right will force you back into the closet.

The right doesn’t understand it is simply being polite to give in.  The right is violent.  The right is extreme.

It goes on and on, day after day.  I’ve been called so many nasty names by people that I’ve never meet since Obama was elected that I’ve lost track.  I wear them like a badge.  I don’t remember this level of vitriol from prior to 2008.

The joke was always the Republicans think of Democrats as stupid, Democrats think of Republicans as evil.

Today we are continuing to see that drum beat of dehumanizing language applied to conservatives, gun owners, Republicans and just about anybody to the right of Stalin.

It is starting to seep into the general conscious.

When Sunny Hostin on The View says “I read a poll just yesterday that White Republican suburban women are now going to vote Republican. It’s almost like roaches voting for Raid, right?” she likely isn’t smart enough to know the insult.

She was attempting to say that these women are voting against their best interests.  The problem is that the narrative has perculated around her so much that she is causally racists and thinks nothing of comparing her enemy to cockroaches.

This is the power of Propaganda.

My father was a Republican for all the time I lived with my parents.  They were conservative even when the rest of the family was not.  He and my mother are not Democrats.  They turned into leftists when Obama took office and have stayed that way ever since.  They had full on TDS.

My wife got an email from my father telling her to vote for the democrat for Senate this month because the Republican was an right wing extremists that will destroy our democracy.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?!?! This is the same man that taught me that we are a Republic.  That to be conservative means to think things through.  The lessons he taught me still live within me.  I’m proud of my father.  I can’t stand to talk to him as his TDS has now developed to the point where he considers me to be evil because I don’t sing the praises of Joe Biden (and I own firearms)

Keep an eye on the words they use.  Note how those words and phrases start to seep into other parts of our culture.

Stay armed and vigilant.  It is going to get spicy out there.  I hope it doesn’t happen anytime soon, but it is still wise to keep your head on a swivel.  Stay gray, keep alert.

This article was edited because even AWA couldn’t stand the vast number of grammar errors and wrong words in it.  There is still likely more.