Can you say “sto-chas-tic”?
Sure. I knew you could.
Some may “find it harsh using the terms ‘infestation’ and ‘cockroaches’” to describe members of Tren De Aragua, a Venezuelan gang operating in Texas, Department of Public Safety Commander Steve McCraw said on Monday. McCraw made his remarks in Houston after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) designated the group a foreign terrorist organization:
“Tren de Aragua gangsters are like cockroaches,” said DPS Director McCraw. “They multiply quickly; small intrusions into communities become infestations if not aggressively pursued. These Venezuelan thugs are highly combative, violent, and certainly adaptable. They’re always involved in situations that first start with human smuggling. Then they are involved in the extortion, kidnappings, rape, assaults, and sex trafficking of migrants. Governor Abbott has made it very clear: We will not allow any of these gangsters to gain a foothold in Texas.”
Over the last week, Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance promoted a debunked internet rumor alleging something-something about Haitian immigrants legally residing and working (and welcomed) in Springfield, Ohio. Bomb threats against the town followed their remarks.
The timing of Abbott’s statement about another group of immigrants, albeit criminals, might at best be described as unfortunate. But not McCraw’s remarks describing any Venezuelans as a “disease.”
“This is genocidal language. He should be immediately suspended. At a minimum, this dept should not receive one dime of federal money while he’s in charge,” said Howard University’s Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. McGraw announced his retirement last month.
When they’ve got nothing to offer Americans to solve their problems, MAGA Republicans have an endless supply of Others to blame for them.
Stochastic terrorism
The Ink reflects on how dehumanizing language feeds stochastic terrorism. That is, “random” terrorism that isn’t entirely random, but an outgrowth of characterizing an entire ethnic group as an internal enemy. One doesn’t have to invoke Germany of the 1930s for how that operates:
Instead, let’s go back a few dozen years, to the 1990s, to Rwanda. And to the (now former) Yugoslavia. According to Human Rights Watch:
From 1990 through the 1994 genocide, propagandists used newspapers and later the radio to disseminate these ideas hostile to the Tutsi. It was particularly the last idea—that Hutu were threatened and had to defend themselves—that proved most successful in mobilizing attacks on Tutsi from 1990 through the 1994 genocide. This idea may have been influenced by a study of propaganda methods. Among documents found by Human Rights Watch researchers in a government office soon after the genocide was a set of mimeographed notes summarizing methods of propaganda as analyzed by a French professor, Roger Mucchielli, in a book entitled Psychologie de la publicité et de la propagande. One of the methods described is persuading people that the opponent intends to use terror against them; if this is done successfully, “honest people” will take whatever measures they think necessary for legitimate self-defense.
In Rwanda, some 660,000 people were murdered; following a similar playbook in the collapsing Yugoslavia, more than 100,000 were killed. Rwanda’s media agitators were prosecuted and convicted of genocide. NATO bombed RTS/Serbian Radio and Television’s headquarters.
Given First Amendment guarantees, prosecutions of the influencers(?) behind such a genocide could not be carried out in the U.S., argued the counsel for a Rwandan journalist convicted as a war criminal.
That it is not prosecutable here does not make what Vance and Trump engage less “domestic terrorism by proxy,” writes Daniel Drezner in a Monday Substack post:
The difference between Trump and the innocent residents of Springfield, Ohio, is that Trump has the protection of the United States Secret Service. Trump’s targets of political violence possess far fewer defenses. And make no mistake: Trump and Vance’s willingness to lie, deceive, and stigmatize minorities is behind the threats of violence affecting Springfield, Ohio this week.
They are attempting domestic terrorism by proxy. And if they keep it up, they will eventually have blood on their hands.
After the alleged assassination attempt against Trump over the weekend, Vance said at the Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition dinner in Atlanta that “the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that we have — no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months.” He blamed liberal rhetoric for attempts on Trump’s life.
David Cay Johnson suggested that Vance’s comments “painted a target on Kamala Harris, sending a signal that some rightwing nutcase may a take as a directive,” just as Drezner described.
The genesis of genocide
In April 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro reflected in The Atlantic on how Rwanda became the site of genocide:
Twenty-five years ago this month, all hell broke loose in my country, which is tucked away in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Hordes of members of the Hutu ethnic majority, armed with machetes, spears, nail-studded clubs, and other rudimentary weapons, moved house to house in villages, hunting for Tutsis, the second largest of Rwanda’s three ethnic groups. The radio station RTLM, allied with leaders of the government, had been inciting Hutus against the Tutsi minority, repeatedly describing the latter as inyenzi, or “cockroaches,” and as inzoka, or “snakes.” The station, unfortunately, had many listeners.
And many dehumanizing euphemisms for the Tutsi minority.
By the mid-1990s, the Hutu leadership was in jeopardy. Multiple political factions had emerged, and the insurgent Rwanda Patriotic Front, an organization composed mostly of young Tutsi exiles, had entered the country. For Hutu leaders, it was time to play the Tutsi card. Extremist publications had sprung up, especially a newspaper called Kangura. (Its public face, the editor Hassan Ngeze, was later convicted by the post-genocide International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, along with other high-level figures associated with the publication.)
But it was the private radio station RTLM—which stands for Radio Télévision Libre de Mille Collines—that illustrates the power of hate media. Rwanda had an official radio station, but Hutu hard-liners came up with the idea of creating a private radio station to carry incendiary anti-Tutsi propaganda.
It was Joseph Goebbels who said, “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent; its task is to lead to success.” RTLM was very successful. It managed to plant a seed of discord among the moderate Hutus who were slowly drawn into the extremist fold.
Out of context
Foreign Policy in 2016 reported on one Rwandan receiving a life sentence for genocide, not for what he did but for what he said:
In 1992, Leon Mugesera, a senior politician in Rwanda’s then-ruling Hutu party, told a crowd of supporters at a rally in the town of Kabaya that members of the country’s minority Tutsi population were “cockroaches” who should go back to Ethiopia, the birthplace of the East African ethnic group.
Spectators claim that at one point in the rally, which was not recorded in its entirety, Mugesera said, “Anyone whose neck you do not cut is the one who will cut your neck.” Two years later, some 800,000 Rwandans — mainly Tutsis — were brutally slaughtered and hacked to death in a genocide that lasted 100 days.
Mugesera, who told rallygoers to dump their victims’ bodies in the river, “later maintained his innocence, saying the speech had been taken out of context,” the BBC reported.
Expect to hear the “taken out of context” excuse if we see mass casualty attacks against immigrants in this country.