The Rwanda playbook in Springfield, Ohio
Viewing, and resisting, J.D. Vance's attacks on immigrants through the prism of the 1994 genocide and the Yugoslav wars
In political storytelling, where is the line between motivation and incitement?
Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made what to many must have seemed a startling admission: that his fanning of the flames of racist violence against the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio (keep in mind that they are his constituents — the people of the state he represents in the Senate) was a lie and an intentional one, meant to rally the masses to his message:
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
There’s far more to that message than retail politics. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie put it, Vance’s statement — which, in its dismissal of immigrants as somehow different from and a threat to real Americans, abandons the American ideal of citizenship based on creed rather than bloodline — amounts to blood-and-soil nationalism:
In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for vice president, Vance rejected a creedal notion of American identity. America, he said, “is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” He went on to add that America is a “homeland” and that “people will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”
This may be shocking, but it is not surprising.
One remarkable thing about the current crop of business and political leaders-cum-social media entrepreneurs is that they function as both authorities and spectators. Despite their access to privileged communications, state secrets, and all the informational resources of our age, in their social media outbursts Vance, Trump, and others come off as barely more informed than the rest of us, surfacing memes, rumors, and tabloid sensationalism as if they were old men yelling at clouds and refusing to look things up.
But calling that out, or even directly confronting figures like Vance or Trump on the dangerous implications of their explicit calls for violence, doesn’t seem to stick. They fall back on their double position as instigators and observers to claim they aren’t directly involved in what they might inspire, maintaining plausible deniability, as Vance did on Face the Nation when Margaret Brennan gave him an opportunity to recant, asking, “These false claims are endangering your constituents. Do you regret your words?”
Rather than express regrets, Vance defended his position (that Haitians were in fact threatening Springfield in some way) and put any blame for violence on those acting on the ground in response to his words — again throwing his constituents under the bus:
Why is somebody calling in a bomb threat, Margaret? It's because they want attention. I think that we should ignore these ridiculous psychopaths who are threatening violence on a small Ohio town and focus on the fact that we have a vice president who is not doing her job in protecting that small Ohio town.
Yes, perhaps sometimes figures such as Vance are just saying what’s on their minds, loose cannons — it’s difficult to say, and their language has been fluid and evasive enough to stymie the drawing of direct connections. They are, at the very least, disorganized and messy in their messaging. MAGA rallies aren’t staged to classical proportions, and the Trump campaign’s social media team isn’t exactly Leni Riefenstahl.
But there’s something more serious going on here. Some analysts have embraced the notion of “stochastic terrorism” (“random” terrorism in technical terms) though it isn’t exactly random and in practice operates much like most terrorism (groups like ISIS or the various right-wing U.S. paramilitaries have grown by making their ideas open to all comers, inspiring disconnected sympathizers to take action indirectly and at a distance from leadership).
But call it what you will, the stories are out there, and that their targets aren’t made perfectly clear doesn’t mean those stories aren’t working as intended. It may not be the sort of rigid order people associate with fascist movements But you don’t have to go all the way back to Germany in the 1930s to never again or never forget about it.
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.
That is to say, media threats were taken very seriously as acts of violence with genocidal intent at the time. But, prefiguring the current reluctance to deplatform or otherwise quash MAGA statements, there was plenty of debate about whether prosecutions against those who’d fomented hate in the media (mostly on the radio, given the time) had really done anything beyond exercising their right to free speech.
It has been argued that RTLM's role was no more strident than that played by some of the Belgrade stations during Nato's bombing of Kosovo - and the language no more intemperate than that directed against Muslims by some US radio and TV commentators after September 11. Indeed, Hassan Ngeze's black American counsel, John Floyd, says the prosecutions would not have been brought in the US - and should not have been brought in Arusha: "What's on trial here is free speech and the freedom of the press. In the United States, the First Amendment guarantees these rights, but this case is a dangerous encroachment on these hard-won liberties. We're talking about a judgment which, potentially, will be used to justify censorship."
And it is true. Much of what went out on the air in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda wasn’t all that different from what you see on Fox News, or hear from Trump or Vance and others in interviews or on social media today. Much of it would indeed fall under First Amendment protections in the U.S. Plus, the effects of this type of propaganda on target audiences weren’t easy to figure out at the time and have never been easy to figure out.
That said, there have already been convictions stemming from media provocations in the recent anti-immigrant riots in the United Kingdom, so the international debate on just how powerful these stories are, and whether they should be understood as speech or weapons, is ongoing.
Somewhat confusing the issue is that the very randomness of these calls for violence has meant some of it has blown back on their authors. This weekend saw a second alleged assassination attempt against Trump, again by a confused, violent diagonalist with right-wing sympathies — just different enough from the former president’s to suggest a murderous solution.
Daniel Drezner’s formulation — he calls what Trump and Vance are doing “domestic terrorism by proxy” — is helpful here:
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.
There’s no easy solution. Stories are powerful. Right now it is very unlikely that those telling these terribly destructive stories will stop — even following acts of horrific violence against the tellers — or can be stopped by the law. As we’ve been saying all along, it falls to those who want to build a better world to tell a better story.
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This is a sad state of affairs. The media is complicit, intentionally or unintentionally, but the result is the same. Once again, we have Haitian people, black immigrants once again being used badly not only the patience are being used badly, but the people of Springfield have become collateral damage, As the Tactics of the Republican playbook being carried out by JD Vance and Donald Trump. The question is who will be next. As we know anyone is game in this vicious fight for gaining control of this country.
I have been making this comparison for a while now. Essentially trump and the rest of hte MAGA leadership have been building extreme hatred and fear of liberals . Othering. There was even that new book "unhuman" that takes it its natural step further. They have given permission for violence. Foment fear whenever possible and frightened people are capable of much harm. Esp with weapons - military grade no less. The Supreme Court has helped along the way. So has the media. Today on WNYC I was shocked to hear a journalist interviewing a business owner who supports trump and not asking the hard questions but rather normalizing this. It is continuously shocking to me.