Disgust

I’m afraid and I’m angry. I’m afraid because the anger that is spilling out from McCalin-Palin rallies reminds me too much of the kind of rhetoric that incited mass violence in Kenya this past year, and even more so, the kind of rhetoric that led to the genocide in Rwanda. I am not exaggerating. One of the first things that the Hutu Power movement did in Rwanda was to broadcast a message over and over again that the Tutsis were foreigners and traitors, and that even the “good ones” associated with traitors and could not be trusted. Once that envrionment had been created, all it took was one national tragedy–in their case the assassination of their President–to set off a paroxysm of violence that left over 700,000 people dead at the hands of their neighbors. In Kenya, this year, the violence that ripped the country apart and killed around 1,500 people, resulted from an intense presidential election. As an editorial in the Christian Science ...