Comparative Analysis of Genocide: Patterns of Destruction
Senior 4 · History
Comparative Analysis of Genocide: Patterns of Destruction
Lesson 2 of 4
25 min
In March 1993, thirteen months before the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi began, the extremist newspaper Kangura printed an article under this title:
"A cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly."
Kangura, March 1993, as translated and quoted by Human Rights Watch, Leave None to Tell the Story (1999), chapter "Propaganda and Practice".
Analyse it. The headline does three things at once. It classifies: it assumes that every Tutsi belongs to a fixed group, passed from parent to child. It dehumanises: since 1990 extremists had called the soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front inyenzi, "cockroaches", and the article extended the insult to Tutsi civilians as a whole. And it served an organisation: Kangura began its attacks on the RPF and on Tutsi right after October 1990, and it was soon joined by other papers that, Human Rights Watch reports, received support from officials and businessmen linked to the regime. The same three patterns appear in every genocide in this unit. This lesson follows them across the four cases.
Definition
Classification: dividing people into fixed groups, "us" and "them", by law, papers or propaganda. Example: the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 defined who was a Jew in Germany.
Dehumanisation: describing members of a group as animals, insects, dirt or disease, so that killing them seems acceptable. Example: calling Tutsi inyenzi ("cockroaches").
Organisation: building the structures that will carry out a genocide: a party, militias, special units and the state's own chain of command. Example: the training of the Interahamwe militia by soldiers from 1992.
Propaganda: information, often false, spread on purpose to shape what people believe and do. Example: the radio station RTLM, which began broadcasting in August 1993.
Accusation in a mirror: a propaganda trick that accuses the target group of planning exactly what the propagandists themselves are planning. Example: papers that claimed, before 1994, that the Tutsi were planning to exterminate the Hutu.
Figure 1. REB's six patterns of destruction. Drawn by Ganzaa; the six are taken from the ten stages of genocide set out by Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch in 1996.
Stanton describes genocide as "a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable but not inexorable". "Not inexorable" means it can be stopped: at every stage someone can act. He also warns that "the process is not linear. Stages occur simultaneously." Use the six patterns as questions to put to the evidence, not as a ladder that every case must climb in the same order.
| Case | How the victims were classified |
|---|---|
| Armenians, 1915–1916 | From 1909 the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) turned towards a state that would be "culturally and homogeneously Turkish". Armenian Christians in eastern Anatolia were treated as a "demographic obstacle". During the deportations, rules limited Armenians to no more than 10 percent of the population of the areas they were sent to, and in some areas to 2 percent. |
| The Holocaust | The Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 took citizenship from German Jews. A person with three or four Jewish grandparents counted as a Jew, and a grandparent counted as Jewish by belonging to the Jewish religious community. The Nazis spoke of race, but they classified people by their grandparents' religion. |
| Cambodia, 1975–1979 | The Khmer Rouge divided society into "old people", the peasants who had lived under its rule before April 1975, and "new people", the town dwellers driven into the countryside, who were treated as suspect. Former officials, educated people and minorities such as the Cham and the Vietnamese were treated as enemies. |
| Rwanda, 1930s–1994 | In the 1930s the Belgian administration registered every Rwandan once and for all as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa (about 84, 15 and 1 percent) and recorded it on identity cards that adults had to carry. The categories, once flexible, "became so rigid and permanent" that they were inherited at birth. After independence the same cards were used to discriminate against Tutsi in schools and jobs. |
Analyse. In all four cases the group was partly invented by the people in power: the Nazis' "race" was really their grandparents' religion; Rwanda's categories were social categories that colonial rule froze into hereditary labels (unit 8). What made the classification deadly was not the label but the state: once a government records who belongs to which group, it can find them.
Every genocide needs ordinary people to stop seeing the victims as neighbours. Nazi films portrayed Jews as "subhuman"; The Eternal Jew (1940) showed them as "parasites", and the newspaper Der Stürmer printed hateful caricatures. In Rwanda, extremist propaganda spread the so-called "Ten Commandments", which called any Hutu who married a Tutsi or did business with Tutsi a traitor; from August 1993 RTLM brought the same language to every radio. The Ottoman government presented Armenians as an enemy within, claiming in 1915 that Armenian revolutionaries were helping an Allied landing. The Khmer Rouge treated "new people" and minorities as enemies of a pure revolutionary nation; Cham Muslims were forbidden to practise their faith or speak their language.
Genocide is never a spontaneous explosion. In the Ottoman Empire, the CUP issued instructions from Constantinople and enforced them through agents of its Special Organization and the local administration, and it demanded detailed counts of the Armenians deported. In Nazi Germany, on 20 January 1942, fifteen senior officials met at a villa at Wannsee, outside Berlin, to coordinate what they called the "Final Solution". The Khmer Rouge ruled through a secret party called Angkar, "the Organisation", and a network of prisons. In Rwanda, the ruling MRND party turned its youth wing, the Interahamwe, into a militia that received military training from soldiers from 1992; once the killing began, Human Rights Watch shows, orders passed down the state's own chain from the prime minister to the prefects and the burgomasters.
Warning
Do not explain genocide as "ancient hatred" between groups. Human Rights Watch stresses that Hutu and Tutsi "had shared a single language, a common history, the same ideas and cultural practices", lived side by side and often intermarried. The division was built, by colonial classification and then by politicians, newspapers and a radio station. The same is true of the other cases: Armenians and Turks, Jews and other Germans, "old" and "new" Cambodians had lived together. Write about who built the division, and how.
When you quote dehumanising words such as inyenzi, always put them in quotation marks and say who used them and why. Never use them yourself.
Tip
"Label, libel, line-up." First the label (classification: who is "them"?), then the libel (dehumanisation: "them" are vermin and traitors), then the line-up (organisation: who will act, and on whose orders?). For each, give one piece of evidence with a date from each case you compare.
Important
Discuss. The "Ten Commandments" attacked Hutu who married Tutsi, and Nazi law decided Jewishness by grandparents. What do these two facts reveal about how real the "groups" were, and why did the propagandists need laws and insults to keep them apart?
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "What Was Nazi Propaganda?" (Holocaust Explainer). Watch how the regime took control of independent media and used the newest technology, radio, to spread its message. Then compare it with RTLM in Rwanda in 1993–1994.
Practice
Key points
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the diagram (Figure 1), the comparison table and the exercises. This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Quick check
Match each piece of evidence to the pattern it shows best.
Tap one on the left, then its partner on the right.
