Rwanda and Octopuses, Radio and Foxes

I hope you’re doing okay. I am a little weird right now, with a virus from a few weeks ago seeming to have retriggered my POTS in a way that is stressing my heart. With so much to do, I am trying to do it all slowly. But I still have bursts of clarity, including this, which I wrote last week.

I've been thinking about Rwanda, specifically about Philip Gourevitch’s book, We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed Along With Our Families, which chronicles the genocide carried out on by the Hutu tribe on the Tutsi people. I keep circling back to the radio, for this was how the hateful and hate-filled government spread its message, beginning four years before the genocide. Henriette Mutegwaraba, who lost 60 members of her family, told the UN, “We keep saying ‘never again’, and it keeps happening: the Holocaust, Cambodia, South Sudan. People in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are being killed now, as I’m speaking.”

The Rwandan genocide was seeded by colonial European powers including Germany and Belgium, who began issuing identity cards in 1932 identifying which tribe a person in Rwanda was from. And as Mutegwaraba said, if there had been social media in 1994, the outcome would have been much, much worse.

In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission introduced the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, mindful of the ways in which imbalance in media could fuel hate, and this requirement to present a range of perspective in news held until Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1985. Fox News was founded in 1996, nine years after the Fairness Doctrine fell.

I, like many others, blame Fox News among other forces for the current swamp of disinformation we live in in the U.S., abetted by a 24-hour visual and auditory assault that people seem to love enfolding themselves into, an addiction to dopamine and rage. It’s already led to a lot of very bad things. And now, we are mindful that even worse may be to come. The multi-media campaign over years and years to align this country to Trump, who is essentially a foreign asset, has been deep and wide, and it also aligns with certain geopolitical agendas.

Marshall McLuhan, a communications scholar, famously wrote, “The medium is the message.” And that is true, as in the way we absorb communication from others tells us important things we need to know. But a death cult is a devious thing that uses the tools at hand. The Rwandan genocide—and the arguments to dehumanize and then kill certain groups of people—were enabled by radio. The Nazi stagecraft used radio and live speeches, overwhelming visual spectacles, and the printed word. The destruction of the vast territories and civilizations of Indigenous nations whose land we were on was motivated by print and speech alone.

The message is also the message, and the message is dehumanization.

Everyone reading this post has heard of the Holocaust, read Maus and Eli Wiesel’s Night. We know—we knew—as soon as various populations began being referred to by our president-elect as “vermin” that he was evoking a very old and riveting piece of the brain, the part that determines who is friend and who is Other and therefore Enemy. And the idea of sending certain categories of people to “camps” is now an idea that multiple members of Trump’s cabinet have proposed—there’s Hegseth’s camp for leftists and RFK’s “wellness camp” for people “addicted to SSRIs” (honestly what the fresh fuck). Because bleak humor is essential in these horrifying times, my husband and I have been joking about which camp would be better to be routed into.

This is probably the real motto of the United States: some of us are more human than others, specifically Black people. But so many, many categories of people in the U.S. have been fit into that “not human” that it turns out that very few people get to be categorically qualified as “full human,” and so there’s that desire to be human, to see one’s self as fully human, and to get closer to and identify with those who are doing the classifying, to become like them and vote like them and think like them, in order to be powerful and fully human, even if it means you have to crawl over other beings to get there.

We are not supposed to be shocked anymore. We are supposed to join them.

Dehumanization is never a liberatory strategy. It can make you feel powerful, and I’ve been saddened over the course of the last year to see people I respected get pulled into dehumanization strategies to argue for their causes, to the point of seeing messages on social media that people who voted for Harris weren’t even human. (Really, from people I once respected.) In their desperation to get utterly necessary safety for Palestinian people enduring a genocide created with U.S. bombs, the target became Harris and her voters, who became repugnant in the guise of radical political messaging.

In the brain, this is old stuff, the categorization of US versus THEM, and studies show that “when we dehumanize others, the regions of our brain associated with disgust turn on and the regions associated with empathy turn off.” Disgust is a primal emotion. I have been enraged at Trump voters, horrified, chilled, but never viscerally disgusted. I find their messages absolutely repugnant. But I have this thing in my brain that stops the disgust at another being, which I think many of us have, the continued desire to understand what is happening. That desire to connect, to understand, is the opposite of disgust.

The truth, as I have been thinking about in the past few weeks, is that we can’t save them from this force, from this active practice that they are engaged in, the diminishing and discarding of other humans. We are witnessing something that goes back as far as our genetics go back, and farther. We say the word “humanity” as if there’s something inside us that will save us, some fundamental core of empathy, but I think our empathy is something we have to nurture or the flame goes out. We are not the top of the great chain of being, and our “humanity” is a practice, not an essence. Dolphins and octopi probably have secrets of dolphinity and octopusity that could teach us a few things. And I believe that this thin thread of not denying someone’s sentience, their consciousness and potential, will make the world living for. Without it, this destruction is just going to happen over and over again.

In an age when we feel numb—overworked, exhausted, exploited, disheartened—dehumanization can make us feel “alive” in that it gives us the jolt of energy and rage that feels so clarifying. But it is absolutely never a part of radical politics. If you consider yourself a radical and yet your entire existence is to talk about the categories of people who you don’t consider human, you’re bringing nothing to the table but hate, and hate will never get us free. This is my short-hand these days: if someone is online blasting dehumanization, they’re a bot or have been bot-brainwashed, and they’re making the rest of our jobs harder.

And what does that mean for my opinions about those who voted for him? Those folks are addicted and enthralled to some very old brain juice, something enabled by the big brains of the opposable thumbed ape-humans that we evolved from. We are a node on the fractal tree of evolution, and it is only in the living—in seeing, in bearing to comprehend what we do each day to each other—that we understand who we are. The practice and the kick of dehumanization is central to our past and our futures, and it means the story of us, and it is written on all of our faces. I believe that our brains and bodies, collectively, may find a way past this—in fact, I believe a million possibilities are being tried and discarded every moment, that life is trying to find a way to survive.

I will not aid in the destruction. I will not dehumanize. I can fiercely disagree, but I will not de-world. What I will do, as much as I can, live and write and express in these times. I will see and make connections. I will help and oppose as much as I can. I will survive and help others survive. I will watch my own brain juice and take solace particularly in spiritual traditions that do not set me at odds with the real world and its real creatures.