• Gaywallet (they/it)
    link
    fedilink
    41 year ago

    Thank you for this excellent story. I found the following paragraph quite harrowing:

    During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a popular radio station repeatedly called for the extermination of the Tutsi minority (a red-alert “1” on the Dignity Index scale: “a combination of feeling the other side is less than human and calling for or approving violence”). But those messages could only be heard in villages with radio reception. That meant that there were natural control groups all over Rwanda — places where people did not hear those dehumanizing messages. In a landmark 2014 study, researcher David Yanagizawa-Drott analyzed the violence across Rwanda and found that killings increased wherever radio reception improved. In all, about one in every ten acts of violence could be linked to the messages from this radio station. Some 50,000 Rwandans may have been killed as a result of these radio broadcasts.