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“A Cockroach Cannot Give Birth to a Butterfly” and Other Messages of Hate Propaganda

Jonathan Belman, May 2004

In December 2003, an international court in Tanzania convicted three Rwandan media executives of genocide for helping to incite a killing spree that took the lives of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus.[1] It was the first conviction of news media executives for crimes of genocide since 1946, when the Nuremburg tribunal sentenced Nazi publisher Julius Streicher to death for campaign of anti-Semitic propaganda through print media.[2] Both the court in Tanzania and the Nuremberg tribunal based their decisions on recognition of the power of media to inflame hatreds and provoke violence. The presiding judge of the Tanzanian court, Navanathem Pillay, emphasized this point as she addressed the defendants in her closing remarks: “Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.''[3]

How is it possible that media messages can convince people to commit atrocities, in some cases against their neighbors? What are the messages that were powerful enough to incite the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, the Holocaust, and the widespread murder, rape and torture of Muslims, Croatians, and Albanians in the Balkan conflict? What follows is an analysis of seven messages that consistently appear in the fiercest and most thorough campaigns of hate propaganda. These messages are:

1.     The enemy is qualitatively different than us.

2.     The enemy represents some great evil. They are demonic, fascist, fundamentalist, etc. The evilness of the enemy is eternal. They have always been evil and they will always be evil.

3.     The enemy has harmed us in the past with impunity.

4.     The enemy has plans to harm us again in the future.

5.     Unlike the enemy, we are noble and deserving of the good lives that the enemy would deny to us

6.     The enemy is united so we must also be. Those of us who undermine our unity are traitors or agents of the enemy.

7.     This is the final battle. If we win we will move on to a bright future free from the threat that the enemy poses.

The Enemy is Qualitatively Different Than Us

The first message of hate propaganda is that the enemy is different than us in some fundamentally important way. Of course, hate propaganda never stops at declaring that the other group is different. This point is made alongside or is followed by the message that the other group is inferior and/or malevolent. Still, the assertion of difference is an important first step in the process towards violence. Once the other group has been identified as different the lines have been drawn for future persecution, ethnic cleansing or genocide.

Depending on cultural context and the goals of the propagandists, the alleged difference is presented in different ways. For example, in state-controlled Serbian media prior to the Balkan conflict, Croatians and Muslims were portrayed as being different from Serbs with respect to culture.[4] Print, television and radio media disseminated the idea that Serb, Croat and Muslim cultures grew from separate and entirely different roots and produced different kinds of people that could be distinguished from each other by their values and basic beliefs.[5]  

Propagandists of Hutu extremism portrayed Tutsis as belonging to a different race.[6] According to Hutu propaganda, the race to which Tutsis belonged was foreign to Central Africa, while the Hutus were an indigenous race.[7]

One of the first principles of Nazi ideology was that Germans are qualitatively different than other peoples, in terms of their racial background but also on some ill-defined spiritual level. This point is illustrated in a picture from an early Nazi propaganda pamphlet:  

The Enemy is Inherently Evil. They are Demonic, Fascist, Fundamentalist, etc. The Evilness of the Enemy is Eternal. They Have Always Been Evil and They Will Always be Evil.

In March 1993, the Hutu extremist newspaper Kangura published an article titled “A cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly.”[9] The article said:

We began by saying that a cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly. It is true. A cockroach gives birth to another cockroach […] The history of Rwanda show us clearly that a Tutsi stays always exactly the same that he has never changed. The malice, the evil are just as we knew them in the history of our country. We are not wrong in saying that a cockroach gives birth to another cockroach. Who could tell the difference between the Inyenzi who attacked in October 1990 [Kangura falsely claimed that Tutsi forces had attacked Kigali] and those of the 1960s [who had resisted the Hutu revolution of 1959]. They are all linked … Their evilness is the same. The unspeakable crimes of the Inyenzi today … recall those of their elders: killing, pillaging, raping girls and women, etc.[10]

The message is clear. The Tutsis represent an evil that will reproduce itself for as long as Tutsis exist. Future generations of Tutsis will not be any better than their predecessors because, “a cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly.”

A Similar message was disseminated through anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda: The evil that the Jews had practiced throughout history was the same as the evil they were practicing now and would practice for as long as they existed.[11] They had corrupted great empires throughout history, leading to the fall of Egypt, Persia, Rome and others.[12] If their evil was allowed to corrupt Germany, the Third Reich would fall as other empires had. Future generations of Jews would be “destroyers” just as their ancestors had been.[13]

The common thread running through this aspect of Nazi and Hutu extremist propaganda is that the evil of the enemy is incorrigible. Once that message is completely accepted, negotiation and attempts at reconciliation are perceived as fruitless. Violence becomes the only viable solution, and in some cases that violence reaches the level of genocide.

The Enemy Has Harmed Us in the Past With Impunity

One of the chief goals of hate propaganda is to create feelings of victimization in their audience. Hate propagandists spread the message that their group has suffered a history of oppression, violence or other insults from their enemy. This creates what David Perkins calls victim rage, “the rage that people feel when they perceive themselves as subject to sustained victimization.”[14]   

Nazi propaganda disseminated the message that it was Jews and not aggressive German expansionism that had plunged Germany into two World Wars.[15] The suffering of German soldiers and civilians, in World War I, World War II, and the economic hardships of the period in between were all blamed on the Jews’ malevolent control of economic, political and media forces.[16]

The anti-Semitic poster shown below blames Jews for World War II:

According to Nazi propaganda, it was not just Germany but practically the entire world that had been victimized by the Jews. In the following passage, taken from an article in the anti-Semitic magazine Der Sturmer, “the Jew” is blamed for the violence of the Russian Revolution:

The Jew used the Marxist movement to rouse the people against the nobility and royalty. […] He caused economic crises and threw workers out on the streets. The Jew committed mass murder with unprecedented brutality. More than 30 million people were killed in Soviet Judah under the leadership of the Jews Trotsky, Sinowjew, etc.[17]

In magazines like Der Sturmer, Jews were alleged to have victimized entire nations, but there were also many articles describing in great and often graphic detail how individual Jews had supposedly victimized individual Germans. For example, nearly every issue of Der Sturmer accused specific Jews of depraved sexual crimes.[18] A 1935 articled titled “The End: Betrayed to Death by a Jew” described the seduction, corruption and betrayal of a young German dancer by a much older Jewish businessman.[19]

Fictional accounts of victimization were also widespread in Serbian propaganda. For example, a TV Belgrade correspondent told viewers, “The Muslim extremists have come up with the world’s most horrible way of torturing people. Last night, they threw Serb children to the lions in the local zoo.”[20] In a similar vein, an article in Politika accused Kosovo Albanians of, “poisoning wells and slitting the throats of children.”[21] ? Minor format: after everything else is done, search and replace two spaces in a row with one, please. I notice one above.

It is not always necessary for hate propagandists to invent a history of victimization at the hands of the enemy. For example, Serbian propagandists often referenced the atrocities committed against their people by Croatian fascists during World War II. The terminology used by Serbian media covering the conflict was designed to remind Serbian audiences of the past crimes of Croatian fascists.[22] For example, news stations were requested not to refer to “Croatian forces” or “Croatian fighters,” but instead to speak about “Ustasha hordes” or “Vatican, fascist, barbarian hordes.”[23] The labels “Ustasha,” “Vatican” and “fascist” refer to the devoutly Catholic and brutally repressive Croatian regime of the 1940s that was closely allied to Nazi Germany.

Likewise, Hutu propagandists could reference the real, tragic and large-scale persecution of Hutus by Tutsis in neighboring Burundi.[24] Of course, it was in the interests of Hutu propaganda to represent the Burundi conflict as a one-sided affair, when in fact both Hutus and Tutsis had committed atrocities on a large scale.[25]

What differentiates hate propaganda from legitimate anger over past victimization is the dangerous fallacy that the former oppressors are incorrigibly evil and therefore there can be no reconciliation that is both non-violent and satisfying for the former victims.

The Enemy Has Plans to Harm Us in the Future

Hate propagandists also create a fear of future victimization in their audience. They spread the message that the enemy is hatching malevolent plans.

On March 3 1992, Hutu-controlled Radio Rwanda five times broadcast the false news that a human rights group in Nairobi had issued a press release warning that Tutsi were going to kill Hutu in Bugasera.[26] Some Hutu took this to be truth and began slaughtering Tutsis the next day.[27]

By the middle of 1993, Hutu propagandists were asserting “We know that they have attacked us with the intention of massacring and exterminating 4.5 million Hutu and especially those who have gone to school.”[28]

Similar messages are found in Nazi propaganda:

[International Jewry] wants to continue and intensify the boycott war against Germany. They will attempt to fight Germany until it bends to their will or is forced to its knees. They will stop at nothing. They will lie and slander, and continually attempt to incite the whole world against Germany. Every means a Jewish             brain can think of will be used … The insane goal of World Jewry remains ruling all nations by controlling their government organs, their territory, their money and all their goods.[29]

In a similar vein, prior to the Armenian genocide Turkish Mullahs and town criers spread the word that Armenians in their midst were traitors, saboteurs, spies and conspirators, stockpiling weapons and planning to murder Turks in the near future.[30]

The message is repeated in Serbian propaganda. TV Belgrade broadcast a speech by Mihajlo Markovic, a Serbian academic, claiming that, “the neo-ustashas [that is, Croatians] are getting ready for a decisive attack … [they have] started the mechanism for the destruction of Serbia.”[31]

The examples given in this and the previous section lead to an interesting hypothesis. It seems plausible that there are at least two emotions that must be evoked if the violence that hate propaganda incites is to reach its full fury: indignation about past victimization, and fear of future victimization. If only the first emotion is evoked then the result is likely to be a simmering resentment, but not widespread violence. If only the second emotion is evoked then there may be violence but it is likely to be relatively controlled. When both emotions are evoked together there is the greatest potential for a violent conflagration that can destroy whole peoples. At this point, this is only a tentative hypothesis, but it would be an interesting area for future research.

Unlike the Enemy, We are Noble and Deserving of the Good Lives That the Enemy Would Deny to Us

In addition to denigrating the enemy, hate propagandists also glorify their own group. Serbian propagandists promoted an image of Serbs as noble idealists who are willing and able to fight for what they believe in. In their version of Yugoslav history, Serbs deserve special credit for the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918 and for its resurrection in 1945 because they suffered the largest casualties in both World Wars.[32] Yet instead of being grateful, the other Yugoslav republics pushed them to the margins of the economic and political spheres, undermining their interests and conspiring to deprive them of their legitimate rights.[33]

Nazi propagandists spent as much effort glorifying the German people as they did demonizing the Jews. The bloodline of Germans was supposedly of a higher stock than other that of other peoples’. Jews had only been able to molest the Germans because Germans were to that point too “polite” to deal with the “Jewish Problem” decisively.[34]

This message combined with the message that the enemy is inherently evil sets a dangerous double standard. Anything that the enemy does, even if benign or altruistic, becomes evidence of their malevolence. On the other hand, we are so pure that anything we do, even ethnic cleansing or genocide, is a righteous endeavor. The pair of quotes below, the first from an issue of the Nazi party magazine and the second from a propaganda pamphlet issued by the party illustrate this point:

[Jewish] "decency," proven by charitable deeds done in as public a manner as possible, is nothing but a hidden cost of business, to be repaid a thousand times by uneducated Germans. "Know, dear Christian, and have no doubts about it, that next to the Devil you have no more bitter, poisonous and determined enemy than a genuine Jew. . . If they do something good for you, it is not because they love you, but because they need room to live with us, so they have to do something. But their heart remains as I have said![35]

The Jew must be destroyed wherever we meet him! […] In so doing, we commit no crime against life; rather serve life's laws of battle, which always oppose that which is an enemy to healthy life. Our battle serves to maintain life. A German victory — the victory of the created order.[36]

The Enemy is United so we Must also Be. Those of us Who Undermine our Unity are Traitors or Agents of the Enemy

Campaigns of hate propaganda must convince their audience that all members of the enemy stand united behind their malevolent plans -- that all Tutsis, Jews, Croats, Armenians, etc., are in league with each other. That message creates intense social pressure for all of “us” to join the cause and close ranks behind ideologies that we might otherwise reject. Social psychologists have done a great deal of work on the power of social pressure to compel conformity, and some have argued that a vulnerability to social pressure is one of the main reasons ordinary people commit atrocities in social environments such as Nazi Germany.[37]

In extremist Hutu propaganda, a high premium was placed on Hutu unity. Hutus who worked together with Tutsis towards reconciliation were branded as traitors and marked for death.[38] In order for extremist Hutus to reach their genocidal goals, the battle had to be Hutu vs. Tutsi with no room for anyone in between those two camps.

The message was the same in Nazi propaganda. All of World Jewry was unified behind its malevolent plans for world domination:

Every Jew, regardless of whether he lives in Germany or America, whether he speaks Russian or Spanish, whether he lives in the ghetto or on Wall Street, thinks and feels as the Talmud commands him.[39]

Therefore all Germans had to be totally and uncritically unified behind the Nazi party’s proposed solution to the “Jewish problem:”

One must either affirm or reject anti-Semitism. He who defends the Jews harms his own people. One can only be a Jewish lackey or a Jewish opponent. Opposing the Jews is a matter of personal hygiene.[40]

Serbian propaganda denigrated moderate Serbs who refused to back Milosevic genocidal regime. Such messages were often expressed in printed or televised interviews with Serbian intellectuals:

And there where Serbian blood is shed and Serbian bones fall must be Serbian land [an often cited justification for ethnic cleansing]. Those who think otherwise are on the side of our enemy, Priest Nikanor, Borba.[41]

Those who are against their own people are traitors, Ljubomir Tadic, Duga.[42]

We are speaking about islamicized Serb traitors during the Ottoman enslavement, but we gloss over the important fact that our modern traitors are much more dangerous and lethal than traitors in the distant past … their treason imperils the very being of Serb people, Amfilohije Radovic, Borba.[43]

In an interview published in the Milosevic-controlled NIN, Andrija Biorcevic, Commander of Corps of the Yugoslav Army, expressed the same sentiment in the simplest and most violent terms: “Whoever wants to join us is OK, whoever does not: a bullet in his back.”[44]

Unlike Nazi propaganda, Serbian propaganda did not tell its audience that all Muslims or all Croats were united behind a malevolent plan, but that they were uniformly violent and depraved because of their cultural and genetic background. For example, an article in Borba claimed, “For Islam rape is normal, for that religion tolerates polygamy.”[45] The magazine Svet disseminated a similar message:

Muslims are genetically spoiled material who converted to Islam. And those genes have been reinforced generation after generation. They have become worse and they dictate and express the Muslim way of thinking and behaving. The latter is embedded in their genes.[46]

This is the Final Battle. If We Win We Will Move on to a Bright Future Free From the Threat That the Enemy Poses

This is a crucial message of hate propaganda. Because the conflict that is approaching is the ultimate struggle, and because the stakes are so high, anything that we do no matter how reprehensible under normal circumstances is justified now.

Nearly every campaign of hate propaganda stresses this message. The following example is taken from an article in an anti-Semitic magazine:

Now there is war! The Jews forced us into a struggle for life and death. […] The devilish hatred of the Jews plunged the world into war, need and misery. Our holy hate will bring us victory and save all of mankind.[47]

One the Jews and their allies were defeated, it was claimed that Germans would enjoy a “thousand-year Aryan empire.”[48]

The Serbian magazine Politika told its readers that when the Balkan conflict is over “there will either be no more Serbs or no more Muslims.”[49] Bosnian Serbs in particular were told that if they were victorious, they would prosper in an ethnically pure “Republic Sprska,” free from the malevolent interference of other Yugoslav peoples.[50] In Serbia, it was promised that after the conflict Serbs would reclaim “the lost paradise” of ancient Serbia.[51]

Johan Galtung notes that in “cultures of violence” people are prepared to perceive conflict in terms of a final battle.[52] He describes this message as follows: “[The conflict] can end in only one way, in a massive violent encounter, possibly with Evil triumphing over Good on Earth, but Good continuing in Heaven.”[53] This is an apt description of the “final battle message.” However, it seems likely that when the aggressors perceive themselves as being more powerful then their enemy, they focus on victory in the here and now. When the weaker force disseminates this message, they must allow for possibility of defeat in the here and now by promising victory and rewards in metaphysical terms.

Conclusion

People rarely cite hate propaganda as one of the main reasons that large-scale ethnic or nationalist violence happens. Instead, they think of age-old hatreds between groups as the root cause of these conflicts, or they blame the atrocities on the culture of the perpetrators, which is assumed to be inherently violent.

These explanations fail to consider an important point: Many of the worst episodes of ethnic or nationalist violence are incited by people who have an interest in creating and sustaining these conflicts. For example, the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic used the Balkan conflict to achieve and maintain absolute power in Serbia.[54] Likewise, the Hutu regime of Rwanda incited the genocide of 1994 in order to avoid making reforms that would have weakened their power.[55] These leaders used hate propaganda to create the atmosphere of violence that made genocide possible. Hate propaganda is often not a symptom of hatred between groups. Rather, it is the cause of that hatred.

Endnotes