The tragedy of Zimbabwe is that one day the leaders of the majority decided, Since you do not tolerate us we cannot tolerate you. There is no room for both of us. Since we want to live, you must die. This infectious disease called violence has never been removed from our body politic.
It is humanly impossible simply to kill in cold blood, executing the enemy in a cool, clinical operation. You need to be in rage, you need to feel hatred and anger so as to be able to beat, hack, pierce a human body. These poor misguided young men who are hired to beat up and torture their neighbours and brothers, their own kind, cant do this in cold blood; they first have to get into a collective rage by shouting hondo, hondo, hondo (war, war, war) before they can rape and torture their own grandmothers as class enemies and traitors.
Those white schoolboys who were sent into the Rhodesian bush could hack to death their black compatriots because they had been brought up to regard blacks as something less than human. And in military training they had been told they were the vanguard of world communism. And even though they had never seen a communist they had been brainwashed to regard communists as sheer sub-human monsters.
They were able to kill black fellow citizens because they had been told they would rape their sisters and mothers in case of majority rule.
You have to dehumanize the enemy and declare him mere vermin to make the killing easy. This is what hate speech does. Verbal violence prepares the way for physical violence, death and destruction.
Western and Eastern Europeans as well as Americans (nominally Christian) in two world wars did not really want to shoot and kill and bayonet Germans to death. But call them demeaning names like Boches and Krauts and they are no more than cockroaches, so what is wrong with getting rid of them? The German war propaganda of course did the same, depriving the enemy of his human face.
A huge propaganda machine in Nazi-Germany depicted the Jewish people as ugly, repulsive, sinister and malicious, dangerous and depraved. So when they were liquidated with organizational perfection in their millions, the reaction was with many good riddance as if a plague had been contained.
Hate speech makes the monstrous normal and the outrageous acceptable. Goebbels, Minister for Propaganda (today the title would be Minister of Information), discovered broadcasting as vehicle for his hysterical rhetoric denouncing the Jews as unfit to live and used it with lethal effect. Hate speech brainwashed millions and made them ready for mass murder.
The Nazi use of broadcasting was copied many times with equally devastating effect, for instance in Rwanda for the genocide of 1994.
You do not kill fellow citizens, even if they happen to be of another colour. But call them a derogatory name like mabhunu, and shooting them becomes the right thing to do.
Our own propagandists call them settlers, a word that seems harmless enough. But analyze it carefully. What does it really mean? What is implied?
It means these people are strangers, they dont belong to us, they have come to take our land (xenophobia!), they are dangerous land-grabbers, they have lived very well at our expense, exploiting us, lets get rid of them, so we can live as well as they did. Often hate speech expresses fear and instils fear, it seeks scapegoats and someone to blame for ones own failure.
An ideology of conflict and class war always needs enemies or it runs out of steam. Having an enemy is essential for the struggle, ideological and physical. If one enemy has been vanquished you need to invent another, or even exhume the dead one and kill him again. For fanaticizing the crowds you need monsters to hate. The colonialists and imperialists, the exploiters and bloodsuckers cannot be relegated to the museum of history. They are still needed. How else can the revolutionaries justify their violence? The leaders need them to blame for their failures, abusing them with foul language.
We hurt people not just by beating them with fists or stabbing them with knives. Every kind of creature can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison (James 3: 7 8). We all know how deeply people can be hurt by poisonous tongues.
Hate speech need not always be wild and violent, it can express contempt in a subtle manner. A misogynist speaks of her ladyship to ridicule a woman. Sarcasm cuts deep and is not forgotten.
If a woman cannot defend herself against a mans physical violence she may spit verbal venom, which enrages him all the more.
For Jesus hate speech is tantamount to killing( Matthew 5: 21 22). A name stands for the person. A bad name destroys that person. A mocking tone, taunting language is severing the ties of our common humanity. It is, incidentally, also an insult against the Creator in whose image that person was formed.
Post published in: Opinions