Comment by energy123
4 months ago
Hate speech is the thing that plays on the radio station that directly causes the mass graves of the Rwandan genocide. The physical call to violence is just the very last step in a long chain of escalating hate speech, but it is no more culpable than the preceding hate speech that created the environment where that physical call to violence is acted on.
During the Rwandan genocide, the radio stations played incitement to violence. While "hate speech" is inclusive of speech that incites violence, the types of hate speech which people have contemporary political disagreements about (including this thread) do not include such incitement.
More importantly, causality doesn't erase culpability. The step that immediately preceded the [Charlie Hebdo shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting) was publishing a cartoon in a newspaper. Those who create hateful environments may have some culpability, but those that act almost always have greater culpability than those who speak.
The incitement to violence came later, at the climax, after the hatred was distilled via the type of hate speech we are discussing here. This is the etiology of all internal genocides. They all follow the same pattern. Attempting to inderdict the genocide just as the calls to violence are happening is too late, because the population is too radicalized by that point.