Where Demonizing And Blaming Leads, Jews And Tutsis

 People make choices, including whether or not to bully, to scapegoat, to demonize, to rape, to murder. The people that demonize and harm others often render themselves blame free by blaming the targets or victims of their hate for the sins and crimes they themselves commit

It does not take much for the most basic laws and moral codes known to humankind to be tossed aside. Too often religion, rather than being the moral code and guide it should be, instead is used to facilitate the hate, demonization and bigotry that leads to actual crimes against humanity.

When demonization and dehumanization of another group of people occurs, what happens next depends on circumstances and opportunity. Demonization and dehumanization will always lead to rape, torture and murder if opportunity and circumstances allow for it. 

If Hitler and the Nazis did not gain power over one of the world's most advanced countries, Hitler would be an unknown, another dime a dozen deranged Jew hater. 

If genocidal Hutus did not gain control of Rwanda, there would not have been the mass slaughter of Tutsis, committed mostly by hacking people to death with machetes. 

Prior to the genocide, the Tutsis were demonized and dehumanized. A Hutu that was genocidal would have given a thousand reasons why the Tutsis needed to be slaughtered, just as the slaughterers of Jews justified their crimes. Demonization and dehumanization of one group or another continues to this day.  Whether rape, murder and genocide results depends on the ability of those that demonize to carry out their demonic desires.

The Rwandan genocide did not stop in Rwanda. The conflict moved into the already troubled Democratic Republic of the Congo, where over six million people have already been murdered, and where rape and torture have been widespread.  

The need by many to scapegoat, to have a target to blame for everything perceived as wrong, is an enormous human weakness and form of evil. 

The unwillingness by many to challenge those that hate and demonize enables this evil to go unchecked.

It does not take much to descend from bigotry, hate and demonization into crimes against humanity. History proves this again and again, right up to the present time.