The Fear Factor How People Do Horrible Things - 1815 Words

The Fear Factor: How People Do Terrible Things The Holocaust. The Armenian genocide. Rwanda, 1994. â€Å"Your ancestors have a gift for self-destruction that borders on genius† (Doctor Who), and â€Å"Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it,† according to Napoleon, and indeed they are right. But how does it happen? How can one person or group think of another group as deserving to be slaughtered, and how on earth can ordinary people be convinced and capable to take action against them? Again and again, the same three steps repeat and weave the thread of genocide and atrocity into the narrative of history. Hatred is sown, dehumanization occurs, and action is sparked. The leader(s) are afraid of a foreign culture or idea so they attempt to†¦show more content†¦Ã¢â‚¬Å"Hutu extremists blamed the RPF and immediately started a well-organized campaign of slaughter. The RPF said the plane had been shot down by Hutus to provide an excuse for the genocide† (BBC News). The Hutu extremists feared the R PF, a secret Tutsi resistance army, and needed to get rid of them, they now had their excuse. The 100 days of genocide began on April 6, 1994, when the Hutu leaders from several groups united and set up roadblocks and immediately began slaughtering Tutsis and even neutral Hutus less than an hour after word of the plane crash got out (BBC News). One of the major issues with this mindset, besides the fact that they were committing genocide, was that the racial differences between the Hutus and Tutsis were mostly arbitrary (History.com). The two groups were so interracially mixed that it was nearly impossible to tell them apart, and citizens needed ID cards with their ethnicity in order to classify them. Researchers even tried measuring nose lengths in order to categorize people to one group of the other. According to one researcher, â€Å"This was Third Reich stuff† (Tinline). The entire reason for the terror was capricious, caused only by fear of one group who wanted action an d knew how to cause it. This is the first step of genocide, which might one day lead to the last step of humanity. As usual, history continues to repeat itself because of the fundamental ways humans think about each other, which leads to the second step to