They Want Us to Hate Each Other

 Immaculée Ilibagiza was born in Rwanda in 1972. As a teenager, she went to school one day and noticed that her teacher was taking attendance a bit differently than she had done in the past. It was the first time she realized that she was a Tutsi, and that most of her classmates were Hutus

That Incident Did Not Happen by Accident

• In 1993, the Hutu-led Rwandan government lent its support to a new broadcast service called RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines).
• The content on RTLM was characterized by a sharply anti-Tutsi slant.
• Announcers frequently referred to Tutsis as "cockroaches" that needed to be exterminated.

Polarization is Power

• Throughout history, unscrupulous people have used division to manipulate entire populations
• The designers of the Rwandan genocide understood that if they could isolate an identity group and characterize it as a vengeful, duplicitous enemy, they could consolidate their own power and motivate members of their target audience to do virtually anything for them
• In today's America (and to a great extent, throughout the rest of the world), people are clamoring for meaning and are finding purpose in fomenting political conflict
• People are so desperate to find purpose that they will grasp at anything that might remotely qualify as an injustice
• When Joe Biden and mainstream media outlets launched their "pandemic of the unvaccinated" campaign, their aim was to polarize us
• They sought to isolate, target, and cast blame on anyone who objected to being shot up with an experimental drug that had dubious benefits and potentially dangerous side-effects

How Can We Interrupt That Dynamic?

• As long as we continue to fall back on the us/them paradigm, we will remain highly susceptible to manipulation
• In the current political climate, we might consider looking beyond the labels and beginning to engage each other as flesh-and-blood human beings
• Four guidelines to help us to move in the right direction

Be aware of the polarization dynamic

• Understanding and acknowledging that powerful people want us to hate each other allows us to break down our habitual ways of thinking, speaking, and interacting with the people who disagree with us.

Stop with the name calling

• Do you want to fight, or do you actually want to convert people to your point of view?

Look for the humanity in other people

• In any conversation that involves disagreement, look for the positive intentions in others.
• Even delusional people are usually motivated by some positive intention, even if it's misguided. Do your best not to condemn the person or their intention; instead, wish that they might eventually see the truth.

Be willing to risk failure

• Some people are simply not open to the idea of seeking common ground (yet). Accept that you won't always get through, and don't let it keep you from trying again.
• In today's America, we seem to operate from two entirely different sets of facts.

https://brownstone.org/articles/they-want-us-to-hate-each-other/