"as we have always noticed in history the bad things start with speech, bad speech"

This morning, on CBC's Sunday Edition, Michael Enright did a 24 minute interview with former Ontario Premier Bob Rae who is Prime Minister Trudeau's special envoy to Myanmar.  It is the best, fairest and most insightful thing I've read or heard about the horrendous situation of murder and oppression and forcing the Islamic Rohingya population of Myanmar into perilous refugee - to call them camps would be to white wash what they are - in Bangladesh. 

The whole interview is worth listening to, Rae's insights into it are certainly deeper than you're likely to hear on the American media, which is more about affixing blame and taking sides, dressing down and condemning such people as Aung San Suu Kyi, who are hardly in a position to do what Western people sitting in safety and comfort on North America imagine is a practical possibility.  Really, we've all got a lot more in common with Donald Trump's Caspar Milquetoast heroics than we'd ever like to believe. 

The highly edited, truncated, text of the interview given at the website cut some of the most important things that Rae said,  I have to wonder if it's because what he said didn't go along with the code of liberalish ethics in pointing out the absolutely vital role that hate speech, especially as magnified in the media, especially the social media plays in generating violence and genocide.   I've done a quick transcription of that section of the interview.

Michael Enright: The rest of the world thinks of Buddhism as a religion of tolerance and peace. Where does the bigotry towards the Rohingya Muslim population come from?

Bob Rae:  I think, at it's best, every religion is a religion of tolerance and peace.   Certainly, that's a common position of most religion I'm aware of.  The problem is that I think the Buddhist population in Myanmar, as in Sri Lanka where I also worked a few years ago,  feels besieged by a large population of India, which is a Hindu nation and similarly it's a reality that's a feeling, plus now the additional factor of the relationship with Islam, which since 9/11 has become much more complicated and difficult.

And, also, I have to say it, most people would agree with me, there's also a racial factor. The Rohingya are dark-skinned people and the stuff that's said about them is racist, as well as being based on Islamophobia.  But it's also a basic feeling   it's a feeling that they're strangers in their own land. They're stateless. It's the largest stateless population in the world. And that is a terrible situation to be in, because it means you have nowhere that you can safely call your home.

Michael Enright: Like the Kurds, in a way. 

Bob Rae: Well, the Kurds have a place to live, They live in certain places, 

Michael Enright: Yeah, 

Bob Rae: But, I mean, they're politically very challenged.  The more closest analogy would be the Roma population in Europe, who often have the same level of racism and animosity and stereotyping of the worst kind.   And the same thing is true of the Rohingya in Myanmar and now Bangladesh.  And you also have this in the social media. 

Facebook has become a major carrier of hate speech, as has Twitter.  And they're both widely followed, particularly Facebook in Myanmar.  It's widely followed and you know, you have these very strongly held views which are very nasty in the way they're expressed directed at the Rohingya and that's creating a climate of  of real fear.  And as we have always noticed in history the bad things start with speech, bad speech.

Next month, on April 7th, is the the 24th anniversary of  when the attempted genocide of the Tutsi population in Rwanda began.  We can date the beginning of it because, if nothing else, than that is the date on which one of the largest radio station in the country told Hutus to start murdering the Tutsi people.  Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, was set up by those who instigated and directed the genocide, making it popular with a local version of crude, obscene American style shock jock programming mixed with American style hate-talk formatting, the very kind of stuff that has had such a role in reviving the crudest and most extreme forms of hatred in the United States.    The kind of stuff championed by the same boutique and bookstall liberals and moderates who so gleefully decided that Aung San Suu Kyi was now shit when she failed to meet their expectations in expression of outrage against the predictable outcome of encouraging the flourishing of hate speech.

Since they are seldom mentioned in what's written about it, there was another group targeted by the radio station, the Twa, more often called Pygmy population in Rwanda, who were accused of siding with the Tutsis.  A third of that people were murdered in the 100 days of genocidal violence.

One of the biggest real crimes of Bill Clinton was his administration refusing to take out the transmitting tower of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines even as it was broadcasting instructions telling the murderers where Tutsis were taking refuge so they could murder them.  "Free speech - free press" was the excuse for doing next to nothing to impede the murders.  No doubt he was afraid he might take flack from the "free speech" industry if he'd violated the sanctity of the media, putting that above the lives of those who were about to be murdered on its instruction.

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In looking up stuff on the two posts I did about the overrated comedian Lenny Bruce, I came across the interesting fact that his lawyer in his last obscenity trial was the famous "civil liberties" movie industry hack-lawyer Ephraim London.  One of London's accomplishments was getting his client out on bail during the appeal, during which Lenny Bruce took the opportunity to OD on morphine and die.

It is a pungent irony that one of the most famous cases London was involved in was when he filed Lillian Hellman's lawsuit against Mary McCarthy when Mary McCarthy told the truth that Lillian Hellman was an habitual liar on Dick Cavett's show.   I find it entirely in keeping with the "civil liberties" industry that one of its heroic legal figures would be involved with financially ruining Mary McCarthy for telling the truth about the lies of another hero of the pseudo-left.   One of the things I've read about that case was that Hellman and her lawyer knew that she had the financial resources to keep a case going while it would likely break Mary McCarthy who was not wealthy.  I imagine London made a lot of money while representing the film industry.