On 9 December 1948, just three years after the end of World War II, the United Nations General Assembly - determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past - unanimously adopted The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. 

Did it bring about an end to genocide or have we forgotten and repeated the mistakes of the past?

At the Holocaust Memorial Day service at the War Memorial in the centre of Warwick, those present heard powerful testimony from Leamington Spa resident Maurice Henderson who experienced the 1994 genocide in Rwanda first hand.  It was the first time he had spoken publicly about the horror he had witnessed for several years, but it was palpably clear that 20 years later he was still haunted by it. He reflected on the origin of this tragedy in which an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in just over 100 days.  Most of the dead were Tutsis and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutu.  The two ethnic groups speak the same language, inhabit the same areas and follow the same traditions.  When the Belgium colonialists arrived in 1916, they did not start with a blank page.  They used the history of disagreement between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis to divide Rwandans and help them control their new territory.  They produced identity cards classifying people according to their ethnicity and favoured the Tutsi who, for the next 20 years, enjoyed better jobs and educational opportunities. When Belgium relinquished power and granted Rwanda independence in 1962, the majority Hutus took their place.  Over subsequent decades, motivated by their righteous victimhood, the Hutu portrayed the Tutsis as scapegoats in every crisis. Then, in April 1994, the Rwandan President’s plane was shot down.  Paul Kagame the leader of a Tutsi rebel group and the current President of Rwanda was blamed for carrying out the attack.  Mr Kagame vehemently denies this, maintaining that it was the work of Hutu extremists aiming to provide an excuse for genocide.  Whoever was behind the killing, its effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.  The Presidential Guard immediately initiated a campaign of retribution. The then-governing party, the MRND, had a youth wing, weapons and hit lists were handed out to local groups.  A radio station, RTLM, and newspapers were set up, urging people to “weed out the cockroaches” and the names of prominent people to be killed were read out and listed in print. Soldiers and police officers encouraged ordinary citizens to take part. Neighbours killed neighbours and some husbands even killed their Tutsi wives. Even priests and nuns have been convicted of killing people, including some who sought shelter in churches. 

Less than 50 years later in Rwanda, as in Nazi Germany, a sense of righteous victimhood and the dehumanisation of a minority led normal people to do unspeakable things on the orders of those in positions of authority. 

This week it was my turn to facilitate the latest session in the Harkness Discussion Programme.  Harkness is a student focused method of teaching that develops oracy, and the programme encourages Year 10 pupils to engage with curated source material related to social issues. My session was titled ‘The Implications of the Milgram Experiment for Moral Responsibility’.  Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram’s famous study posed the question: Would people obey orders, even if they believed doing so would harm another person?  Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal. The experiments controversially found that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant in the original study going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450.

Year 10s conclusion?  Whatever the flaws in Milgram’s methodology a significant proportion of people will obey an authority figure even when the order goes against their values or social expectations. Milgram’s findings are supported by history, and as he later went on to ‘demonstrate’ obedience is even more likely when the authority figure represents a paradigm/ideology with which the participants agree.  In the case of Milgram’s experiment, that paradigm was the progressive power of science embodied by Yale.  In the case of the holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda the ideology was that the Jews and the Tutsi were “Untermensch” and to blame for the ills of Germany and the Hutu. 

At university, I studied Stephen Lukes’ ‘Power a Radical View’.  According to Lukes there are three faces of power. He argued that power was about much more than the ability to get people to do something that they would not otherwise do, which Lukes identified as the first face of power.  Lukes’ second face of power is the ability to set the agenda and to prevent certain issues from being seriously considered.  The third face of power is preference shaping, is the ability to manipulate the wishes and desires of others without them realising, such that they do what you want because they want to. 

The Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda were examples of the third face of power.  Using propaganda, a ruling elite was able to shape the wishes and desires of the majority such that when commanded by those in authority to persecute a minority, they ‘willingly’ became the vehicles of genocide. 

Surely something like this could not happen today.  Modern technology means that every individual citizen has access to a volume of information unthinkable in the 1940s and still impossible in the last decade of the 20^th Century.  Surely in the age of social media no one, not even a totalitarian government, can exert sufficient control over information networks to shape the wishes and desires of its people to such an extent that they will obey an authority figure even when that order goes against their values or social expectations. In the 21^st century, a quick Google search is all that is needed to debunk propaganda scapegoating and dehumanising a minority.

In 2018, a UN fact finding mission concluded that by disseminating hate-filled content, Facebook had played a ‘determining role’ in an ethnic cleansing campaign in Myanmar in which between 7 and 25 thousand Rohingya were killed and a further 700,000 were expelled from the country.

At the start of 2017 there were about 1 million Rohingya in Myanmar (formerly Burma) the majority of whom live in the Rakhine region of the country.  They have their own language and culture and see themselves as descendants of Arab traders and other groups who have been in the region for generations.  The government of Myanmar see them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, denies them citizenship, and refusing to recognise them as people, excluded them from the 2014 census. Since the 1970s the Rohingya had suffered severe discrimination and occasional outbursts of violence at the hands of the governing junta and the Buddhist majority.  The release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratisation of the country and her election as Myanmar’s leader gave rise to the hope that the Rohingya’s situation might improve. Political liberalisation was accompanied by greater market freedom – including, crucially in the telecoms sector.  Outside influence had been kept to a minimum during the years of military rule, but prices quickly dropped, and mobile technology became increasingly accessible. Most of the big apps – including Google – didn’t support Burmese text, Facebook did.  Soon out of a population of 50 million, Myanmar had 18 million regular users, and the platform had become the main source of news in the country. The combination of social media released unfettered in an unprepared society riddled with ethnic tension led to an increase in anti-Rohingya violence inspired by fake news. Then in 2016-17 a small Islamist organisation known as ARSA (the Arakan and Rohingya Salvation Army) launched a series of attacks intended to establish a separate Muslim state in Arakan and Rakhine.  In response the government ordered a series of “clearance operations”.  Fuelled by intense hatred of all Rohingya the troops were backed by local Buddhist mobs.  The hatred in turn was fomented by anti-Rohingya propaganda spread on Facebook.  In addition to reports of actual ARSA attacks, Facebook accounts were inundated with reports of imagined atrocities, rumours of planned terrorist attacks, and claims that most Rohingya were not really people of Myanmar but immigrants from Bangladesh flooding into the country to spearhead an anti-Buddhist Jihad. Many commentators have argued that the scale and violence of the response to the ARSA was a product of the propaganda, propaganda which Facebook algorithms played an important role in spreading.

But is it justified to place so much blame on Facebook and its algorithms? In 1994 Hutu extremists used radio and print to call on people to massacre Tutsis, is it reasonable to blame the technology of radio or Gutenberg and the printing press for the genocide that followed? Surely not, genocide is fermented and perpetrated by flesh and blood extremists who publish and broadcast hate speak, not the mediums they employ to distribute it, and by the same logic Facebook cannot be held responsible for events in Myanmar. This defence ignores the fact that social media algorithms are fundamentally different from the printing press and radio sets.  Social media algorithms make active decisions about which content to recommend and share.  Whilst the algorithms social media uses to suggest content to their users vary all the time, one thing is consistent, they are programmed to recommend material that will keep you looking at your screen. More users spending more time on the platform means more advertising revenue and more data harvested and available for sale.  The business models of Facebook and other social media platforms rely on maximising user engagement and as the data demonstrates due to a quirk of human psychology – the negativity bias - we are drawn to that which makes us feel angry and outraged over that which makes us feel calm and happy and therefore it is hate filled conspiracy theory that generates engagement.  Consequently, in Myanmar, moderate views were drowned out by extremist hate speak because as Amnesty International found ‘algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content on the Facebook platform which incited violence, hatred and discrimination against the Rohingya’.

The Rohingya Genocide shows the optimistic view, that increased access to information made possible by the internet and social media would make it harder for extremists to shape preferences is at best naïve.  Propaganda ministries, secret police and networks of informers are no longer needed to scapegoat and dehumanise a minority. Algorithms programmed to maximise user engagement, and the negativity bias did the work for extremists like the Buddhist monk Wirathu in Myanmar. 

That this could happen in a young nation that had recently been a military dictatorship is one thing, but surely the widespread sharing of hate speak, and acceptance of racism is impossible in a modern pluralist democracy?  Findings from the polling company Craft that form part of a Channel 4 report, ‘Gen Z: Trends, Truth and Trust’ indicate that we cannot afford to be complacent.  According to the “deeply worrying” study 58% of Gen Z (those born between the mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s), your sons and our pupils, said they considered social media posts from friends to be as – and sometimes more – trusted than established journalism and 42% of young men considered influencers like Andrew Tate worthy of a similar level of trust. 

In a world where people place so much trust in social media content, and the algorithms that curate that content proactively promote hate speak at the expense of truth and moderation in order to maximise user engagement and profit, it is vital that we do not simply accept recommended posts and auto-played videos as fact.  Maintaining curiosity - the desire to ask questions, to discover more, to think critically and make informed judgements has never been more important. It is incumbent on us, as part of a responsibility, to create a better world around us, to have the courage to challenge the views and posts of our friends and the perseverance to demand to see the evidence that supports the claims of social media influencers.  In a world where the President of the United States can publicly dismiss the need to provide evidence for his baseless assertions, if we are content to linger in our social media echo chambers rather than remaining actively curious, then we are condemned to repeat the past.