Implications
Firstly, my analysis has demonstrated the extent to which toxification is a
stronger indicator of genocidal early warning than dehumanisation. Under
Stanton’s dehumanisation stage of genocide, he suggests that for prevention:
local and international leaders should condemn the use of hate speech, and
leaders who use it should be banned from international travel (2016). If this was
implemented then you would have to look at some of the speech used by people
such as not only Donald Trump and Vladmir Putin, but countless other heads of
states all over the world. Alternatively, if you change hate speech for toxification,
it would provide a more accurate early warning indicator due to uncertainty over
what is considered hate speech. In this implications section, I will provide my
suggestions for what actions should be taken, under a toxifying lens, against
people using toxifying language to highlight early warnings and prevent
genocide.
One of the most important reasons to study genocide is for the prevention
of future ones, through the means of education. In particular, noticing early
warnings and preventing the genocide at this point is vital to save the lives of
future victims if no action is taken. Focusing on toxification, this sort of rhetoric
being used so often and so naturally in Rwanda, with no response from any
international organisation, resulted in incredible amounts of damage as 800,000
predominantly Tutsis died. Applying this to the modern day, amidst the current
Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin has adopted toxifying language that has not
been spoken about. In a discussion on NPR radio, Anne Applebaum stated that
Putin refers to his enemies as gnats or flies (2022). This is a clear indication of
early warning under Neilsen’s toxification as flies and gnats have toxic
connotations whereby, they carry disease and can feed on human blood, but
simultaneously can be easily swatted away and killed. This being an early
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