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‘The Holocaust did not start with the gas chambers – it started with hate speech,’ declared former United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng in a UN video message ahead of Genocide Prevention Day in December 2019. ‘The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda started with hate speech.’ Dieng explained that genocide is a process: even when that end point seems remote, the process often begins with language that marks out a people as dangerous, alien or less than human.

Alice Wairimu Nderitu, who succeeded Dieng as UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, agreed with her predecessor:

‘Genocides do not start with bullets or machetes, they begin with hate speech… The Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina began with constant nationalist propaganda throughout party-controlled media channels demonising the Bosnian Muslim population … While the use of social media and digital platforms to spread hatred is relatively recent, the weaponisation of public discourse for political gain is unfortunately not new. As history continues to show, hate speech coupled with disinformation can lead to stigmatisation, discrimination and large-scale violence.’

‘Genocides do not start with bullets or machetes, they begin with hate speech… The Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina began with constant nationalist propaganda throughout party-controlled media channels demonising the Bosnian Muslim population … While the use of social media and digital platforms to spread hatred is relatively recent, the weaponisation of public discourse for political gain is unfortunately not new. As history continues to show, hate speech coupled with disinformation can lead to stigmatisation, discrimination and large-scale violence.’

As we turn our attention to the new India, we find that hate speech has grown in the years of the country’s stewardship by Narendra Modi into a pandemic of terrifying proportions.

It Started with Words : The Epidemic of Hate Speech in New India, Harsh Mander, Speaking Tiger Books LLP, 2026.

How does hate speech build a portal to societal violence? Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political thinker who fled Nazi persecution, showed how totalitarian politics begins by isolating a targeted........

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