Tomorrow on April 6th, it has been 12 years since the start of the Rwandan Genocide. I believe things can get better and that there is such a thing as progress, albeit not necessarily linear, which means things get bad, real bad, sometimes. In order to look ahead, we have to keep in mind what happened in the past, and also what happens elsewhere.

Being in the US, and currently taking a Mass Media Law class, it’s interesting to study free speech issues from a standpoint that is arguably both the standard and an outlier; an outlier, at least when it comes to regulation of hate speech. For example, it was a Big Thing that people got convicted for incitement to genocide, while in most European countries, hate speech regulation is a de facto standard. If looking ahead, how can we reach consensus on these issues? Should we? Or is it enough (hopefully) to judge on a case-by-case basis?