Old Yiddish proverb: "He who lives on hope dies of starvation".

Oh my God, that's fantastic. I'm adopting that.

Thing about ethnic cleansing and genocide is that they always come out of an existing prejudice, yes - for example the Serb/Croat hate, the Tutsi/Hutu hate. But it then needs to be fomented.

The one I always come back to (nervously, because I ride a bicycle, and there's currently a baying herd of shock jocks arousing hatred of cyclists among right-wingers) is Radio Télévision Libres des Milles Collines in Rwanda, a Rwandan radio station which broadcast from July 8, 1993 to July 31, 1994. That's just one year.

Many of the Tutsis who were slashed to death (a million people, in just 100 days; that's three months) were last seen running away from their homes, with transistor radios pressed to their ears, listening to the station's shock jocks telling people that it was time to kill the "cockroaches" (dog whistle for "Tutsis").