There are moments in the study of genocide denial when one stumbles upon a text so revealing, so recklessly self-incriminating, that it becomes a researcher’s equivalent of Archimedes stepping out of the bathtub screaming Eureka. ALSO READ: Why war on Genocide denial will be a lifelong struggle For me, that moment arrived on December 10, 2025, delivered not by an archivist nor through a declassified memo, but via a single X-message written by Jean-François Le Drian, a French author, conspiracy theorist, and devoted disciple of the intellectual underworld of Hutu Power. ALSO READ: The persistence of the Hutu-Power movement and its implications for Rwanda For years, I had dismissed him as digital noise; static from the far-right echo chamber. His writings possessed the synthetic clumsiness of a bot, the predictable irritability of a man allergic to facts, and the unmistakable stench of machetocratic ideology: a worldview in which logic is replaced by the blade, and words impatiently yearn to become swords. ALSO READ: Hutu Power’s role in planning the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi But his December 10 message - addressed grandly to the President of the United States - was a jackpot. A sudden illumination. A gift to anyone researching genocidal discourse. Because in less than a page, Le Drian unintentionally exposed the entire architecture of denial: the myth-making, the manipulation, the emotional targeting, and the pathological obsession with reversing perpetrator and victim. This is where discourse analysis becomes indispensable. It was the substance of genocidal propaganda condensed in its untainted form. As Ruth Wodak, a leading scholar of the field warns, “The language of denial and manipulation does not simply distort reality; it attempts to replace it” (Wodak, 2001, The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual). That is precisely the game Le Drian is playing. His text is not simply awkward—it is an attempt at reality substitution. Verbal surprise attack Le Drian opens his message with fake seriousness: “Subject: Request for the declassification of documents proving Paul Kagame’s involvement in the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana and call for firm action against his conduct.” ALSO READ: Habyarimana's role in planning, implementing 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi At first glance, one expects a thorough clarification of a seemingly serious matter. Instead, Le Drian completes a linguistic ambush: he weaponizes the subject line to activate the core justification used by genocidaires since 1994—namely that the Genocide against the Tutsi was a “spontaneous reaction” to a plane crash supposedly engineered by the RPF. Le Drian made lexical choices to make his introduction of the message appear neutral but are calculated to galvanize shared mental models of genocide deniers and ideologues. Le Drian’s subject line is a coded pointer to fellow deniers. It reveals the narrative frame, regardless of the actual facts. Then again, before one can even examine his claim, he overturns into an entirely unrelated theatre: the fall of Uvira to AFC/M23 on December 9, the very day the world marked 77 years of the Genocide Convention. Thus, in classical propagandist tradition, his subject and his intention are unrelated. His aim is psychological operations, not truth. His message was based on the assumption that Americans wouldn’t notice his manipulative discourse. Le Drian begins his emotional seduction of the U.S. President: “Mr. President, I am writing to draw your urgent attention to the conduct of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who, in my view, is openly mocking your authority...” The phrase “mocking your authority” is a textbook manipulation. It follows what Patrick Charaudeau calls “the persuasive strategy of narcissistic flattery,” whereby the speaker constructs a perceived slight against the addressee to provoke retaliatory emotion. Here, Le Drian seeks to place Donald Trump in a state of performative injury. He wants President Trump to feel—not merely diplomatically challenged but personally disrespected and humiliated. It is the same technique used by Hutu Power propagandists in the early 1990s, who repeatedly told Hutu citizens that their “honor” was being “mocked” by Tutsi existence. The mechanism has not changed; only the audience has. The underlying conviction is that the U.S. President is infinitely manipulable, a sheer marionette awaiting activation through carefully created indignation. The arrogance is amazing. Le Drian’s worldview is a colonial delusion. He believes Paris as the mother of truth, Washington as the gullible child who must be guided. Masking the genocidal intent His manipulation style of writing is thoroughgoing and premeditated. Continuing his psychological operation, Le Drian writes: “...a blatant display of contempt for diplomatic principles and regional stability. Such behavior cannot be tolerated or left unpunished.” This is the rhetoric of a man in a war-room. He is not an analyst or a journalist. He is a steadfast mobilizer. It is, however, very fascinating - to note how Le Drian writes as though President Trump and Americans can’t sense flawless manipulations. Le Drian’s prose carries a quiet supposition: that Americans are easily influenced, easily confused, and generally incapable of recognizing rhetorical manipulation. His tone is practically pedagogical - a senior European wise man teaching the naïve American president about “African complexities.” The arrogance is suffocating. He highlights that “tensions have intensified” without specifying why or how, as though Trump - or any American - requires a simplified bedtime story version of Central African history. He claims Rwanda is pursuing “a revival of open conflict,” making no mention of decades of attacks by FDLR militias. He insists everything is “well known” - as if the audience is too lazy to verify facts, too uncritical to interrogate omissions. Jacques Semelin, in Purify and Destroy, describes the genocidaire mentality as “a project of moral inversion, where those who commit violence imagine themselves as righteous protectors.” That is precisely what Le Drian is restructuring. The insincerity is enormous: He accuses others of contempt while whitewashing the architects of the 1994 genocide. He invokes regional stability while cheerleading for FDLR – a génocidaire militia responsible for massacres against Congolese Tutsi and Banyamulenge. This is real moral acrobatics of machetocratic intellectualism. Now comes the central dogma: “Today, it is an open secret: the international community widely recognizes that Paul Kagame ordered the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana...” This phrase alone is a doctoral thesis in genocidaires' discourse. By stating something is an “open secret” and therefore public knowledge, is an effective manipulative approach for evading the burden of proof. Le Drian claims universal recognition where none exists. He asserts consensus where only fringe conspiracy circulates. He turns falsity into folklore. His “open secret” is the oldest lie in the denialist playbook—a rhetorical corpse that should have been buried two decades ago, yet is reanimated whenever needed to justify hatred. Le Drian escalates: “The time has come to permanently disqualify this mass criminal and hold him fully accountable.” It is a red flag call—a transition from speech to action. In genocidal speechmaking, they signal a call for punitive violence. For Le Drian, “justice” is not legal adjudication. It is the political destruction of Kagame, and by extension, RPF, and by deeper extension, the Tutsi survivors whose continued existence contradicts his ideological cosmology. His appeal is not for evidence, but for vengeance. The performative nature of his prose is glaring. He speaks of peace but never to the actual conditions that threaten it. He references “the fragile region” yet sidesteps France’s historic complicity in destabilizing it. He warns of a “potential explosion” while refusing to acknowledge that the region’s ongoing trauma is rooted in the unpunished genocide masterminds who fled into Zaire under French military protection. Every omission is strategic. Not a single time - does Le Drian mention FDLR. Not once does he refer to Hutu Power ideology poisoning DR Congo. Nowhere does he acknowledge that the very individuals who massacred Tutsi families in Rwanda, in 1994, now operate from the forests of eastern DR Congo. ALSO READ: Why genocide ideology doesn’t dissolve three decades after dispersion of genocidaires Le Drian’s silence in discourse is neither accidental nor benign. It is a shield. He protects FDLR from scrutiny by erasing them entirely. He shields France from accountability by pretending that FDLR has no history. He shields his own argument from collapse by pretending the central actors do not exist. This is the semantic tactic of the accomplice in a crime - to make the perpetrator fade into the background so that the victim-turned-survivor can be recast as the source of all instability. It is a familiar pattern in genocide denial: the killers disappear, the resisters become the problem, and the world is invited to forget the uncomfortable parts. His omissions are not gaps; they are weapons. ALSO READ: Linda Melvern’s new book exposes patterns of Genocide denial This is not an oversight; it is a deliberate evacuation of context. What he didn’t say is more ideologically illuminating than what he avoided. By removing FDLR from the narrative, Le Drian constructs a world in which Rwanda’s security concerns appear delusional, unwarranted, or too aggressive. And why does he dare to do this? Because he assumes that the American reader will not ask the obvious question: “If Rwanda intervened militarily, whom was it fighting?” Le Drian’s message is built on an assumption which has grown into a belief. He is certain Americans will not detect how his sentences are constructed to redirect culpability away from genocidaires and onto the very government that ended the genocide. Perhaps the most grotesque move in Le Drian’s message is the transformation of President Paul Kagame — the man who led the struggle that stopped the genocide — into the architect and engineer of instability. This is not merely distortion; it is, as you note, a continuation of genocide through narrative inversion. It is the scaffolding of future genocidal violence. If the survivor becomes the aggressor, then any harm done to him appears proportionate. If the liberator becomes the threat, then the genocidaire operating in the DRC becomes the misunderstood rebel. This rhetorical inversion is not an intellectual exercise; it is a blueprint for future bloodshed. Implicating the US government and his ‘victims’ In his instructions-like message to President Trump, Le Drian proceeds with stunning self-importance: “One of the most effective ways to achieve this would be for you to order the complete declassification and public disclosure of all documents and evidence held by the United States...” He is no longer messaging a president; he is commanding a subordinate. France - more precisely, the intellectual debris of Mitterrandism - positions itself as the global custodian of truth, morality, and African history. This is where Achille Mbembe’s analysis is invaluable. In On the Postcolony, Mbembe describes a colonial psyche that “seeks to adjudicate African realities from a distance, granting itself authority while exempting itself from accountability.” Le Drian is the modern emissary of that colonial arrogance. He presumes the U.S. has hidden evidence that supports his myth. But most weirdly, Washington needs Parisian permission to act. Pure delusion wrapped in entitlement. Le Drian continues: “...to expose and condemn those who knew the truth yet chose to remain silent, thereby allowing impunity to persist.” Here, he is accusing the American government of complicity. That statement suggests bureaucrats in Washington covered up the truth—truth that only he, a French conspiracy theorist, claims to possess. He knows what Americans have more than they do. Le Drian’s tactic is to elevate himself from fringe agitator to courageous truth-teller. Le Drian concludes: “Such a decisive action would not only deliver long-overdue justice to the victims...” Here lies the real exposure. The “victims” Le Drian imagines are not the Tutsi whose families were wiped out in 1994 and later in DR Congo. They are not the babies slaughtered in churches or thrown into rivers and mass graves. His victims are not the women hunted in marshes or the survivors scarred for life. No. His “victims” are Bagosora and his ilk; the perpetrators whom the ICTR convicted. In Le Drian’s upturned cosmology: The génocidaires are martyrs and the liberators are criminals; France is above suspicion, the U.S. must conform – and machetes or grenades were instruments of political expression. This is what I have elsewhere called the machetocratic worldview: A belief system where violence is virtue, where truth is optional, where denial is duty, and where word becomes sword with the addition of a single letter. Erasing people’s identity There is a particular cruelty in Le Drian’s message that must be exposed with precision: his insistence—without evidence, logic, or historical grounding—that President Kagame is the mastermind of the conflict in eastern DR Congo. This is not merely a lie; it is gaslighting elevated to geopolitics. It is an attempt to force the world to question what it sees, deny what it knows, and accept the French ideological script as a substitute for observable reality. This inversion becomes even more outrageous when placed against the backdrop of the Washington process and the peace deal, both of which implicitly acknowledge something Le Drian desperately tries to hide: that the Government of DR Congo is negotiating with AFC/M23 because the latter are Congolese. ALSO READ: Full text of Washington Accords signed by Kagame, Tshisekedi The same recognition has guided the Doha Framework for a Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Government of DR Congo and AFC/M23—in Qatar, where the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the African Union, and U.S. mediators have treated the movement not as foreign pretenders, but as domestic actors with legitimate political and human rights grievances. ALSO READ: How the Washington Accords implementation is a do or die deal for the African continent To ignore these ongoing negotiations—meticulously documented, diplomatically supervised, internationally validated—is not an omission. It is an insult. A deliberate attempt to paint the US President, the Emir of Qatar, the African Union, and the entire mediating architecture as incompetent fools unable to see what only French friends of genocidaires— supposedly understand. But the real violence in Le Drian’s message lies in his denial of Congolese identity. His refusal to acknowledge M23 fighters and leaders as bona fide Congolese citizens follows the old FDLR ideological playbook: to de-nationalize the Congolese Tutsi, exclude them from political belonging, and justify perpetual persecution. President Tshisekedi adopted this same ideology as a convenient scapegoat for his failures. What he could not solve, he blamed on Rwanda; what he could not govern, he militarized; what he could not understand, he labelled foreign. This refusal to recognize the Congolese Tutsi as Congolese is not insanity—it is ideology. A worldview inherited from the genocidal universe of 1994, where citizenship is denied, identity is dismantled, and belonging is withdrawn at will. Le Drian, in amplifying this worldview, reveals himself not as a commentator, but as an ideological trafficker—still exporting hatred, still teaching the world to see the Congolese Tutsi as foreigners on their own land. Such gaslighting is not merely dishonest. It is dangerous. It perpetuates the very conditions that have fuelled decades of bloodshed. And for Le Drian, it is essential: once the world accepts his illusion, the truth becomes expendable, and those who survive genocide become the suspects rather than the victims. Thanks to Le Drian One must be grateful to Le Drian for the convenience. He saved scholars hours of decoding by exposing himself fully. His letter: replays every genocidaire's talking point, deploys every manipulative rhetorical strategy, underestimates every audience, and confirms every hypothesis— researchers have long proposed about denialist psychology. In the process, he forgets to mention the Congolese army (FARDC), the Burundian army, and FDLR’s well-documented massacres against the Banyamulenge—because their crimes do not exist in his ideological universe. ALSO READ: Scholar tells how Burundi, FDLR connived in DR Congo village massacre This is not an omission. It is an ideological design. As Semelin notes: “Genocidal ideology is not merely a set of beliefs; it is an organized blindness.” Therefore, one has to ask: do genocidaires' sympathizers still believe they can manipulate global opinion? One, Le Drian thinks if he flatters an American president, he can rewrite African history. His kind mistakes Western geopolitical concerns for intellectual gullibility. That is why one can believe the U.S.A is an empty vessel waiting for French gossip. Two, they are confined in cognitive fossilization. Their worldview halted or froze in 1994 — no evidence since has penetrated. Three, many of them rely on racism. They assume Western audiences are prone to believe the worst about Africans — especially African leaders who reject subservience. Lastly, these fanatics need the falsehoods to live. Without reversal of guilt, the genocidal narrative flops or collapse — and with it, their identity. That is why Le Drian’s letter is not just a text; it is a leftover. A relic if not a fossil of the ideological dinosaur that massacred a million people. And yet, he believes he can manipulate the United States into resurrecting the ghosts of Hutu Power. A French conspiracy enthusiast lecturing Washington about “moral clarity” while defending genocidaires is like: an arsonist asking the fire department to apologize for extinguishing his flames; or a thief accusing the police of property damage for recovering stolen goods; or a machete-wielding ideologue accusing his victims of “provoking the blade.” The world must read his letter not as a threat, but as a warning. Not because Le Drian is judicious or powerful — but because his worldview still circulates in quiet corners of Europe, Western think tanks, and political networks that confuse colonial nostalgia with historical expertise. The Genocide against the Tutsi did not end in 1994. Its rhetoric, metaphors and denial continue. Its supporters continue to hoodwink the unsuspecting. Its machetocratic intellectuals continue to test the world’s gullibility. But unlike 1994, the world now has: archives, evidence, survivors who speak, scholars who write, judges who ruled several cases—and citizens who refuse to be fooled. In addition, no amount of manipulative discourse—from Paris or anywhere else—will overturn that truth.
