Believing ‘Speech Is Violence’ Justifies Actual Violence By Tom Knighton
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/07/25/believing-speech-is-violence-justifies-actual-violence/
When an outlet like PJ Media points out that saying “speech is violence” justifies actual violence, it gets dismissed because, after all, it’s our speech that’s supposedly violent. We’re the ones who stand up for the First Amendment on a daily basis, and the Left doesn’t like that.
Of course, claiming “speech is violence” can be used to justify violence isn’t controversial. Anyone with half a brain knows that. At least now an outlet that’s generally on the Left, The Atlantic, is pointing out the idiocy of that line of thinking:
This is why the idea that speech is violence is so dangerous. It tells the members of a generation already beset by anxiety and depression that the world is a far more violent and threatening place than it really is. It tells them that words, ideas, and speakers can literally kill them. Even worse: At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence.
A few days after the riot that shut down Yiannopoulos’s talk at Berkeley, in which many people were punched, beaten, and pepper sprayed by masked protesters, the main campus newspaper ran five op-ed essays by students and recent alumni under the series title “Violence as self defense.” One excerpt: “Asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.”
The implication of this expansive use of the word “violence” is that “we” are justified in punching and pepper-spraying “them,” even if all they did was say words. We’re just defending ourselves against their “violence.” But if this way of thinking leads to actual violence, and if that violence triggers counter-violence from the other side (as happened a few weeks later at Berkeley), then where does it end? In the country’s polarized democracy, telling young people that “words are violence” may in fact lead to a rise in real, physical violence.
Free speech, properly understood, is not violence. It is a cure for violence.
That last sentence is key. CONTINUE AT SITE
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