“Silence is Violence”.
No. It’s not.
Silence – if you catch me silent at all – is me keeping my mouth shut while I figure out what I think, to say nothing of what I’m going to say. Your freedom of speech doesn’t give you the right to tell me what I’m going to say.
If your response to that is “there is only one thing to say”, and that’s to agree with your point of view – then most likely you’re trying to logroll and shame people into knocking off all that pesky thinking, and just acquiescing.[1] If your position is worthy, I may eventually agree with you. Not doing so, in and of itself, doesn’t make me the immoral one.
Logically, it’s Orwellian – silence is the opposite of violence. Morally, it’s worse than Orwellian.
If your response is “that’s how Germans reacted when Jews were getting hauled off” – well, there’s your opportunity to convince me that the issue we face is, actually, that clear-cut.
If it’s not? If there are some facets to the issue at hand over which reasonable people may debate?
If you were to tell a spouse or a significant other “if you’re not verbally acquiescing with my point of view, you are party to evil”, a therapist would call you an emotional abuser.
And they’d be right.
Logrolling is no substitute for a convincing argument.
Unfortunately, people using this form of logrolling, gaslighting chanting point aren’t trying to “convince”, and they’re not trying to provoke thought.
Silence is resistance and resistance will not be tolerated.
Ah, um…..unless it is THE RESISTANCE which is not resistance at all. I mean resistance to Trump is not like resistance, oh hell, you know what I mean.
I’m a big “R” Republican that can be described as a small “l” libertarian and big “C” Contrarian (with the ability to go from 0 to ALL CAPS “CONTRARIAN” in about .32 seconds). A great way to get me to stop listening to you and support the opposite of your position is to try and browbeat me into acquiescing, especially if you start throwing “isms” in my direction.
Even the most sincere believer that “silence is violence” can be convinced of their error by a very simple demonstration showing that silence is not, in fact, the same thing as violence.
All this anti-White racism is really effective in convincing me when it comes from wealthy Negro celebrities, academic elitists and frothy mouthed Anarcho-Marxist terrorists.
Totally convinced me to be as vocal as physically possible.