{"id":20368,"date":"2021-01-18T11:37:51","date_gmt":"2021-01-18T16:37:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20368"},"modified":"2021-01-18T11:37:51","modified_gmt":"2021-01-18T16:37:51","slug":"the-rhetoric-of-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2021\/01\/18\/the-rhetoric-of-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rhetoric of Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I\u2019ve been thinking about the rally on January 6th\u2014the one before violence, the part where there were speakers and listeners, not trespassers and looters. I believe it\u2019s clear, now, that some portion of the crowd at the rally on January 6th had come with the intent to violently overthrow the duly-elected government of our country. And it\u2019s likely that some portion of the crowd had come to put political pressure on the duly-elected government of our country. I have no idea what the proportion was, and I don\u2019t think anybody else does, either.\r\n<p>And the people who spoke, too: some of them presumably were aware that there were plans in place to assassinate the Vice-President and the Speaker, and some of them presumably were not. Some of them might have been briefed on security concerns, but evidently the people who decide what to brief people on were not really concerned, so people might not have been briefed at all, or might have been briefed in a way that downplayed the actual risk. Some people who spoke may have expected the crowd to chant and then disperse; some people presumably knew that was unlikely.\r\n<p>And the thing is\u2026 our political rhetoric is full of things that sound, in the context of a plan to murder legislators, like they are inciting violence. People talk loosely about <i>fighting<\/i> and <i>resistance<\/i> and even <i>revolution<\/i>. Tim Kaine, in his 2016 VP acceptance speech referred to \u201cbattles I've been fighting my whole life\u201d and lauded \u201ctough people\u201d and hoped to \u201cbattle back against the dark forces of division.\u201d He described Hillary Clinton as \u201cbattle-tested, rock-solid, up for anything, never backing down.\u201d He used the word <i>fight<\/i> seven times, talking about himself, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. He used the word <i>battle<\/i> five times, including saying that Hillary Clinton \u201cbattled Congressional Republicans\u201d. I don\u2019t mean to criticize Senator Kaine, who I don\u2019t think has been particularly pugnacious; I chose his speech to typify mainstream political rhetoric because I think he\u2019s pretty clearly plumb spang in the mainstream.\r\n<p>So when I see, f\u2019r\u2019ex, the Daily Show clip of <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/nz-zWeqtVo8\">Heroes of the Insurrection<\/a>, it\u2019s very difficult for me to assess whether the particular phrases in question are incitements to the violence that was being planned or not. If the speakers were encouraging the conspirators (meaning, here, those people who were planning the violent assault on the Capitol) to \u201ctake back our rights\u201d and \u201ctake a stand\u201d and \u201ckeep fighting\u201d, that\u2019s very different, it seems to me, than encouraging the ralliers (meaning those people who were planning to attend a rally and pressure their representatives politically). Which speakers were knowingly speaking to which audiences is not obvious to me, and may never be certain. Some of the language was absolutely intemperate anyway, of course, but some of it was in keeping with the mainstream of our political rhetoric, if only the audience was in that context, too.\r\n<p>Is the rhetoric of violence, in the context of ordinary politics, dangerous? I don\u2019t think so. But is it ideal? Is there a better way?\r\n<p> I am writing this on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a day when we as a nation talk about, and perhaps attempt to live up to, the principles of the man. We can argue about what precisely those principles were\u2014we probably should argue about that, because it\u2019s important. But one of them, clearly, was the principle of non-violence. The rejection of violence as a tool for good, or a weapon against evil. And it occurs to me that he largely rejects the rhetoric of violence, too\u2014I\u2019m sure I can find lots of exceptions, but I\u2019ve read a lot of sermons where he manages to avoid talking about <i>fights<\/i> and <i>battles<\/i> in talking about the movement. When he says that they will overcome, he often says explicitly that the goal is not to vanquish their oppressors but to love them and live in community with them. That the great struggle is not the struggle against others but the struggle for righteousness.\r\n<p>I don\u2019t think it\u2019s likely that we\u2019ll get rid of our taste for the rhetoric of violence. I don\u2019t even notice it, most of the time, even when I\u2019m using it myself. I am hoping, though, that I can commit myself to noticing it, and that perhaps I can even persuade other people to notice it, and to then think about alternatives. Things do change, you know. And it\u2019s certainly not the most unlikely thing that Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved.\r\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I><br>-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger knows that a lot of stuff crossed the line, but also might like to move the line itself.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20369,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20368\/revisions\/20369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}