Hate crimes spring to mind. People tell lies about minority groups, give themselves permission structures to justify violence, and vigilantes take it upon themselves to "fix" the problem with violence.
A lot of people have been murdered on as a result of hate speech. Emit Till, Michael Donald, James Byrd are a few.
Also, the Rwandan Genocide, historical Pogroms, lynchings, arguably the holocaust.
It's pretty hard to get humans to murder their neightbors without inciting speech.
> It's pretty hard to get humans to murder their neightbors without inciting speech.
Eh, I'm not so sure about that. En masse, with coordination? Maybe, but speech is mostly about coordination at that stage.
Would you say that everybody ever saying something untruthful or hatefull about the GOP is responsible for some lunatic storming the base ball practice of some GOP members of Congress with a gun and shooting at them?
Speech is certainly involved in the actual act of a pogrom, but it's not the driving force (unless your definition of speech gets really vague and everything ever said since the beginning of time is part of "the speech"). You don't have pogroms without previous animosity. Somebody saying something might spark the fire, but the wood has been there all along, soaked in gasoline.
> You don't have pogroms without previous animosity. Somebody saying something might spark the fire, but the wood has been there all along, soaked in gasoline.
That presumes the victimized communities have done anything to warrant violence. In the case of anti-jewish pogroms the inciting factor was often speech by newspapers and officials. How should we account for anti-semitic newspapers that made a good business of concocting lies about the crimes done by Jewish people in the community?
Consider the Kishinev pogrom where "the Bessarabetz paper insinuated that children had been murdered by the Jewish community for the purpose of using their blood in the preparation of matzo for Passover"[1].
> That presumes the victimized communities have done anything to warrant violence.
No, it doesn't at all. It says that there is animosity, but not why it's there or whether it's valid or not. You might hate your neighbor because he's more successful than you, makes you feel inadequate with his good deeds, because he's literally Hitler or because he just so happens to look like somebody that wronged you. The fact that you hate him says nothing about whether that's justified. But your hate makes you susceptible to all kinds of suggestions for terrible actions against your neighbor. All it takes is for somebody to suggest burning down his house, or telling your that he has attacked another victim (or posted the wrong thing on Twitter to stay on topic!)
> In the case of anti-jewish pogroms to inciting factor is speech by newspapers and officials.
Doubtful. We'd have to look at the very first pogroms. If you're looking at the last 150 years, you're closing your eyes to the fact that pogroms against Jews were recurring events and anti-semitism was always around.
That's a problem, because you'll be surprised how these peaceful neighbors can turn into violent murderers practically over night. When you consider that they weren't peaceful neighbors right up until they became murderers, but that there was just a light cover over the hate for a while, there are much fewer unexplainable actions.
The rumors are the spark that I mentioned. The long-existing anti-semitism is the wood pile that is ready to be set ablaze.
> The rumors are the spark that I mentioned. The long-existing anti-semitism is the wood pile that is ready to be set ablaze.
Which arrives at the question, how does anti-semitism propagate through societies? It doesn't spring from nothing. What are the mechanisms that keeps the idea alive? Are all societies susceptible? Someone must be doing the work of keeping that wood pile dry and ready to catch light.
That's what I meant with regards to "speech" becoming very vague and stretching over long periods of time, making the individual expression rather insignificant and the concept very fuzzy and hard to tell apart from culture, tradition and history. Like a rain drop in a storm where all those drops combined are causing the flood, but to pin it on an individual rain drop and say "this one is responsible" is hard.
> Are all societies susceptible?
Given that we've seen some level of exterminatory warfare all over the place in history (I'm sure there's huge amounts that we don't know about because the victims have been annihilated), and it's not unheard of among other mammals as well, my money is on yes.
That some small nations did not wage war against their much larger and much stronger neighbors is not a counter example: the fact that chickens don't hunt wolves doesn't mean they're not predators, they'll happily eat worms, and will eat a mouse if they can catch it.
With those assumptions, it seems fair to state that, given enough time, any sufficiently large group of humans will commit an atrocity against an internal or external minority.
Shouldn't then societies try to structure themselves against this tendency?
I don't know how you'd structure a society against hate. We can't seem to even come together over political ideas within cultures, where everything else is very similar, so I don't have a lot of hope for situations where the similarities are few and far between.
We haven't tried adding empathogens to the water supply, maybe that's a good way to do it.
A lot of people have been murdered on as a result of hate speech. Emit Till, Michael Donald, James Byrd are a few.
Also, the Rwandan Genocide, historical Pogroms, lynchings, arguably the holocaust.
It's pretty hard to get humans to murder their neightbors without inciting speech.