WORDS ARE NOT VIOLENCE
Neither is Silence
It’s a central slogan of Illiberal Identitarianism that “Words are Violence”. To those uninitiated in the Whacky Ways of Woke, this mantra will come as a confounding and moronic oxymoron. When children claim that a fart is “silent but violent”, they’re not sincerely asserting a risk that the relevant effluvium could be physically harmful. Wokesters, however, claim to sincerely believe that words can and often do inflict genuine physical harm.
But it might be best to give the “Woke” word a rest. “Woke” started out as a word capturing a well-intentioned alertness of racism and other discrimination. However, that alertness has morphed into a self-righteous Cult, and the Woke-word has become a divisive pejorative to describe that Cult. So let’s neologize and come up with a new word for the collective mind virus which is the Woke Cult. I’ll go with the truncation ”Wult”, which sounds like a benign uncle.
By any sensible standard, the Wult notion that words can somehow, sometimes constitute violence is frightfully odd.
On the one hand, a word is a distinct element of meaning, either a noise produced by a human voice box or a combination of visible letters with a space on either side. The primary definition of violence, on the other hand, is behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt or kill someone. Quite how the former can be the latter is cryptic, to say the least.
Words can of course evoke powerful human emotions, including prolonged stress which can have adverse physical health effects. However, in human history until recently, words have only ever been seen to cause stress where they involve threats of actual violence to a person or the person’s close family or friends, or where a member of one’s close family or friends says something gratuitously nasty and doesn’t apologise.
To Wultists however, combinations of words such as “a woman is an adult biological female” or “Climate Change cannot kill planet earth” – coming from someone the Wultist doesn’t even know personally - can indeed – apparently - cause harmful stress. But even assuming that’s true, the stress-inducing words are not violence.
So, what’s going on here? On closer inspection, “Words are Violence” meshes nicely with foundations of the Wult belief system.
Wult expressly rejects “Western” notions that there is objective reality and that words bear their ordinary established meanings. Instead, Wult favors subjectivity and the primacy of personal “lived experience”. In the Wult realm, an individual simply has to feel that they have been violently assaulted by words one disagrees with in order to have been a victim of actual violence.
Wult delights in mangling language and the ordinary meaning of words. Renaming things has historically been a characteristic of the occult and there are elements of this with Wult. Wultists aim to disconcert, infuriate and gaslight “outsiders” with their Wult catch-cries: “Silence is Violence”, “Diversity [Not Unity] is Our Strength”, “[Insert name of disliked person] is Literally Hitler”. Subsidiary definitions of “Violence” include “a clashing or jarring quality” and “undue alteration of wording or sense of language” and, in a quite literal and legitimate sense, Wult does violence to language.
Wult celebrates self-labelling as being vulnerable and oppressed. For the Wultist, words cannot do violence to oppressors but they can be violent to the “vulnerable oppressed”.
There’s an element of Wult deflection in the Words are Violence mantra. Wultists welish hellish wiolence to adwance Wult winning, and smugly deny the reality of Left-Wing violence. LGBTQIA+ “counter-protesters” at Posie Parker’s pro-women gathering at Auckland’s Albert Park were undeniably physically violent.
The violence included a bearded person in a dress repeatedly punching a 72-year-old in the head, in a vicious unprovoked assault (viewable online). The assault fractured the woman’s eye-socket and left her permanently maimed.
Activist Shaneel Lal organized the “counter-protest” and incited the protesters with They’s loud-hailer. In true ANTIFA style, They then steadfastly refused to acknowledge the violence, claiming to Tova O’Brien of defunct TODAYFM radio “the protest was something that I could not describe as violent. I think it very quickly turned into a colourful celebration”.
Reminder: Shaneel Lal is the Fiji-born activist who, despite being named 2023 Young New Zealander of Year, hates New Zealand (Lal direct quotation: the “System is anti-queer”), sees the Ku Klux Klan everywhere (ditto: “I walked into University, and it felt like the largest convention of White Supremacists”) and dreams of seeing New Zealand destroyed (ditto: “Overthrow colonial system”). New Zealand’s Crimes Act creates a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment to express a “seditious intention”. This includes inciting the alteration, otherwise than by lawful means, of the Constitution, laws, or Government of New Zealand. In 2023 Government-owned Kiwibank awarded the title “Young New Zealander of the Year” to this ungrateful immigrant who openly advocates for the dismantling of New Zealand. This award must represent some sort of dumbfounding new low.
The notion that “Words are Violence” plays perfectly into the Wult aversion to Free Speech. If words are indeed violence, then to allow unfettered Free Speech is to unleash rampant violence. At their core, Wultists have their own Identitarian World View, and simply want everyone else to just shut up. The reality, which Wultists either don’t understand or choose to ignore, is that Free Speech is the antithesis of, and antidote to, violence. In the words of Sigmund Freud ‘The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilisation.’
Wultists’ laissez faire attitude to real violence also applies to incitement to actual violence. Tusiata Avia was born in Christchurch to a Samoan father and New Zealand European mother. Avia’s State-funded poems include 250TH ANNIVERSARY OF JAMES COOK’S ARRIVAL IN NEW ZEALAND. Widely lauded by Wultists, the poem contains the following choice morsels:
Hey James,
it’s us.
These days
we’re driving round
in SUVs
looking for ya
or white men like you
who might be thieves
or rapists
or kidnappers
or murderers
yeah, or any of your descendants
or any of your incarnations
cos, you know
ay, bitch?
We’re gonna FUCK YOU UP
…..
and I’ve got my father’s
pig-hunting knife
in my fist
and we’re coming to get you
It’s also a crime of sedition in New Zealand, punishable by imprisonment, to make any statement that incites or encourage violence. (I wouldn’t want Avia imprisoned, or her poem banned, but the fact that taxpayer money is funding her awful, hate-filled bile is a national disgrace.)
This debased notion that violence can be non-physical has seeped into New Zealand’s legislation. Under New Zealand’s Family Violence Act, “family violence” includes “psychological abuse”. Psychological abuse can be odious in its own right, but it aint violence. A dear friend of mine battles poor mental health and addiction. When his marriage fell apart, his wife successfully applied for a temporary protection order against him on the ground, basically, that she simply didn’t want him to have any contact with her or their children. His wife did not allege physical violence. The protection order prevents him from having any contact with his own children. Trivial breaches of the order, including responding to a text from his daughter asking for food money, have resulted in my friend being harassed and hounded by New Zealand Police and imprisoned for over two months.
Claiming words can be violence and otherwise distorting language can have awful real world consequences.