Why hate speech hurts

And even kills. David Neiwert:

The dynamic of eliminationism thus begins with the conceptualization of other people as less than human, and finds its voice in rhetoric that portrays them as objects fit for elimination: vermin, disease, slime, traitors, killers. This rhetoric sets the stage for action by creating a rationale, which itself is seen as a signal to the like-minded for permission to act. Then, as the action occurs, the rhetoric is used to justify the violence, and indeed to inflame it still further as both ratchet upwards. In some cases, as with the internment of Japanese Americans, the action takes the form of government policy -- one from which, it must be added, violence was largely absent; but in others, as in the case of the Nazi Holocaust or the extermination of the Native Americans, the entire enterprise is violent from start to finish.

There is a causal connection here, but it's not a necessary causality -- that is, eliminationist rhetoric may always precede and accompany eliminationist action, but it does not always inspire it. What we can say is that it does make it far more likely, if not inevitable, as it increases in volume. But because there is an obvious time gap between the respective appearance of rhetoric and action, it's also possible to prevent that step from taking place -- most notably, by confronting it.

Not everyone succumbs, of course. Indeed, the history of eliminationism is also colored by the continuing presence of people of good will who opposed the base inhumanity that it revealed. But their ineffectiveness over the centuries, embodied by the crude reality of the end results, is also part of the dynamic. What history has demonstrated, really, is that all the good will in the world is helpless against the determined efforts of men given over to the demonic, whose willingness to murder and eliminate their fellow men quickly obliterated whatever good may have been intended by others. It is only in the past half-century of our history, really, that this has ceased to be the case, and that the demonic component of the American psyche has been wrestled under some semblance of control.

When encouraged, there are those who will take hate speech literally, and will become dangerous. I guess I'm just stunned to find out how many such people we actually have in the United States.