Words Are Sharper Than the Two Edged Sword

In April 1994 the Rwandan radio station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines broadcast calls to its listeners to kill what it called cockroaches and to cut down the tall trees, meaning the Tutsi minority. In the following hundred days, an estimated eight hundred thousand people, mostly Tutsi, were murdered, many by neighbours armed with machetes. Courts later convicted the station's founders of incitement to genocide. The weapons were crude, and the words had prepared the way. The experience gives grim support to the proverb of the topic, that words are sharper than the two edged sword.

The proverb has long roots. The Letter to the Hebrews in the Bible speaks of the word as sharper than any two edged sword, cutting to the dividing of soul and spirit. A sword cuts flesh, and it heals. A word can wound without leaving a mark and can last longer than the scar. In Indian tradition, Kabir taught that speech should be cool, so that it comforts the speaker and the hearer. The Mahabharata is read by many as the story of a war whose beginnings lay in insults. The saying holds that the power of language exceeds that of arms.

Words are sharper because they act on the mind, and the mind directs the hand. A sword can defeat the body, but a word can change what a person believes, wants and fears, and so changes what he does. Armies have been raised, regimes brought down and faiths founded by speech. Because words travel without limit, a sword reaches only those near it, while a speech or a book can reach millions, now over the internet in seconds. Because words persist in memory and writing, they outlast the occasion. A single insult can embitter a family for generations.

The constructive power of speech is as great as its destructive power. Gandhi's call of Quit India on 8 August 1942, urging do or die, moved millions to defy an empire without arms. Abraham Lincoln's address at Gettysburg in 1863 ran to a mere 272 words and redefined the American nation as dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Martin Luther King Jr. told the crowd in Washington in 1963 that he had a dream, and the words became a rallying cry for the civil rights movement. Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock in 1964 declared an ideal for which he was prepared to die, and, after twenty seven years in prison, he lived to see it realised. The Preamble to India's Constitution, a few lines long, has guided a nation of a billion people for seven decades.

A sword can defeat the body, but a word can change what a person believes, wants and fears, and so changes what he does.

The destructive examples are no less impressive. Adolf Hitler's speeches and the propaganda machine of Joseph Goebbels, who understood that a lie repeated often enough is believed, prepared a nation to accept the persecution of the Jews. In India, the speeches that fuelled communal passions in the 1940s and again in later riots, and rumours spread by text message in the violence at Muzaffarnagar in 2013, show how words kindle fire. George Orwell warned in 1946 that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and in his novel Nineteen Eighty Four he imagined a state that shrank the vocabulary to narrow the range of thought.

Words wound at the personal scale too. Cruel remarks by a teacher can damage a child's confidence, harsh criticism can crush an artist, and cyberbullying has driven young people to despair. Defamation can ruin a reputation faster than any assault, and the law of defamation exists to answer it. Social media has given everyone a megaphone, and the speed of sharing leaves little time for reflection. A few thoughtless words, once posted, may be impossible to withdraw.

Why then do societies protect free speech? Because the power of words is also the power of truth. The argument made by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty in 1859 was that suppressing an opinion robs the human race, since if the opinion is right, people lose the chance to exchange error for truth, and if it is wrong, they lose the clearer perception of truth produced by its collision with error. Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression, subject to reasonable restrictions in Article 19(2) on grounds such as public order, decency and incitement to an offence. The line between protected speech and incitement is hard to draw, and courts have struggled with it, as in the cases on sedition and on hate speech.

The sharper the instrument, the greater the care needed in handling it. Writers and speakers owe their audiences accuracy and restraint. Teachers and parents can teach children to listen and to speak with kindness. Leaders carry the heaviest duty, since their words are repeated and acted upon. Gandhi, who kept a weekly day of silence, wrote of the value of restraint in speech, in the spirit of the saying that speech is silver and silence is golden. In the end, the rule that works is one that each speaker applies to himself, to ask whether what he is about to say is true, necessary and kind.

Silence has its own place in the argument. The proverb that speech is silver and silence golden warns that to speak is not always to do good. There is the silence of the coward, who fails to speak against a wrong, and the silence of the wise, who holds back a hurtful word. Martin Luther King is often quoted as saying that in the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. Knowing when to speak is thus a part of the discipline that the proverb teaches.

In the classroom, children can be taught to think about the effect of language, to distinguish between argument and abuse, and to ask for evidence. A population that can recognise manipulation is harder to inflame. Critical reading and listening should be seen as protections for a democracy, as much as free speech itself.

The sword leaves a trace that investigators can follow, a wound, a weapon and a witness. Words leave very little. A rumour has no author, a mood has no date, and the person who sharpened the edge may be long gone when it falls. The Rwandan courts could find the broadcasters, and no court has yet found a way to count the damage done by the words that nobody remembers saying.