When a nation has a particularly traumatic history, one of the ways that the nation seeks to move beyond the problems of the past is by a judicious combination of silence and amnesty. There are those who oppose this sort of policy of silence, but there are good reasons for it. As much as the freedom of speech is celebrated, there are often compelling reasons for silence if one wants to preserve peace where speaking only brings about an open argument or a revelation of just how hostile different people or different groups of people happen to be. Silence is an obvious effort on the part of people who are aware that they think differently from others to keep the silence in order to keep the peace, but there are tensions that exist between speech and silence and it is worth examining how the silence of those who wish to avoid conflict is a sign of deeper societal problems.

When people are silent about what they think, it allows for others around them to think what they want to think about what those people think. That kind of ambiguity can work out for both better and worse. Sometimes people think that others who are silent are more in agreement than they are, and when this impression is dispelled by speech, it can lead to intense hostility. This is especially the case when political matters are in view, where people might think that others share a broad similarity with their own views, only to find out that others are violently opposed to what one considers to be obvious truths, and unwilling to hear their own deeply held opinions held in contempt and derision. Silence as method of preserving peace is a fragile one, because it depends on people not finding out what one truly thinks or believes, because it will reveal a wide gap between what is thought of someone as existing within a particular consensus and the reality of that person being a deep and committed ideological enemy, which is a painful fact to recognize.

The growing silence about political matters because of the hostility it breeds, or the proliferation of hostile political speech that demonstrates the wide gulf that exist between different people or different camps of people tends to lead, where politics has become a violent sport where no holds are barred from seeking the power of office to oppress one’s enemies, tends to lead to a different kind of ominous silence. When political violence breaks out in an area, the silence that results is often the silence of the grave where obnoxious political elements face execution because their areas are controlled by political opponents. Sometimes people do not keep silence well enough and their views lead others to go out of their way to silence them. This is a fate that is already being threatened at some times and in some forms within the United States, and even if we have not quite reached the widespread nature of this problem in the United States as happened during the Spanish Civil War or other grim periods of history, we are not far from this being a problem to a similar extent where tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people could find themselves imprisoned or killed because of the insecurity of incompetent authorities that have betrayed the freedoms that our nation was built on, which depends in large part on the restraint of governments to accept the criticism that results from social division.

In the aftermath of such violent and bloody regimes, the compromise that is made that allows such authorities to step away from power is a commitment in society to keep silent about the past and provide an amnesty to those who silenced political opponents in the past. Those who have done what may be punished by future regimes are often only willing to give up power if there is a promise made on the part of the political community as a whole not to punish such actions but to let things go, and such promises are easily made. Judging from the past twenty years or so of history, though, such promises are not easily kept, and this frequent way that these promises of amnesty and amnesia have been forgotten with the desire of people to seek vengeance for the past will likely make it more unlikely that people will give up power and submit themselves to their vengeful and hostile political enemies, all of which bodes poorly for hopes of polite silence and peaceful recognition of the past and the divisions that still exist over who was right and who was ultimately to blame for the silence due to violence that is threatened in many a divided society.