Bryce wrote:
I often have the same difficulty when speaking with Objectivists. They define "censorship" as "silencing the speaker by force", which is a fine and useful definition, but suppose we want to talk about a similar phenomenon which does not involve force? For example, the magnate who owns all the newspapers, television stations, bookstores and movie theatres in a small town decides that never again will homosexuality be publically mentioned in any of these venues. Force? No. "Censorship"? Not by _that_ definition, but what _is_ it? We need a new word, or else we have to continue using "censorship" to mean both of those things. I sometimes use "violent-censorship" and "non-violent-censorship" in conversation. As long as we continue to try to overload "censorship" we will waste much of our dialogue energy on semantic quibbling or pure misunderstanding.
I don't see how you can say this. I was brought up by this wonderful system (U.S.) to believe that censorship was necessarily non-violent. It was only when I became conscious of "Assassination as the Ultimate Form of Censorship" that I saw the broader connections. Seems to me you'd want to come up with different words for violent censorship instead, but then again, as in the above paragraph, we already have those.