AAQ, equating lying or slander with violence is nor accurate. But you touched on an extremely important hashkofa topic that needs to be said – it’s really worth its own thread.
Middos and mussar are tempered and guided by halacha (see sefer emunah ubitachon by the chazon ish; it’s one of his central themes). What mussar engenders in a person needs to be mugdar, defined and put into the parameters of halacha. For instance, says the chazon ish, mussar teaches us to have mercy on the oppressed and to defend them. However, it’s halacha that comes and defines for us who is the rodef and who is the nirdaf. In his case of melamdim who are established in a town, and who are losing their parnosa to newcomers who steal their business, the instinct of the baal mussar who is not educated in halacha is to defend the old melamdim. Hasagas gevul! Will they scream. They will say lashon hora on the newcomers, petition cherem, make public machlokes. All of which would be justified…if halacha said that they were defending the nirdaf. Halacha in that case is the opposite – kinas sofrim tarbeh chochma mandates that there is no taanah of pasakta lichiusi, of hasagas gvul, because the competition creates better teaching. The glorification and better study of Torah is more important than thw individual parnosa of a yid, explains the heiligeh chazon ish.
Same thing here. We all learn midddos when we are young. I can still hear the marvelous middos machine in my head as if i heard it yesterday. Gevaldig! Working on our middos, says the Gra, is the purpose of our existence (in many ways). However here too, the seep feelings we should have about the evils of lashon hora must ve limited to what halacha considers lashon hora. Failure to do so results in….saying lashon hora itself! Saying about a jew “Reuven is guilty of motzi shem ra…i heard it myself” is itself MSR on Reuven if the topic of Reuven’s discussion was not a Jew.
Comes the visceral response…the knee jerk reaction of the miseducated. “Just because someone isn’t Jewish you think you can do what you want???”
This attitude belies two fundamentally incorrect assumptions, aside from it being against halacha. The deep seated feeling stems from the assumption that the difference between the two is merely a creed, a race, or a personal belief system. Therefore, judaism feels “racist”. This is coming straight from zionism, which convinced the masses that the jews are a nationality. We are not. We are a group of God’s treasured Torah nation, defined solely by our connection to and adherence of the Torah. Those who are not part of that nation, are different.