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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

A Culture of Violence

What do you get if you allow your television and film screens to be bombared with violence, make it easy for people to obtain guns and run an economic system which encourages competition but not solidarity? The answer is this.

2 comments:

bidibis said...

Firstly, I don’t think such incidents are appropriate for political exploitation by the Left.

Societies had been violent even before the invention of television and capitalism, thus they are not to be blamed for anything evil occurring these days.

In my view Virginia’s carnage is another act of a supposedly heroic desperation committed by a man with access to weapons who belonged to a very small portion of the American society inspired by the Columbine massacre. Reports show that people who committed similar crimes in the past shared lots of things in common, the most important being a sense of marginalization and self-destruction. Once one of them set the first bloody example, he became a hero in like-minded people’s eyes, thus laying the foundation for a new kind of tradition of violence.

This isn’t of course an exclusive feature of the American system. Similarly, people in desperation in other parts of the world , who felt like they wanted to convey a message to the world at large or become national heroes or martyrs, have also developed similar types of nihilistic behaviour. Arabs for instance become suicide bombers, Kurds set their bodies on fire while Albanians in Greece feeling left-out by the Greek Society have hijacked buses with many passengers on three different occasions. Once the first hijacker, killed by the bullets of the Albanian Police, had become a national hero, two of his admirers followed suit.

The power of imitation is too fight it only with political means…

Anonymous said...

Are you referring to South Korea?