Vicarious Violence - Killing as Leisure and Engendering Empathy

Between 1800 and the present, more and more people have come to know of violence through various forms of media. Those same media also came to form a record of the diverse ways that humans could inflict violence - an archive was emerging that in its expanding form became a tool for combating ^[11] violence and punishing perpetrators.

As the technology capable of representing violence gained greater reach into people's lives - through cinema, television and video games from the twentieth century - representations of violence were often thought to be a cause of violence. Popular concern about the link between acts of violence and the consumption of murder and gore in cinema or First-Person Shooter video games emerged alongside the spread of these technologies. In response govern­ments and national censorship boards introduced ratings that were designed to alert consumers to the various gradients of violent or sexual content in the films, television programmes or games they were about to watch or purchase. Children, it was felt, were particularly vulnerable to harm from viewing explicit violence because their capacity to distinguish fact from fiction was less sophisti­cated than that of teenage or adult consumers. But it remains unclear whether the steady diet of media violence and gamified killing inures adults to violence as well.

Commemoration of conflict through state-sponsored construction of mem­orials, museums, obelisks and cemeteries has continued apace around the world but was particularly widespread in the aftermath of the world wars of the twentieth century. These sites are major military tourist attractions in the expanding leisure travel industry that has accompanied the rise, and increasing accessibility, of mass transport technologies of jetliners and high-speed trains. The political functions of these sites of commemoration are generally to reassert the validity and legitimacy of the particular nation state that funded the construction: the national war memorials around the world pay respect to the people who lost their lives in the formation of the defence of that state. For example, the Monument to the National People's Heroes in the heart of Beijing's Tiananmen Square was built in 1958 and is decorated with crucial stages in the struggle to achieve the formation of the People's Republic of China.^[12] Monuments are built to serve very modern political purposes, for example in the case of the opening in 1985 of the Nanjing Massacre Museum to commemorate the 300,000 victims ofJapan's invasion and occupation of that city in 1937.

Monuments constructed by losers in conflicts and the inclusion of enemy forces in parades have been contentious around the world. Japanese minis­terial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine honouring wartime dead, including Class A war criminals, elicits formal diplomatic protest from Chinese and Korean governments.^[15] The Australian veterans' association, the Returned Service League, agreed in 2006 to allow descendants of First World War Turks to join the veterans' parade on ANZAC Day, but did not extend the endorsement to Germans, Japanese, Italian or North Vietnamese. The latter ‘were a dreaded enemy that was despised by the Australian veterans', where the Turks ‘were a very honourable enemy'.^{[16] [17] [18]}

Only rarely do nation states commemorate the victims of the violence that occurred in the building of their states. The settler colonial nations of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States fund memorials to their soldiers who fought wars in foreign lands, and have museums of settler society life, but have few if any memorials to resistance wars by Indigenous peoples whose land was being ‘settled'.

The vast majority of war memorials built around the world are products of civil society and not the state. States do not remember or mourn; groups of people do so in public, frequently through their own initiatives. The collec­tive memory of violence is the memory of collectives, and not primarily of the state. There are substantial differences between commemorations of violence by states which have dominated civil society, like the Soviet Union, and states which are less active than civil society, like Britain. Between the two extremes, most monuments to violence arise from and are paid for by people in small groups who do the work of remembrance. Equally, the cultural sector is active in the production of poems, paintings, sculptures, novels, blogs and films that narrate histories of violence, both wartime and peacetime. These are frequently powerful critiques of the official commemorative projects managed by states.^[19]

From the 1970s, commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust became iconic, in that the forms of remembrance of those who disappeared in Nazi- dominated Europe from 1939 to 1945 were adapted to represent those who disappeared in later conflicts, including those that states like Argentina and Chile waged against their own people during Operation Condor.

There is a scholarly consensus on many of the themes explored in this volume. Industrialisation radically increased the capacity of the state to impose its will, through violence if necessary, on subject populations. Genocide was the direct outcome of the civilianisation of war. Dictators waged war on their own populations because of the supposed disloyalty of targeted groups or because of their identification with subversive movements. Prisons worldwide still hold such ‘enemies' of the state, and despite international accords against the use of torture, interrogation specialists operate today, as they did a century ago, effectively outside the law. Wartime violence affected patterns of violence in peacetime. Repressing the horrors of war made it easier to draw a veil over violence in families, schools, churches and orphanages. Slowly, the silence surrounding the sexual abuse of women and children is breaking. Since the 1970s, popular transnational human rights movements have emerged to protect individuals from violence, even when the writ of the state lies behind it. Yet, as many chapters herein show, who controls the state controls the instruments of violence. Has economic growth and the spread of technology made the world more peaceable? On balance, the answer must be no. The violence done to the poor through economic inequality is no less now than it was a century ago. The social relations of violence are framed today just as much by power and wealth as they were in 1920. And, while we make no assessment of any rise or fall in violence in the absolute numbers impacted, we are not convinced, contra the controversial book by Pinker, that violence has cast less of a pall over human affairs than it did in previous centuries. There is little reason to believe that the world our grandchildren will inherit will be any different from our own.^[20]