Everyday people turn on the television set and see violence things happening all over the world. With the way violence is publicized over the news, television, Internet, radio, movies and games it is no wonder that people feel that the world is more violent then any other time in history. But, in my option, if you look at our history, you will see that the world today is no more violent than has been in the past.
It is rarely known why someone would commit a violent act upon another person. The spectrum of violence can range anywhere from a scuffle between two individuals to a full scale World War among many nations. Generally, violence is associated with aggression, brute force, and the intention of causing harm. Political, social, religious, economic, criminal and personal differences are some of the most passionate issues we face as human beings. They are often the most common reasons for violence as they are often how people define themselves. (Alder & Denmark, 2004) Violence on a political level may be used to protect citizens or defend from outside forces. Ethnic or racial groups may use violence to fight against oppression and discrimination. Religion can also be a driving force of violence, because of differences in religion or performing terrorist attacks in the name of God. When someone assaults, robs, or commits a homicide there is usually violence involved. Emotions are probably one of the biggest triggers of violence. Individuals can be easily perform violence due to any number of different personal issues or disagreements.
If you look at our past, there is no time in history that has been immune to violence. History has an important role in establishing how violence is portrayed, represented and interpreted both now and in our past. It is unconceivable that the human race could violently do harm to another person and even worse have enlisted the aide of others, and yet it has happened though out our history. In every historical era there has been some form of violence and if you look into our past you can point to several different incidents and figures.
Early European history is full of violent incidents. The actions of violent leaders, account for a lot of the violent events. Often wars were fought because of a leader or king wanting to expand their borders, or because they felt that they were a god and needed to concur all, declaring them selves to be the only ruler. Like in the case with King Xerxes in 480 B.C., at the beginning of the Persian Wars, when he proclaimed himself to be the “king of all lands”. (Souza, 2003, p. 40) With this proclamation, King Xerxes felt that all the lands should be under his rule, and all should be slaves to him. (Souza, 2003)
Not only were there wars, that killed hundreds and hundreds of people, but there was also torture and peasant violence. Rulers, military and peasants would use torture against their enemies, prisoners and fellow citizens. Vlad the Impaler of Romania, one of the most famous torturers, had one of the most gruesome reputations for torture. He was most famous for impaling his victims on stakes. Stakes were often inserted into the anus and forced through the body until it appeared out of the mouth. Not caring about any human life, he would even kill infants while still in their mother’s womb. (Miller, 1972) In A People’s Tragedy, the author Orlando Figes describes types of torture peasants enacted upon one another. A victim of torture might have been restrained by having his torso wrapped in sacks, allowing them to be beaten. During the Civil War of Russia, the Cheka would use imaginative forms of torture that would slowly kill their victims such as “dismemberment with axes, slow boiling or burning, crucifixion, skinning alive, or twisting off heads.” (Thomas, 1998, p. 24) The Gulag, a government agency that administered penal labor camps in Soviet Union, was a system that killed hundreds of thousands of individuals. Much like the German concentration camps of World War II, poor living conditions, abusive officials, hard dangerous labor, and severe punishment of those who tried to escape. A prisoner of war would have been tortured before being executed in the Gulag. Prisoners were starved, exposed to the elements, were never given medical attention when injured or sick and often raped and/or beaten regularly. (Viola, 2007)
During World War I, between 9 to 10 million people died, (Ferguson, 2006) and it is a well known fact that the German Nazis exterminated millions of people by various ways on their way to internment or while imprisoned in concentration camps, labor camps, and death camps. The biggest target was the Jews, either members of the Jewish faith or those who were Jewish by descent. A number of Jews perished at the hands of the Nazi’s. There was more than six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by different types of methods such as starvation, being worked to death, exposure to the elements, epidemics and disease or just plain being murdered for their believes. (Aroneanu & Whissen, 1996) Besides the inhuman treatment of the Jews in the concentration camps, several Jews where sent to “killing centers” where they where sent to gas chambers, hung, burned alive, or just shot on the spot. (Aroneanu & Whissen, 1996)
The United States has its fair share of violence in it past as well, ranging from the pre-colonial period to present. Violence is the central character of American society, often-violent behavior is chosen as a response. So much so that it is typically taught in our schools. The Revolutionary War, War of 1812, and the Mexican War are just the starting place of violence in America. Before the Revolutionary War, American citizens and the British troops often would be violent to each other. When alone, British soldiers would be beaten on the streets and the British soldiers would abuse unarmed civilians. All this hostility leads to the Boston Massacre where a riot occurred between British troops and Boston citizens. (Bliven Jr., 1986)
Slavery was one of the worse displays of violence there was. The single paragraph most schoolbooks devote to slavery, in public schools, wherein slavery is justified historically as a universal practice "of that time" and therefore not that unusual, this downplays the actual gruesome reality of human enslavement. The over-riding consciousness of the slave was that he was not allowed to own himself, and that he would be punished if he attempted to act even remotely independent. The slave's survival depended on his complete subservience to his master, his ability to hide his true emotion of hatred, to only tell his master what his master wanted to hear. The issue of slavery led to one of the worst wars in American history, the Civil War. More than 620,000 Americans died, cities destroyed, farms burned, and homes leveled. (Hakim, 2005) The violence didn’t stop after the Civil War, especially for the African Americans. Some of the most extensive and systematic expression of violence has been the brutal treatment of our nation’s African Americans. “The American record includes the barbarous institution of lynching and urban race riots that have often taken on character of mass assaults or “pogroms” upon the black community.” (Sharpiro, 1988) With the threat of violence, African Americans have been subject to terror at the hand of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, state police, and officers of government, and by anyone who felt African American where worth anything more than nothing.
Violence during the period of the old west was also just as violent as today in America. There were bank robberies, stagecoach robberies, public hangings and just plain violence. Just as slavery was one of the most horrific times known to humanity, the Native Americans where not treated much different. They had their land stolen from them, where placed on to reservations, and killed for defending their right to live where they had been living for many generations before Columbus figured out the world was not flat. Often U.S. troops would go to a village and knowingly murder women, children and elders in cold blood. The westward expansion such as pioneers in search of gold and land would often collided with Native Americans. The use of rifles and guns against bows and arrows often created a one sided fight. The way of life of the Old West gunslinger was a life of violence and death. Vigilante justice was swift and mean, and didn't take into account anything so delicate as proof or evidence. Once the Indians populations were reduced, in the first decades of the 20th century, the old frontier values lived on, in gunfights and showdowns, with Americans killing Americans.
I feel that the main difference between violence now and then is the current use of media. The press has been the most important medium for creating the public’s awareness and perception of violent crime. Murders, assaults and other crimes against the humanity have literally made headlines news, and as such these news stories give journalist something serious to report. In the book Violence and the Media (2003), it is suggested that what counts as real journalism revolves around violence. (p. 21) An explosion in mass media occurred in the 20th century. “Inventions such as the television set, the digital computer, and the videocassette player forever changed the way people gain information about the world including information about how violent the world is.” (Bushman & Anderson, 2001, p. 1) It is clear that there have been definite changes in the way Americans get their news. Before there was mass media, most of the American public got their news from friends, relatives and other personal contacts rather than via mass media. A war could start and end on side of the world, and the other side of the world would never have known it happened. During this day and time there is a growing popular awareness and television news coverage is having a definite effect on how people perceived and responded to events. It is interesting that the American public will spend 3,400 hours a year consuming media output. (Forestel, 1998) “That represents almost 40 percent of our lives, more time than we spend sleeping and far more time than we spend working.” (Forestel, 1998, p. vii) But, it was not always like this, because of media censorship, the press of the past was unable to give people the full story because that was what was best for the American people. But, the human race has the right to be informed of all the truth, so with the “Freedom of Press”, the news media now plays a critical role in informing the public.
Now the mass media is one of the biggest promoters of violence in the world and many people views the news media as their primary source of information. (Weitzer & Kubrin, 2004) With out concern for the impact, news media will most frequently report on violent crimes, which gives the impression that crime is often random and inexplicable. The constant barrage of crime stories give people the impression that violence is on the rise, that people are powerless, that minorities are likely to commit crimes and young people are dangerous. Viewers and readers respond by feeling more afraid and more discouraged about life in their community. So it is no wonder that the world today is more informed of the violence around the world and because of freedom of speech and of the press, there is little to limit or censorship from violence in the media.
The biggest reason for the news media to report the on the more violent events is to build circulation and ratings. “Bad news prevails over good news because it is more profitable.” (Klein, 2003, par. 6) After all, even the news organizing is considered to be a business. The better the ratings, the more likely that the advertisers are going to advertise on their network. Which in turn leads to more profits.
Politics also is a big contribution to the violence reported in the media. Take for example when the Bush administration felt that “Iraq was said to be a threat to national and international security as it possessed chemical and biological weapons capabilities” (Viotti & Kauppi, 2009, p. 83), and they felt that Saddam Hussein somehow was involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Because of this, the Bush administration was able to use the media to gain support of the American public for the war in Iraq.
So is the world more violent today then in years past? I don’t think so, today’s media is just ensuring that we are all able to gain knowledge of the more violent instances. This in turn has given us, the public a higher since of awareness of the violence in the world. Violence has always played a part in our history, and before the media started publicizing violence, there where stories and plays of violence that became a time-honored element. Since the beginning of time, violence had played a huge role in all of human’s history; the media has just taken it to the next level.
Reference
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