Fake Violence Vs Real War

Fake Violence Creates Real Violence
A man gets into a violent fight in 1914. In the midst of the brawl, he receives a deep cut in his upper cheek. This is before the invention of penicillin and sulfa drugs (Encyclopaedia Brittanica). He has never heard of such a thing as antibiotics. The cut becomes infected, and develops a severe fever. His eye is lost to sepsis. He comes close to losing his life…from a cut. In the same situation a hundred years later, losing the eye would be unimaginable…much less loss of life. The violent altercations from which such once-common injuries come—bar fights and other such casual violence—are seldom seen except in rough neighborhoods and on television. When they are encountered, the people involved simply go
It might seem to be the case that violence could never be more ‘real’ than in a war, but even the way in which wars are waged has changed drastically in the last few generations. In comparing the way the first and second World Wars were fought to how they are fought with technology now, war is a great deal less personal. Previous generations of soldiers fought in open fields with bunkers, trenches, and foxholes dug for cover. They shot people directly in front of them, and killed people with grenades and bayonets. Current warfare is waged often with unmanned drones that are piloted from computers continents away, or with intercontinental ballistic missiles launched miles away from the target. Guns even have greater ranges. Because of these technologies, fewer soldiers are lost to combat, but soldiers also are less often face-to-face with the people they are killing. When killing by remote control, mass violence can look the same as a computer game. Technology therefore has both saved lives and made violence easier to perpetrate, and has been shown to desensitize humans by making the results of violence less real and more constantly portrayed from an emotional distance. It has also been over 150 years since a war has been fought on United States soil, making war an experience in which only military personnel are likely to have firsthand knowledge. In the U.S. today, it is more common to play a video game or to type quadrants into a computer than to harm or kill a person