There was a roughly twenty year gap between world wars 1 and 2. Looking at that record, it is pretty remarkable to consider we have gone nearly 70 years since the dropping of the first atom bomb without seeing a world war 3. There are many claimed explanations for this, ranging from views of heightened social standards and human rights to questioning of the profitability of war in general (Joshua Goldstein & Steven Pinker, 2011). However absent traditional war may be in this day and age, violence is still very prevalent all around the world. In an interview with BookForum, Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic memoir Persepolis that tells of a young girl growing up during the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, discusses violence and its role in the world today. “Violence today has become something so normal, so banal–that is to say everybody thinks it’s normal,” (Hajdu 2004, 35).
A way to look at this is violence as an evolved form of war. In a blog post discussing violence in the 21st century, Robert Hariman, professor at Northwestern University, shows us–mostly through images–how war and violence are still prevalent in the 21st century, specifically in developing nations, citing one-on-one cases of commonplace brute force. He cites author Barbara Ehrenreich in contemplating, “To look at war [or in our case violence], carefully and long enough, is to see the face of the predator over which we thought we had triumphed long ago.” (Ehrenreich, 1997). Through this predator metaphor, Ehrenreich is essentially saying that by examining the evolution of “war” throughout history, we will find it to be pessimistically ongoing. As much as we may think that we have come to a time free of armed warfare, we have unconsciously entered a time of normalized violence, characterized by commonplace brutality masked by the absence of prototypical war.
Sources:
Goldstein, Joshua S., and Steven Pinker. “War Really Is Going Out of Style.”New York Times 17 Dec. 2011: n. pag. Print.
Hajdu, David. 2004. Persian Miniatures.” BookForum, October/November, 32-35
Hariman, Robert. “The Evolution of Violence in the 21st Century.” Web log post. No Caption Needed. WordPress, 4 Feb. 2008. Web. 9. Oct. 2014
Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. New York: Metropolitan, 1997. Print.
The points you bring up in this post are very interesting. I think that you are right; violence has become normal. Too normal. I think that because we have seen how extreme human violence can be, with the atom bomb and the massive death count of World War 2 not so far in the past, hand-to-hand violence does not seem so bad anymore. I also think that because there is this fear that another world war will break out, a lot of violence is downplayed in the media and even swept under the rug at times. People are desperate to not allow things to escalate, and are trying to keep things that probably deserve more attention from coming to the forefront of media. It seems they would rather violence occur and keep the rest of the world ignorant about it than have outside forces be involved and risk potential atomic warfare.
Media plays a huge role in this. We are desensitized to violence through films, television, and video games. We are told as a society that violence is not a big deal. But we know that the atom bomb is a big deal. It seems to me that we are being taught that violence is no longer grounds for warfare, which, as warfare has evolved to be more and more destructive, may be a good thing. However, it is making our society more violent as a whole. It may be a short-term solution, but it seems that it will eventually have catastrophic results.