“If everyone demanded peace, instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.”
John Lennon, 1940 – 1980.
The history of Mankind is littered with people who are famous for killing other people, not least because western culture genuflects to fame as the ultimate redeemer of any sad, damaged or lonely life. From Chapman to Cho, the so-called ‘land of the free’ is a place where, if all else fails, society’s outsiders, misfits and psychopaths can claim their place in history by slaughtering the innocent and posting the gory details to a baying international media.
If the names of alleged and convicted murderers were never published or broadcast by the media, the anonymity of the innocent, as well as the criminally insane, would be protected from the glare of the spotlight. Legally enforcing this in traditional mediums would be relatively straightforward. Preventing individuals from posting names on the internet would be more problematic.
Nevertheless, the media corporations should never have been granted the same rights of free expression as the individual, especially when they have the means to reach such a wide demographic. The reversal of this public policy would help prevent the sensationalisation of violence, which allows media barons to profit from creating a public consensus of fear; that psychopaths, paedophiles, rapists and hoodies are lurking around every street corner, with Islamic extremists preaching the slaughter of the innocent westerners in every mosque.
U.K. crime rates have been steadily going down for several years and millions of people now believe that 9/11 and 7/7 were inside jobs committed by the corporatist state, rather than the premeditated acts of Muslim terrorists. However, when no terrorist organisation can rely on round the clock international mainstream media attention for their acts of violence, whether stage-managed or real, we will witness even fewer acts of terrosism that we do now.
This is the way the British media was expected to deal with coverage of hundreds of attacks by the IRA over several decades, even if recent claims that many attacks were the covert operations of the secret intelligence services turn out to be true. It has only been since Tony Blair’s Military-Industrial administration increased the so-called ‘freedom of the press’ that the British media has diverted from the widely perceived belief that changing the way we live because of a terrorist attack would be a vindication of the perpetrators actions.
No Man was born obsessed with violence; he merely absorbed and synthesised the information and circumstances that surrounded him, assuming that because violence seemed so universally prevalent, it must be an inevitable flaw in his nature, which is the polar opposite of the truth. In reality, Mankind is an inherently peaceful species which has been systematically programmed to unconsciously destroy itself, for the benefit of those who fear the consequences of the mass awakening in human consciousness.
When an unstable adolescent who was beaten by his father, ignored by his mother and tormented by his peers, ravaged by teenage angst, devastated by the injustice he perceives in a world which seems to reject him in every respect, obsessed with celebrity, pornography, shoot-em-ups and Nazi memrobilia, and angry with everybody except those he has never met, the last thing he needs is a list of famous teenage murderers to inspire him.
If the lone Finnish schoolboy, who posted his intentions on the internet the day before he shot twelve people, had not been exposed to the explicit details of Columbine and other campus massacres, it is impossible to be sure that he would have followed the path of his suicidal anti-heroes. What is certain, however, is that irrespective of liberal social policy, teenagers are glorifying the suicidal, murderous misfit because that is what the world makes them feel like doing. Other youths from other parts of the globe are choosing to kill themselves, rather than face the bitter disappointment of adult life, often tragically epitomised by their compliant, miserable, struggling parents.
All credible research from Japan, where many teenagers have killed before they were sixteen, thus avoiding prosecution under Japanese law, suggests that there are generations of children who have been completely desensitised to acts of random violence.
In the Channel 4 documentary, TEENAGE JAPANESE KILLERS (2000), the most common reason the children interviewed gave for killing was to experience what it felt like in reality, as opposed to what it felt like while playing a violent computer game. To date, there is no example of a teenage killer in the digital age who was not exposed to violent movies, TV and computer games. We ignore this obvious link at our children’s peril.
