Deep Violence
Military Violence, War Play, and the Social Life of Weapons
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the declaration of the First World War, and with it comes a deluge of books, documentaries, feature films and radio programs. We will hear a great deal about the horror of the battlefield. Bourke acknowledges wider truths: war is unending and violence is deeply entrenched in our society. But it doesn't have to be this way. This book equips readers with an understanding of the history, culture and politics of warfare in order to interrogate and resist an increasingly violent world.
Wounding the World investigates the ways that violence and war have become internalized in contemporary human consciousness in everything from the way we speak, to the way our children play with one another, to the way that we ascribe social characteristics to our guns and other weapons. With a remarkable depth of insight, Bourke argues for a radical overhaul of our collective stance towards militarism from one that simply aims to reduce violence against people to one that would eradicate all violence. Her message is judicious and vital: knowledge about weapons and the violence they bring has simply become too important to cast aside or leave to the experts.
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War and violence are deeply ingrained in the cultural and linguistic context of modern American and English culture, argues Bourke (The Story of Pain), a British academic who has written prolifically on war and its effects on society. In her opinion, popular culture's enthusiasm for weaponry, specifically weaponry that uses the language of sport to couch the raw and harrowing reality of killing other people, and the essentially empty gestures of international bans on various weapons of war merely obscure social complicity in mass violence. "We are all responsible for war," Bourke notes, but the relentless cultural imperatives she critiques make an alternative seem daunting and difficult to achieve. From bluff, hearty diaries and memoirs from WWI soldiers, which describe combat as a "sport with no holds barred," to the enduring popularity of war-related play, movies, and other forms of "militainment," the details offered are telling and disturbing. The use of graphically violent first-person shooter video games as military recruitment and training tools particularly troubles Bourke, who quotes combat veterans using games and movies as analogies to actions that are all too real. While her dissection of war and weaponry in culture is astute, a closing chapter on resistance and rejection of these norms is thin on examples of how to transform our culture and leaves the reader less than hopeful.
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