Onscreen horror seeds violence

ON my holidays, I watched dozens of men being murdered: beheaded, strangled, stabbed, shot, speared, clubbed or their throats cut.

I also watched as a few women were butchered. I saw blood pump from the slashed throat of one and from the belly of another. I saw the body of one woman, skinned alive, hanging on a post. A screaming girl was burned alive.

Then there was the torture. I saw a broken bottle jabbed three times into a man’s face — chunk, chunk, chunk — and a gold tooth dug out of the jaw of another with a knife.

Others’ hands were cut off, or their eyes blinded with razors. One man’s hand was nailed to a block of wood and smashed with a hammer before he was sodomised. A woman was raped.

So, what was I doing as this unbelievable horror unfolded?

Well, I ate

Doritos and ice creams.

See, I’ve now got not only Foxtel but Netflix, one of the video-streaming services that inspired our governments to spend

$50 billion on a National Broadband Network so we could all watch more such entertainment.

And please, don’t think me some sadistic weirdo. I binge-watched only mainstream shows: Game of Thrones,

Peaky Blinders, Rome and Outlander. People love it. Last year’s final episode of Game of Thrones had nearly 900,000 viewers in Australia alone. But now, having listed all that killing, it embarrasses me. How did I become so habituated?

Of course, I’m not like many younger Australians who search the cinemas or internet for even more grotesque violence, some performed for real by terrorists seeking recruits.

Nor would I touch video games such as Halo, Assassin’s Creed or

Grand Theft Auto, where you play at killing others in highly realistic graphics.

I’m civilised, right?

But who else is watching? True, a few social “scientists” swear there’s no evidence for what seems obvious — that violent games and shows make some people more inclined to be violent themselves. Or more skilled.

Yet I know that what those “scientists” say is wrong, after I was physically attacked in the street last year by two far-Left radicals.

Luckily, I’ve had so many threats that I’d long planned how I’d defend myself come this moment, and I instinctively followed my script.

I punched one attacker in the head and kicked him between his legs when he fell.

But I hadn’t actually thought of kicking until a year or two ago, after watching boots flying in films and, increasingly, on CCTV footage of real brawls.

I learned to kick from the TV, but in the end I did pull mine a little. I haven’t yet been brutalised enough. But last month, I watched or read reports of other violence, this time very real, that seemed as unbridled as it was gratuitous. In fact, it seemed cinema-graphic — not just inspired by film, but performed for it.

In one attack, a 52-year-old American doctor was walking back from the Australian Open with his son when five teenagers asked him to hand over what he had.

He did, but it didn’t save him. He and his son were punched, dragged to the ground, and kicked so badly that bones in the father’s face detached from his skull.

The violence seemed a show. Also in Victoria last month, three teenage girls lured a disabled 17-year-old girl to a picnic spot where they bashed her, burned her hand on a barbecue and smashed her face repeatedly into a picnic table, before she, too, was dragged to the ground and kicked.

The tortures were quite creative.

The victim was even made to inhale the smashed glass of her iPhone.

And the perhaps telltale touch? The attackers filmed their work on their phones and posted it online.

The police said they’d rarely seen such violence in 30 years.

But all of this is just anecdotal evidence.

Don’t statistics tell a more mixed story? They say that rates of assault in Australia, as measured by the number of victims, soared for more than 40 years, but have dropped back over the past eight — although Victoria is again getting worse.

It is also hard to blame any one thing for crime rates. Take your pick: unemployment, drug use, broken families, poor policing, weak sentencing, a brutalising culture, dying churches, or the importation of hard-to-assimilate minorities.

But after seeing so many people murdered and maimed for fun on the screen, I must ask: What do children in our grimmer homes dream after watching this new

normal?