Murder and Society
by Peter Morrall
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Book Summary Information
Author: Peter MorrallEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-11-03
ISBN: 1861564554
Number of pages: 214
Publisher: Wiley
Book Reviews of Murder and Society
Book Review: Author's Synopsis
Summary: 5 Stars
The book addresses five questions:
What is murder?
Who commits murder?
Why commit murder?
Why is murder devastating?
Why is murder fascination?
Tim Parry at twelve years-of-age was killed in 1993 by an IRA bomb in Warrington, England. On one day alone in 2006 Iraqi police found sixty bodies of people tortured and shot in Baghdad. France 1835, Pierre Riviere killed his mother, brother and sister in the village of La Faucterie. In a few years time the annual global murder rate will rise to one million. But, there is no generally accepted meaning ascribed to `murder'. As Michel Foucault demonstrated in the Riviere case, what is murder is dependent on who is doing the defining, and in which historical and cultural context that defining is taking place.
There are, however, three levels of culpability which can be applied to who commits murder: individuals; corporations; and governments. Case-studies from around the world are reviewed: the French rock star who attacked his film-star lover in Lithuania; a South African housewife who shot her love-rival in Botswana; a child soldier from Uganda; a notorious USA gang leader; a British medical practitioner who murdered hundreds of his patients; an avenging Jordanian teenager; the Bhopal chemical disaster in India; various States carrying-out genocide and the death penalty. But ultimately, the global community is responsible through complacency.
There is no grand theory that can fully answer why commit murder. The predisposition to kill involves specific motives (love, lust, loot, and love), madness, badness, and the deeper faults in individuals and society, together with complex precipitating factors (including intimidation, indoctrination, and desperation).
Why is murder devastating is easier to resolve. Murder invokes a particularly virulent form of bereavement on secondary victims, which has become subsumed within the medical category of `post-traumatic stress disorder'. But, the degree of violence across the world creates a tertiary victim. There is a pandemic of social suffering, undermining the stability and morality of communities, societies, and ultimately the global village.
Therefore why is murder fascinating? First, everything in global society has been converted into a commodity, including violence. Second, the mix of human compassion and social progress with human cruelty and social atavism has been described by Denis Duclos as the `werewolf culture'. What drives the werewolf culture apart from the commercial incentive to sell violence as a product? Sigmund Freud and Georges Bataille signalled the link between sexuality (Eros) and destruction (Thanatos). Ripper and cannibal murders are the epitome of eroticised violence.
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