(Today's post is a guest post by longtime contributor Matty P. If you would like to guest write for us, please check out our guest post guidelines.)

While doing my weekly web crawling for video game news, I came across what seemed like any other example of exploitive violence showcasing the downloadable content for a (at the time) new game. It’s the typical highlight reel of action and gameplay showing off the “all the creative ways [the columnist] offed history’s worst person.”

I found the article, video, and comments that followed intriguing. Immediately, I noticed I lacked the same enthusiasm with the portrayal of Hitler’s death as most people who commented on the video. Unsurprisingly, this made me introspective.

The graphics seem on par with other B list games and boasted animation that slows to an x-ray mode so you can see bone shatter and the dictator’s heart explode. It’s not quite the over-the-top gratuitous face-exploding Hitler-killing in Inglorious Basterds, which On V has previously discussed, but it aims for a similar strange satisfaction derived from the killing of a mass murderer. Instead of feeling that rush of enthusiasm or laughing as Hitler’s testicles exploded, I simply shrugged and contemplated our culture’s fascination with Nazis as the archetypal villain.

On Violence guest posters have addressed previously the role and effect of video games in our culture. A while back, guest poster Will wrote how active participation in a fantasy world can blur the lines between fiction and reality, and I repeat the same. Video games are both reflect and impact our culture. Take the hyperbolic assertion of Hilter as the worst person in history made above by Gameinformer’s columnist. While a matter of perspective, there are a variety of villains in human history, even from the same time period, in contention as the worst person in history. Consider Adolf Eichmann, one of the Holocaust’s actual architects or Himmler the head of the SS. There is also my personal least favorite person; Josef Mengele, a physician who oversaw the terrifying medical experimentation on human beings.

On the opposite side of the war but with similar detest for the Jewish race was Stalin. Then there are monsters whose contributions to human history can be measured in the insurmountable number of lives they contributed in taking or encouraged others to take in their name such as Gengis Khan, Mao Zetong, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Nero, and Caligula.

Killing Nazis in video games is not a new concept. As far back as the original Wolfenstein, we’ve been virtually slaughtering the SS and their commanders. The original Bionic Commando actually allowed kids to make it all the way to the Fuhrer himself and end the regime with his death. We, as consumers, are fine with killing Nazis. After all, we are playing a first person shooter or an action game and there must be an enemy to defeat. Plus, it’s that much more acceptable if our hero is of Jewish descent.

There is only so far we can go with fighting aliens and monsters. At the same time we’re not okay with the Nazis being Nazis. In the original Wolfenstein, creators took heat for portraying the swastika in the game. Even in Sniper Elite, the patch on the Hitler’s arm is not the African division of the German army’s symbol; a palm tree atop the swastika, but a palm tree alone. Other games have tried to diversify the villains, including most notably, Homefront. It simulated a communist invasion of the US by communist forces similar to the movie Red Dawn. But the villains originally meant to be Chinese became North Koreans because portraying China as an enemy would hurt the development company Kaos Games.

I have no affection for Hilter or the things he did or help perpetuate, but I’m beginning to think the way our culture portrays Nazism and Hilter is distorting the lessons we should be learning from one of the greatest tragedies in human history. First and chiefly, the Holocaust did not happen because of one man, but because of an oppressive regime and a frightened complicit people. Second, the danger and ease with which hate and fear can be channeled. And third, the importance of being an active participant in democracy so decisions are not made for you. And lastly, the evils of the present will mirror those of the past.

Consider our present. Racism and hatred are still alive and well and even more prominent than most of us would like to admit. Consider the following over examples:

The simple point being that the simulated assassination of Hitler seems an impotent expression of rage at the evils humanity perpetrated against itself. Video games are an outlet for me as much as a source of entertainment. But there is a distinct difference between the video game industry’s ability to add to the discourse of our culture so long as the focus of games is on things like how gruesomely we can assassinate one of history’s worst people.

Matty P is an avid gamer and PA pediatrician. He has been a youth pastor, ordained minister and EMT. He has also participated in medical relief missions and ministry outreach in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Just for the record, he is also Jewish by heritage.

On the surface, the last few years have been terrible for the so-called “head in the sand types” like me who don’t understand that…

1. There are truly evil people in the world.

2. Wars are a fact of life.

Since 2010, in part because of the Arab Spring and its multiple revolutions, insurgencies and general instability, the world has never seemed so violent. More importantly, the U.S. can’t stop intervening in warzones. In addition to trying to wind down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the media/politicians have seriously discussed starting wars (“intervening militarily” in newspeak) in Libya, Iran, North Korea, Egypt, Syria and the Ukraine. According to some Republican politicians, only Obama’s weakness has prevented the U.S. from fighting in these places, er, making the world safer.

Except for that pesky word “almost”. The U.S. avoided wars in North Korea, Syria and Iran, and looks set to both stop Russia from invading the rest of Ukraine while avoiding a nuclear war with Russia. We are close to signing an historic deal with Iran.

I give almost all the credit to liberalism in international relations. Liberal foreign policy--promoting free trade, democracy and international institutions--has accomplished its goals: to further economic growth, create peace and expand liberty across the globe. Along the way, it also prevents unnecessary wars. Here’s how:

1. Democratic politics constrain the executive.

In the case of Syria, the battle between the executive and the legislature stopped a full-blown war.

In the original writings of Enlightenment thinkers, the whole concept of a President was supposed to mimic a monarch. In other words, a dictator. Since the presidency of George Washington, America has always restrained the power of the executive with the checks and balances. Since the Civil War, the power of the presidency compared to the legislature has grown, even under President Obama, who promised to limit executive power. When this happens, disastrous wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been too easy for the executive branch to pursue.

Syria seems to have reversed that trend. The American people refused to let one man--President Obama--decide to start another war. So did the British government. (Again, anyone who defines cruise missile strikes as “not war” needs to look in the mirror and ask, “What is war?”) Most of the arguments for a war with Syria--based on credibility, based on deterring Iran, based on avoiding making President Obama look “weak”--are the arguments for maintaining an executive branch that can declare war unilaterally, like a dictatorship.

Instead, we saw the legislative branch restrain the executive. (And the same thing happened in England.)

I’d add Iraq to this discussion too. Though, arguably, Iraq is in worse shape than any point during our occupation, Obama really, really, really doesn’t want to add ground troops to the conflict. In this case, though some conservatives/liberals and media types are pushing for war in Iraq through hyperbolic ISIS coverage, Obama won’t put boots on the ground without Congressional approval.

2. Economic disincentives discouraged Russia and Iran.

After their invasion of Crimea, the Russian economywent in a tailspin. Their main stock market plummeted. The ruble fell precipitously, forcing the Russian Central Bank to raise interest rates. Foreign investment plummeted next. The markets only calmed down after Vladimir Putin promised no further military action.

Iran experienced similar damage when the P5+1 imposed sanctions, which helped bring them to the negotiating table. Iran remained at the table, and agreed to the terms of a deal as well, because those years of crippling sanctions stalled reasonable economic growth.

The problem that neo-conservatives and unrealistic realists can’t understand is that war isn’t profitable anymore. If Putin continues to push on Ukraine, the result won’t be a war (which could escalate quickly into a nuclear conflict), but greater economic isolation. Removing a huge economy like Russia from the global economy wouldn’t just hurt Russia; it would hurt the entire globe. In short, everyone would lose much more than Russia would stand to gain from “expanding its sphere of influence”.

They help restrain powers. The U.S. and Israel both rely on the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission to investigate Iranian nuclear power. Suspending Russia from the G8 hurt Russian power. A host of international institutions help restrain war with North Korea by coordinating responses to North Korean aggression.

And they helped stop a war in Syria. Sure, the U.N. couldn’t stop a war with Iraq, but it sure stopped one in Syria. Having witnessed the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the inherent difficulty in controlling Libya, most of the world simply refused to fight another war in the Middle East. Thus, President Obama faced the prospect of going to war without the support of the U.N., NATO or the Arab League, or even staunch allies like the United Kingdom. Sure, you could condemn Obama’s coalition building skills, but the more important point is how much weight nations around the world--and even Americans--now put on international institutions. This won’t prevent all inter-state wars forever, but it will help to make them less likely.

(As with all my articles on foreign policy, I have to again clarify that I am referring to liberalism in international relations—which means advocating the principles of international institutions, democracy, and free trade, among other ideals—as opposed to political liberalism—which is an entirely different thing altogether. International relations liberalism holds that as democracy spreads, international institutions strengthen and free trade increases, the number of wars occurring around the world will decline.)

(Though many don’t want to believe it, the world is getting safer. There will be an end to war, someday, if the world works towards it. To read the rest of our posts on “The World is Getting Safer”, click here.)

We had so many links about the world getting safer, that we had to split last week’s post into two. Here’s the second set of updates...

Steven Pinker, Yet Again, Makes the Case the World is Getting Safer

Stephen Pinker’s first TED talk on the decreasing likelihood of war turned us on to this topic, and helped make it a passion. (Same with John Horgan’s research from a Radiolab episode.) But it never hurts to re-review the evidence.

And Pinker does this in this Slate article published in December, “The World is Not Falling Apart”. Most relevantly, Pinker and co-writer Andrew Mack admonish us to ignore the headlines. They explain that headlines, especially in a cable news and Twitter world, focus on violent events much more than non-violent events. They point out that homicides in the US, UK and worldwide have dropped, violence against women is at historic lows, and wars are increasingly less likely.

Here’s our favorite quote (from the conclusion):

“Too much of our impression of the world comes from a misleading formula of journalistic narration. Reporters give lavish coverage to gun bursts, explosions, and viral videos, oblivious to how representative they are and apparently innocent of the fact that many were contrived as journalist bait. Then come sound bites from “experts” with vested interests in maximizing the impression of mayhem: generals, politicians, security officials, moral activists. The talking heads on cable news filibuster about the event, desperately hoping to avoid dead air. Newspaper columnists instruct their readers on what emotions to feel.

"There is a better way to understand the world. Commentators can brush up their history—not by rummaging through Bartlett’s for a quote from Clausewitz, but by recounting the events of the recent past that put the events of the present in an intelligible context. And they could consult the analyses of quantitative data sets on violence that are now just a few clicks away.”

1. The worldwide deaths from war per capita. It’s down to almost nothing.

2. Comparing European homicide rates through the ages.

And the World is More Democratic

And here’s another compilation of evidence that the world is getting better. It relates to the comments section of one of our last posts on the world getting safer. A reader pushed back, citing North Korea as an example of a violent nation, because it isn’t democratic. The people of North Korea, he argued, live under a constant threat of violence from the state.

We actually agree. Dictatorships are inherently violent. A peaceful world that consists of only dictatorships? That’s not progress. But it turns out this is the world is getting more democratic as well.

If you want to debunk the world is getting safer argument, you need to avoid obvious logical fallacies. Don’t cite anecdotes, cite statistics. You can’t say, “The world isn’t getting safer because X event happened.” (In this case, North Korea being undemocratic.) You have to research whether the world is becoming less democratic overall.

Will Global Warming Cause More War?

Indeed, some have even blamed the conflict in Syria on global warming. As the climate changes, this will disturb populations, the thinking goes, spreading conflict. A paper even came out showing a causal link! Wonkblog’s Brad Plumer says not so fast, the evidence isn’t all quite in.

Finally, a “Quote Behaving Well”

In our post, “The Best Comment On Violence Has Ever Received”, we simply reposted a commenter’s thoughts--”Martin”--verbatim. He spoke about de-escalating a conflict with troublesome students, and we applied it to another future war in the Middle East (Israel, the U.S. and Iran). Stephen Walt echoed a similar theme when he relayed an amazing Churchill quote along these lines. (Not a quote behaving badly because Walt included the link to the actual book passage where Churchill wrote this.)

(Though many don’t want to believe it, the world is getting safer. There will be an end to war, someday, if the world works towards it. To read the rest of our posts on “The World is Getting Safer”, click here.)

As we promised last week, we’ve got links and links and links arguing that, yes, the world is getting safer. (A second post is coming Monday...)

The Demise of Ares

The article “The Demise of Ares” by Bruno Tertais is so good we had to make it the sub-title for this section.

He, again, shows that long-term war is decreasing in all fronts. I particularly like the opening paragraph as a rejoinder to Frank Hoffman’s “Plato Was Dead Wrong” (who we debunked here) when Hoffman used the example of Prime Minister William Pitt, who predicted peace in Europe and was proved wrong by the Napoleonic wars, as an argument against the world getting safer. Well…

“In 1990, U.S. political scientist John Mearsheimer predicted that we would soon ‘‘miss the Cold War.’’ In the months and years that followed, the eruption of bloody conflicts in the Balkans and in Africa gave birth to fears of a new era of global chaos and anarchy. Authors such as Robert Kaplan and Benjamin Barber spread a pessimistic vision of the world in which new barbarians, liberated from the disciplines of the East — West conflict, would give a free rein to their ancestral hatreds and religious passions. Journalists James Dale Davidson and William Rees - Mogg chimed in that violence would reassert itself as the common condition of life. Former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that the planet was about to become a ‘‘pandemonium.’

“These prophets of doom were wrong.”

So well-trained, wise and learned academics, politicians and pundits have both predicted the end of war and the impending epidemic of war. Who should we believe? I say the people with the data.

Sebastian Junger and the Deep Roots of War

John Horgan--who we really don’t link to enough--reviewed Sebastian Junger’s latest documentary, The Last Patrol here. A few On V connections immediately stood out to us. (Check out our reviews of Junger’s previous book and documentary War andRestrepo.)

First, Horgan writes, “[Junger] started traveling to war zones because he hoped war would make him a man, and his hope was fulfilled. ‘I became the man I wanted to be,’ he says.” As we’ve written before, this is a terrible justification for war. Our argument is simple, “...no one should have to prove their self worth by killing someone else.” We’d add, “Or documenting the killing of someone else.”

Next, Horgan takes down the psychological theories behind much of Junger’s work.

“Junger espouses what I call the deep-roots theory of war, which holds that natural selection embedded the urge to wage war in the genes of males. 'The politically incorrect truth,' he once said, 'Is that war is extremely ingrained in us—in our evolution as humans—and we’re hardwired for it.' He expands on this notion in War, citing deep-roots proponents such as chimp researcher Richard Wrangham.

“Ironically, I saw Last Patrol at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in October. Mead, the great anthropologist, rejected the deep-roots theory–and with good reason, because the evidence for the theory is flimsy.”

Horgan’s book The End of War explains why in much greater detail and we highly recommend it.

Often, pseudo-philosophers caution of World War I, World War II or the Napleonic era to warn that war could break out again. They often ignore that--especially before World War I--Europe had witnessed a multi-decade growth in military spending. A decline in the world’s militaries is only a good thing. (H/T to the now no-longer-blogging Andrew Sullivan.)

It also forces you question those who want us to increase or maintain the size of the American military (especially many of those folks incorrectly believe the world is a dangerous place). As a cautionary note, The Economist wrote in November of last year that spending in Africa on the military had recently spiked.

Today marks the sixth anniversary of On Violence. Like last year's anniversary, we aren’t really in a reflective mood. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. A lot of post ideas and a lot of series. We’re finishing up some topics and moving forwards on others.

Stay tuned!

On Violence is a blog on counter-insurgency warfare, military and foreign affairs, art, and violence, written by two brothers--one a veteran and the other a pacifist.

The work of On Violence has appeared in The Washington Post, Stars and Stripes, The Small Wars Journal, The New York Times’ "At War" blog, The Los Angeles Times’ Blowback feature, FP.com and Thomas Ricks’ “The Best Defense” blog, Infantry Magazine, and Doonesbury’s “The Sandbox”.