BREIVIK - some thoughts

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2130364/Anders-Behring-Breivik-trial-Norwegian-killer-breaks-Vlad-Impaler-video-played.html

The Getty image above is not of an avatar in a life-like video game, or of a police officer armed and ready to shoot down criminals (or even those not guilty of anything), nor is it of a soldier involved in the killing of innocent Muslim civilians in Afghanistan. It is CCTV image of Anders Breivik, dressed in a police uniform shortly after a bomb he made killed 8 people in Oslo. He later shot dead 69 innocent people on Utoya island on 22 July, 2011 because he was afraid that Muslims were taking over Norway. This battle against Islam and right-wing extremism will be played out on the Internet and in other forms of media during Breivik's trial, which is expected to last ten weeks, but haven't we seen it all before? The terror of the 'war on terror' of the Reagan Administration in 1984, followed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and the endless, endless death of innocents by anonymous uniformed fighters? I ask myself why I was shocked last year when I heard this news item. Was it because Norway is so peaceful or is it because we are quite used to seeing news items about deaths in war, but are unused to seeing one individual kill so many of his own people? Having said that we Australians remember all too well militant young men with guns, Julian Knight, who maimed 19 people and killed 7 people during his shooting spree in Hoddle Street, Clifton Hill in 1987 as well as Frank Vitkovic, who killed 8 and wounded 5 people with his sawn-off shotgun in Queen Street, Melbourne in the same year. Martin Bryant who killed 35 people and wounded 21 people with a semi-automatic rifle at Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996 and  Huan Yun "Allen" Xiang, who, loaded with five handguns killed two people and wounded five others at Monash University. I must admit that I get confused between watching footage of actual warfare, footage of police officers both in Australia and overseas who over-use weapons (guns and taser stun-guns) to kill, rather than apprehend the perpetrator and lone killers stalking their prey. All virtual entities, rather like the young children and adults, hunted and killed in front of a vast television audience in The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012) or the real-time footage used in Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes, 2011) and that's why we have to remember that the people who are killed are real; not just statistics.