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Grand Theft Culture: The Entertainment Industry Goes for the Jugular

A game that glorifies brutal criminality and enables players to fantasize their participation in mind-numbing barbarism

Commentary By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

May 2, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The debut of "Grand Theft Auto IV", a highly-realistic video game in which players "win" by committing violent criminal acts, is notable for several reasons, but most importantly because of what it says about a society that is engaged in an orgy of self-destruction, and cannot even recognize what is happening.

The Grand Theft Auto series makes the player into a criminal who wins points by stealing cars, assassinating rivals, killing police, running over pedestrians, and even murdering a prostitute with a baseball bat rather than paying her.  It is, in short, a game that glorifies brutal criminality and enables players to fantasize their participation in mind-numbing barbarism.

The fact alone that Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to earn more than $400 million during its run, rivaling the most popular movie releases, speaks volumes about what has happened to the U.S. during the last fifty years.  What would once have seemed like a blatant and massive assault on our society by a commercial interest, is now a blockbuster form of entertainment.

Mainstream publications such as Business Week yawn at the moral objections raised against such software, and instead rave about the realistic graphics, referring to the game as "Grand Theft Awesome".  "We have a hard time imagining anyone picking up this game and not feeling like this is one of the best $60 purchases they've made in a long time," says the reviewer, seemingly unconcerned that he is talking about a murder simulator.

The new version of the game and the mentality it promotes have already claimed their first victim.  A man standing in line waiting to purchase the game on the first night of sales in south London stabbed a passer-by.  "It was a scene straight from the game itself," said one witness. 

"Grand Theft Auto", as monstrous as it is, is only a single example of the Culture of Death that is overwhelming what is left of Anglo-American civilization.

For decades, moviemakers and broadcasters have competed with one another to create the most perverse and shocking kinds of violence, explicit sexual scenes, and human degradation that the mind can imagine.  The music industry has fed generations of teenagers and young adults with music that glorifies murder, rape, and every kind of immorality.  

Americans watch, stupefied, as children and adults who were fed on this poisoned cultural diet enter their schools, workplaces and even their churches and open fire against their peers, attempting to kill as many people as possible before taking their own lives.  Such events never happened before the modern cultural onslaught from the electronic media, despite the availability of firearms, but virtually no one seems to make the connection.

The violence that increasingly appears in public places is only a pale reflection of the atrocities that occur thousands of times a week in "clinics" across the United States, where doctors tear babies to pieces inside their own mothers wombs, and in hospitals, where the sick and infirm are put to death in cold utilitarian fashion.

"Grand Theft Auto IV", is, simply put, a symptom of a civilization in decline, a society that is being consumed by the Culture of Death.  The fact that the symptom goes virtually unrecognized tells us how advanced the illness is.  The utter moral debasement of the Anglophone world can only presage its eventual political, economic, and military collapse, following the iron law of history that the fall of a civilization is always preceded by internal decay. 

The only question left is: how much longer can a society last after having reached such depths of depravity?  Sadly, we can only wait, and watch, hoping that somehow the United States and its cultural satellites will awaken before it is too late.

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