The savage is just beneath the skin

We look on, horror-struck, while human-beings are tortured and murdered on our screens. We broadcast and rebroadcast those scenes in orgies of voyeurism. We detail them in print and pour over the inches in disgust.

Sated, we lean back and pronounce the perpetrators "savages". Articulate our horror from the lofty heights of civilisation.

We do this as we buy our children guns, toy soldiers, model machinery of war. We place them into battles ever more real, where they take aim and smash the bodies of their enemies. Sense the satisfaction of taking lives. They can all but smell the blood, before they rub their eyes and climb the stairs to bed.

And we claim superiority over the savage.

In living memory, the most cultured nations on the planet slaughtered each other's people - combatant and civilian - with industry and calculated effort. Put the finest minds to work developing technologies designed to take more lives than anything before. All this within the lifetime of my mother.

Today we seek to minimise the risk to ourselves. Reduce the human and political cost of killing. Like our children concentrating on computer screens, we fire, disconnected from reality, switch off, rub our eyes and sleep the sleep of the innocent.

But when a man is burned or his throat is cut by the person stood behind, we recoil.

My skin begins to itch.

Underneath, something feels uncomfortable.