After winning the 2008 election, President Obama declared his opposition to investigations of CIA complicity in torture, announcing a need "to look forward as opposed to looking backwards".

When it comes to ordinary citizens, the US maintains an extraordinarily punitive legal system, with 2.2 million people behind bars, often for minor drug offences. But for high-ranking government officials accused of one of the most heinous crimes possible, the President can brush aside legality and morality on the basis that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past".

The disparity between the political class and the rest of us might seem less apparent in Australia. But think about the response to the tragic alcohol-related violence in Kings Cross.

"There is a deep-seated cultural issue here that must be addressed," explains the Sydney Morning Herald editorialist.

For some youths, [street violence] is seen as a thrilling social activity, and a signifier of manliness. Ultra-brutal mixed martial arts contests are surging in popularity. Extremely violent video games have become a staple.

Now, imagine, for the sake of argument, you wanted to foster a "culture of violence" throughout Australia. If you sought to normalise brutality, to present killing as an acceptable way for perpetrators to get what they wanted without repercussions, could you conceive of a better way than the war against Iraq?

Everyone knows that, in 2003, the leaders of the most powerful nations of the world consciously manoeuvred to make war inevitable, cherry-picking evidence of WMDs and launching an aggressive media campaign to promote a pre-emptive invasion.

The resulting conflict killed hundreds of thousands of people and left Iraq a catastrophic ruin – and none of the politicians most responsible have been held to account. What message does that promote about violence?

In the SMH editorial we are warned about, of all things, video games. If anyone cares to look, they can find a voluminous academic literature on computer games, a literature that simply does not support any direct correlation with violence. So why do games get so glibly blamed?

The SMH knows that its core readers – the prized AB demographic - views gaming with a mixture of suspicion and contempt, seeing it (inaccurately) as a pastime engaged in only by the young and the uneducated. Thus "extremely violent video games" can be invoked as a handy signifier for the ignorant masses and their brutish propensity to bash each other.

A discussion of the slaughter unleashed on Iraq would be far less comfortable, since it would entail acknowledging that Australian politicians – and a considerable portion of the Herald’s own columnists – were willing (even, in some cases, keen) to endorse deadly violence when it suited them.

But perhaps Iraq is old news. So what about Afghanistan?

Australian soldiers have been fighting there since 2001. That means that youths just becoming old enough to vote have lived under a government sending young men to kill other young men since they were five years old.

With the Afghan mission coming to an end, almost no-one can explain what the war was supposed to achieve – and, more remarkably, nobody much seems to care, as if the infliction of deadly force was a matter of complete indifference.

From its an inception, the Afghan war featured in the Australian media less as a policy issue and far more in terms of the prowess of the diggers sent to fight it. If you’re after depictions of violence as "thrilling" and "manly", look no further than the fawning tributes politicians pay to the military.

But, hey, it’s much safer to condemn martial arts competitions in which people very rarely die than the military deployments intended to kill. After all, MMA is a sport watched by the masses – but wars are launched by the elite.

Obviously, drunken attacks are dreadful. But as these figures show, the rate of alcohol-related assaults in NSW has declined since 2008.

The figures accord with more general trends both in Australia and the industrialised world: serious crime is, by and large, on the decline, though you would never know it from the media.

But the widening gulf between the political class and the rest of the population creates a discourse that’s largely impervious to evidence.

Elsewhere in the Sydney Morning Herald, the footballer Brandon Jack has called for a campaign of moral re-education to prevent street violence.

"Those who are ethically deficient must be recognised at the earliest stage possible," he said, "so that the necessary help can be provided to protect themselves and others."

To be fair, it takes more courage for a young athlete to write such things than it does for the Herald editorial room to cook up a boilerplate moral panic.

But who does Jack think will identify the moral deficients among us? That always pertinent question (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes and so on) becomes particularly relevant given that his piece appeared the day after the Guardian released the incident logs from the Manus Island detention camp, documents that include "reports of a child asylum seeker threatening to hang himself, of numerous riots and demonstrations, mass escape attempts and hunger strikes, numerous instances of self-harm, attempted suicides and assaults".

If you wanted to illustrate a dictionary definition of "ethically deficient", you might use a picture of Manus Island, a place described by Amnesty International as a "combination of a prison and a military camp".

The cruelty inflicted on those who have done nothing other than flee persecution is not fuelled by alcohol. On the contrary, the Manus policy has been soberly and deliberately implemented by politicians from both major parties, with the support of much of the media.

By all means, let’s talk about changing the culture. But let’s have the courage to begin with the powerful, rather than powerless