Fascist fetishizing of war

[Fawkes]

In Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction (highly recommend it), he in effect states that fascists fetishize war because it is the only means by which all of the technological power of a state and all the intellectual power of the masses can be exhibited while retaining existing property relations. My pagination is somewhat different from the attached PDF, but I believe he talks about it early in the Epilogue. Doesn't war serve to expose the inequities of these property relations though in that it is the proletariat that fights in the wars and the bourgeois the commands them? I'm curious as to how that is reconciled, and if you think I'm misinterpreting what he said, explain how I am.

http://www.dzignism.com/articles/benjamin.pdf

[William Howe]

Though Fascists are sick, wrong people, I highly doubt they have a 'war fetish'.

[Dr Mindbender]

Though Fascists are sick, wrong people, I highly doubt they have a 'war fetish'.

Nazis have a war fetish. The 'seig heil' gesture is supposed to represent a spear, symbolising the 'war like' nature of the 'aryan people'.

:blink:

[Fawkes]

Though Fascists are sick, wrong people, I highly doubt they have a 'war fetish'.

fetish (noun): any object, idea, etc., eliciting unquestioning reverence, respect, or devotion http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fetish
The term isn't used in a sexual context.

[blake 3:17]

War does expose inequalities by perpetuating them. It can radicalize people, but it is generally terrifying and fucks people up.

And Benjamin would have been a terrible soldier.

Benjamin's essay was written at the moment of fascism being on the verge of really holding itself together in Europe. Italian fascism was consolidated but German and Spanish fascism had a way to go.

I believe his formulation was that fascism aestheticized politics, and that communism politicized aesthetics.

The single best thing explaining this is the excellent film Architecture Of Doom. The wikipedia link here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Architecture_of_Doom

It's a brilliant film that explains Naziism as an aesthetic project. There are overlaps with other fascisms but German fascism was quite distinct.

[~Spectre]

It sounds like what Frantz Fanon said when talking about colonial settlers:


The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native out loud that there he alone is master.