If you ever hear the phrase “fascism is aesthetics as politics,” that’s what this post is talking about.
It’s not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against “crime” as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.
It’s about performing “tough on crime” as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent “crime.” They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.
This is why a lot of conservatives and other right wingers can get straight up angry when you suggest things like reform or social measures to reduce crime. They don’t want crime to be reduced, they want an eternal war against “crime” because it provides an arena for the righteous to demonstrate virtue by brutalizing their enemies.
Also, something that rarely gets talked about is that while many conservatives hide this, or at least don’t say it out loud, the nazis openly and loudly declared that as part of their ideology death was good, that someone had to always be dying somewhere somehow.
I think it’s a crucial problem when understanding fascism. People all too often give it the benefit of the doubt rather than acknowledging that it was “cruelty is the point” brought to a whole new level. Whatever their plans were for Germany, it doesn’t matter. To them, cruelty was the point forwards and backwards.
ALT
amhrancas 