Aestheticization Of Politics: The Art Of ISIS

 Walter Benjamin

I think that if you are not familiar with Walter Benjamin's idea of the aestheticization of politics, it would now be a good time to do so.

Briefly, from Wikipedia:

The aestheticization of politics was an idea first coined by Walter Benjamin as being a key ingredient to Fascist regimes. In this theory, life and the affairs of living are conceived of as innately artistic, and related to as such politically. Politics are in turn viewed as artistic, and structured like an art form which reciprocates the artistic conception of life being seen as art.

As art.
Life as art.

But remember Thomas de Quincey's pamphlet On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts; art need not be good, nor joyous, nor salubrious for us.
Art can be the work of Francis  Bacon and full of terror:

Remember our own pre-occupation with  Zombies and Vampires in the cinema. Even though these are aimed to entertain, they are a grisly diseased resurrection myth.
Remember the Shoa.
Remember the bombing of London and of Dresden.
Remember Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.

What is ISIS but a Snuff Film contorted by rage into an apocalyptic art of the end of time? ISIS may exist in the Islamic society, but it is nothing but the love of death, the eroticization of destruction, the orgasmic involvement in the twilight of the gods.

ISIS videos are staged events. There is no religious rationale, nor is there any Islamic legal reason for them.
The videos, the Tweets, the social networking of death are the Art of Death, and ISIS has taken it to the verge of fine art. Indeed, deaths occur as regularly and as spectacularly as in Game Of Thrones, and we often have trailers and teasers to keep us glued to the tv.

And this Art is that murderous satire of the Sermon on the Mount we once spoke of
 ( http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2015/01/reading-about-france-beatitudes.html ):

... you get Today's World, all wrapped up in a bow and looking as murderously fine as a rendition of Pope Innocent X by the painter Francis Bacon:

We have all been involved in the communal effort of staging the most monumental IMAX of disaster in the history of mankind.

Deny this Art, and let us step back.

Step back from the hate and anger filled airwaves, and cease painting our world canvas distempered by our conflicts.
Resolve those conflicts, the social, the personal, the economic, the physical, and the spiritual.

Do not let the Film of the end of days ever be released upon a definite date of our scheduling.

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