Fascism

Context: The World of Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz – The New York Review

There is “a certain orientation of life toward death” that forms the basis and existential kernel of a pathology that transcribes the arc and trajectory of (an) industrialised or mechanised rationality that in being (or becoming) aspirationally unbounded from the consequences of its actions, can only ever reproduce the need (and desire) for a control of and over precisely what it inadvertently seeks to occlude. In manufacturing death, they hide from it and as something of an infantile response to reality and fear that then acquires normative brutality as ideological and cultural or psychologically self-propagating rationale and purpose.

Fascism is in this sense (and context) the enigmatic charade of extreme control in mechanisms of death as the basis of life; the anachronism of a pre-modern relationship between power and punishment. It is an absurd and grotesque directionality and momentum acquired by individuated and tribal self-validations that, in asserting the centrality of existential horror (that death invokes in all of us) as a core rationale of ideology, must forever recreate that which it denies. This kind of self-reinforcing pathology and feedback loop is quite endemic, occasionally percolating to ascendance, but always corrupt.